Digital Artisans

About Digital Artisans

Welcome to the Crafted Journey - from Digital Artisans, a podcast series hosted by Suzy DeLine, where every career story matters. Whether you're a seasoned expert with decades of experience or just beginning with fresh ideas and bold ambitions, this is your space. At Digital Artisans, we believe in amplifying voices from every stage of the professional journey. Each episode explores the real stories, insights, and defining moments that shape careers—offering inspiration, connection, and visibility to those crafting their unique path.

Publisher

Suzy DeLine

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

19 Sept 2025

Latest episode

3 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

26 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   3 Sept 2026

   From Page to Stage, Screen, and Sound: Building a Creative Life with Barry M. Putt Jr.

   Barry M. Putt Jr. joins the Crafted Journey podcast to reflect on a wide-ranging creative career spanning theater, film, television, books, and audio drama. He shares how his education at NYU Tisch led to independent filmmaking opportunities and international audio productions, including the forthcoming historical drama The Liberty Boys of 1776. Barry also offers practical resources for writers seeking to strengthen their craft and find new opportunities before exploring his collaboration with Veronica Craven on In the Cellar and the Out of the Cellar Horror Film Festival. The conversation highlights his role in curating the festival’s films, the community-building purpose behind its networking events, and the OOTC48 Challenge, which invites filmmakers of all experience levels to create an original horror film in just 48 hours.

2. 

   15 Jul 2026

   Dr Epps on the Crafted Journey

   Dr. Elvis Epps did not set out to become an educator. He joined the US Navy in 1982, traveled to Singapore, Japan, the Caribbean, the Persian Gulf, and beyond, and eventually left the service when he recognized that a military lifestyle and a growing family could not coexist on his terms. His entry into education came at his wife's suggestion. He filled out applications, a school called back, and what followed was a thirty-year career spanning classroom teaching, assistant principal roles, and nearly two decades as a school administrator. That unplanned beginning, he says, turned out to be a calling. Before education, the Navy gave Epps something his hometown of Jackson, Mississippi had not. Growing up in what he describes as a third-rate education system for African American men in the seventies, no guidance counselor ever spoke to him about college. He reached higher education on the strength of nine athletic scholarship offers in track and field, plus a music scholarship and a basketball offer. The exposure he gained through military service, meeting people across continents and economic circumstances, shaped the leader he would become decades later in a Palm Beach County high school. A turnaround built on accountability and trust In February 2017, the Palm Beach County Schools superintendent called Epps into his office and asked him to take over a struggling high school on an interim basis. The school carried a reputation rooted in events from two decades earlier, and community members still associated it with gang activity long after conditions had changed. Epps arrived to a graduation rate sitting at 78 percent and a campus where, by his own account, some staff did not share a vision centered on loving students first. He moved quickly, restructuring personnel, retraining teachers, and tracking attendance with enough precision to discover that students who had moved out of state months earlier were still on rosters inflating absentee figures. The results accumulated steadily. By his final years leading the school, the graduation rate had climbed past 90 percent, peaking at 95.6 percent. The Hispanic student graduation rate, a group he describes as largely first-year learners to American schools, rose from roughly 46 percent to approximately 88 percent and continued climbing after he left. Teacher absenteeism fell from 8 percent to 1.8 percent. Epps is direct about what drove those numbers: "I am the protector of their instructional time. It means nothing interferes with your instructional time." That principle guided every decision, from removing disruptive students to quietly brokering transfers for teachers who were, in his words, good people in the wrong environment, placing them with principals whose school populations would be a better fit rather than simply letting those teachers go. The team behind the numbers Epps is consistent on one point: the outcomes belonged to a team. He points to his school secretary, Ms. Spooner, a bilingual staff member he recruited from the student services office after watching her interact with students without ever rushing them away. She became an informal translator, a keeper of institutional memory from her earlier years at a feeder elementary school, and a quiet logistical anchor who made sure, via a code phrase about a package on his desk, that a principal who never slowed down still managed to eat lunch. He also credits assistant principal Tracy Bailey, who pulled struggling students into her office, pulled up their test scores, and told them directly that she would see them to graduation, and Alicia Taylor, a mathematics leader who managed the master schedule with precision and whose department never required his intervention. A former student summed up the arc of the turnaround in a chance encounter at church two months before the podcast conversation. The student told Epps plainly: "We didn't like you when you came. We were doing our own thing, and you came in and brought some order. We didn't get it at first. But once the school shifted, turned around, all of us start saying, now we see. This is where he's taking us." That shift in student perception, from resistance to buy-in, reflected a deliberate rebranding effort. Epps consistently told staff and students that people from across the country would come to see what they were building. When celebrity chef Guy Fieri visited the campus, spoke to students in the auditorium about his own career beginnings, and presented the culinary department with a $20,000 check, it validated a promise Epps had made repeatedly to a community that had reason to be skeptical. Since retiring from school administration four years ago, Epps has continued working in leadership training and development, serving government agencies, private and public organizations, and nonprofit entities. The through line from Navy recruit to school turnaround specialist to leadership consultant is less a straight path than a series of orders accepted and acted on. His framework has not changed much: identify the right people, give them room to lead, hold the line on what matters, and, as he puts it, drop positivity into their buckets before they run dry.

3. 

   15 Jul 2026

   Robert Freiri on the Crafted Journey

   Robert Ferreri has spent nearly four decades in the nonprofit sector, moving through roles at the YMCA, Boys and Girls Clubs, private child development organizations, and Habitat for Humanity before landing his current position as development director at Morgan Autism Center in San Jose, California. His path was not a straight line. It was shaped by early volunteer work, a willingness to ask the right questions, and a consistent belief that empowerment, not direction, is what moves people forward. Ferreri's entry into the field came through a required volunteer placement during his recreation administration studies at Cal State Northridge. He chose the YMCA, and the experience stuck. Working with older school-age and middle school kids, he noticed quickly that the program had been struggling because no one had simply asked the participants what they wanted to do. "I asked them, well, what do you guys wanna do? And they said, well, we wanna play sports. We wanna go to the park. We wanna go on field trips. Let's do that." That small shift in approach had an outsized effect, and it became a principle he carried into every role that followed. Among Ferreri's most concrete professional contributions was his tenure as executive director of a Silicon Valley Habitat for Humanity affiliate. When he arrived, the organization had built roughly eight homes across its entire twenty-year history and had a staff of three. Over the following seven years, that changed substantially. The affiliate built 30 homes in a concentrated four-year stretch and grew its team to 16 staff members. A key strategic move was accepting government funding, including redevelopment and housing dollars, at a time when many Habitat affiliates did not. In a high-cost region like Silicon Valley, Ferreri recognized that this funding was not optional. It was the lever that made corporate partnerships and volunteer programs viable at scale. That work at Habitat also opened doors beyond the local level. Ferreri served as national chair of the organization's annual conference in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and made the decision to hold the event in New Orleans as a direct act of support for the recovering city. The conference helped catalyze construction of what became known as the Musician's Village, a cluster of homes built to help displaced artists and community members return. It was through that same network that Ferreri ended up working side by side with President Jimmy Carter on a home build, an experience he described with characteristic candor: "The first half hour didn't go so great. I was starstruck." Carter's direct instruction to focus and lead snapped him back, and they finished the job together. Ferreri is deliberate in crediting the people who influenced how he operates under pressure. A program director at the YMCA of the Redwoods in Boulder Creek modeled calm, philosophical leadership during a period when Ferreri was impatient and pushing for faster results than circumstances allowed. That steadiness proved essential when the 1989 earthquake hit while Ferreri was alone with 20 children in an old church building, both of his scheduled leaders having called in sick that day. He credits his mentor's influence with helping him keep the situation stable until every child was home safely. He also points to speaker and former comedian Michael Pritchard, a longtime Bay Area figure who now works with nonprofits, as someone he continues to turn to when things get difficult. In addition to his paid career, Ferreri has been a Rotarian for roughly 17 years across four different clubs. His involvement with the Rotary Enterprise Leadership Conference, a program that brings young people together around innovation, teamwork, and self-determination, circles back to where his interest in the field began. He still hears from participants years later who describe the three-day experience as a turning point. As he moves toward retirement, he expects his Rotary work to expand, with more international engagement, continued involvement in his local church, and conversations already underway with contacts in the tech sector about how he might help bridge corporate resources and nonprofit needs. Ferreri's career is a useful illustration of what longevity in the social sector can look like when it is grounded in genuine community relationships rather than institutional ambition. From youth programs in Southern California to disaster recovery in New Orleans to autism services in Silicon Valley, the throughline is consistent: find out what people actually need, then build the structures that give them a real chance to get there.

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