Session Host: Liz Willen
Reporter: Kate Myers

Takeaways/key insights

• Seek people who want to fund operations, not projects
• Address the history that journalism has of being extractive. Journalism 
• What anchors exist in a community to connect with? Public media station, community college, etc?
• Partnerships: organizations ae going to the same funders. Should we look at organizing to go together? Mergers? Other partnerships?
• Opportunities for merging, fractional support, shared services – but fraught in other ways.
• “I’ve had it with foundations that won’t tell us how to talk to them!”

Additional thoughts, questions, and notes:

• WHY: How do we keep nonprofit news organizations going?
  • How are we finding funding for non-local nonprofits (Like Hechinger Report)
  • What are the sources of sustainability for nonprofits?
• Funders ask: what will you do when we stop funding you?
• One (non-nonprofit) org that is sustainable – Bloomberg. The terminals are a related business that is a huge value and unique differentiator. What is that for nonprofit news?
• Sustainability can be linked to who owns the narrative – specifically, can community members own their own stories?
• There are challenges both for well funded and funding-seeking organizations – just different challenges
• Nonprofits are not broken – operating as designed. And they are designed poorly.
• Let’s redefine sustainability-we need to change the story around how we won’t need funding and instead talk about how that funding is a key part of the operational model. It isn’t just funding to do new projects (that we then have to figure out how to pay for).
• Cannot think big without money
• Burnout and equity: we are at a place where sustainability means paying people what they are owed and keeping them paid.
• Discomfort: access to information should be a fundamental right. How does that intersect with paywalls? How are we building structures that distribute information?
• Martiza: “We don’t want any more walls”
  • There is a big gap between english language media and spanish
  • Those making the funding decisions do not understand our community
  • Sustainability is not just about money. Need practical models and advice
• Distinction:
  • There are some nonprofit journalistic outlets that do not have funding from their core business
  • And some that can build a business that drives money to reinvest
• Discuss: are there hybrid models? For-profit partnerships?
• Nonprofits are built to fail. We need money to fund innovation, but that money is useless once we get it since we have to PLAN FOR and FUNDRAISE FOR IT ahead of time.
• Risk: A sole reliance on philanthropy is a single point of failure like a sole reliance on advertising was.
• Question: how is the subscription model part of the bigger plan for the Banner? Why is it working?
  • Principles: Relentlessly interesting, radically helpful
  • Did it again? Would likely frame it more as membership model
• Membership works when you understand why YOUR people see you as different. How they join you to help you do what you do in the world.
• Another opportunity: government collaboration? Funding for information came during COVID times.
• Why does someone come back to your site? What causes a person to engage and continue to engage with the content?
• Flip it around: not content but community firsT
• Listening is a full time job, but no one is paying for it. Funding comes when people push you for output/publishing and scale.
• We don’t demand for-profit companies fund their own growth. Initial investment and capital gives them a (often long) window of time to experiment and prove the mode.
• This is a CAPITAL PROBLEM.
• Privilege: some organizations have this money at the beginning, and it shows.
• Reminder: Find money that is at the intersections of what you do. For instance from the banner, money that is fighting for/against public health, crime, guns – funding from hospitals in Baltimore. Find alternative funders.
• Is it an emergency that journalism is disappearing in the community? How are we convincing non-traditional funders that this is a problem?
• Flip it around: why does someone care about journalism? Make a case for us as connective tissue for the community
• Note: nonprofits are not always civic minded. It is still just a tax status.
• Convincing community foundations: what do you care about, and how do we as journalism organizations solve that.
• Many organizations in our space know how to get this community funding. Why is the information hoarded among a few or a small network?
• What is there ISN’T money in a community? What then?
• News organizations have harmed communities so why should communities want journalists to tell their stories? Versus owning their own narrative?
• There is somuch good content out there, how do we collaborate instead of compete and repeat?
• Great Salt Lake Collaborative: Experimental model: 2 years of funding for a new collaborative, then they raise their own money. The new funder is funding them because it aligns with what the funder needs, and no one member of the collab could have been able to get that funding. 
• When we help startups start, don’t for them to go nonprofit (or forprofit). This assumption that one way is better than the other is a disservice.
• Saying “Fund Journalism” is like saying “Fund Science” – too broad and undefined.
• Journalism is not an end in itself.
• Can foundations connect organizations to rich individuals?
• Can we then educate new funders with different expectations (E, those who might not assume journalistic independence
• Use the skills of journalism (storytelling!) to raise money.
• Are there organizations out there that matchmake grants – connecting donors to aligned organizations in need?
• Challenge: how are we not reinventing the wheel? Need to systematize the learnings and share across more of the industry.
• We don’t systematically track impact
• YET the tools exist (why don’t we all know them?)
• Sometimes initial successes are low hanging fruit and we should use those to build traction.

Tuesday, August 22, 2023

Host/ Reporter: 

• Dionicia Roberson

Participants: 

• Linn Washington (TU Journalism Dept)
• Shannon Bowen (NC Local News Workshop)
• Anthony Damcott
• Ben Schittler (TU)
• Cole Cummings (TU)
• Alanna Hutchinson (TU)
• Joy Mayer (Trusting News)
• Scott Blanchard (WITF)
• Heather May (Great Salt Lake Collaborative)
• Carla Robinson (Chestnut Hill Local)
• Carole Carmichael (Chestnut Hill Local)
• Kat Nagasawa (El Timpano)

Discussion Topic:

HOW CAN WE PRACTICE JOURNALISM AS A PUBLIC SERVICE WITHOUT COMPROMISING QUALITY, INTEGRITY, AND INCLUSIVENESS FOR THE SAKE OF REVENUE?

Main Points of Discussion That Emerged:

• We know we’re supposed to be changing things, we have the blueprint for doing that and we know new models are required…at the same time, we also know we can’t do this work unless it’s (financially) sustainable. It’s a tricky equation and an uncomfortable place to be.

Where is the money going to come from?

• What, if anything, do journalists offer that sets us apart? 

1. Responsibility
   1. To our words and to our communities
2. The assurance of accuracy
   1. Although an overwhelming number of Americans believe that journalists and the media are deliberately misleading them
3. The ability to create news content?
   1. Not exclusively ours anymore
4. Journalistic training?
   1. Available even to non-journalists (i.e. Info Hub Captains at Resolve Philly)

What is “the journalism”? Is it the product or the practice?

• When we think of professionalism and expertise as the sole domain of journalists, we leave out so many voices and ideas! 
• We’re looking at what it might look like to include more community voices and have more people see their lives reflected. That is a higher quality of journalism that requires us to be flexible about what we think is news and professional.

Quality

Closing the gap with collaboration

• The difference between us and content creators is the perception that we’re us and they’re them and there’s a necessary distance. 
• But legacy media has to close that gap and become collaborators. We need to learn that it’s OK to support and amplify a voice not owned by a journalist. The collaboration can be a challenge but that’s where we need to go.

Participants offer examples of journalistic collaboration with non news partners: 

• Partnered with two educational institutions; Shippensburg and Franklin Marshall to do some surveying of the community in order to gauge the community’s knowledge on climate. Ultimately collaboration led to a community awareness event that included a play about climate. The writing of the play was journalism-adjacent work because of all that was involved.
• Great Salt Lake Collaborative had a professional dance company interview members of the team in preparation for composing a modern dance about the lake.

Collaborations with local media that org leaders could really use: 

• Rather than go out and engage the public on a project and series of community events to raise votes, it would have been so helpful to get the news media to cover this. 

Where did the journalism role fit in? 

• Creating the news, engaging the public.
• Lifting up and amplifying convos that are relevant to people that they may be able to impact.
• Help guide the public toward things that they can engage themselves in (or the slice of the public you have access to and influence over).
• Convening and holding space for important conversations that engage the public.

More useful to ask “is this thing journalism” than to ask “who is a journalist?”

Integrity

Where does our credibility come from?

• The belief someone’s not trying to sell you something 
• Accuracy
• Transparency, or at least the sense among your consumers that you aren’t hiding your intentions
• Commitment to following the facts even if you don’t like them
• Transparency with partnerships

There seems to be a tension between taking money from entities as a source of revenue. What happens when my newspaper has to hold an entity to account?

Credibility: it’s easy to set up good guidelines of autonomy. What you have to worry about is your integrity and ethics.

You have to acknowledge that you could be influenced subconsciously or consciously.

AND if people don’t believe in your integrity, they’ll assume you’re lying anyway.

Integrity and revenue

Civic partnerships as a revenue model. They pay for coverage to their target communities. Does this come with its own ethical issues? 

A participant mentions their org’s method of getting and spreading news and information via “kitchen table conversations”.

• News orgs can help to sponsor and support these conversations.
• Doesn’t have to come with a set of articles.
• This is definitely journalism

How to financially support these endeavors?

• Digital doesn’t pay! 
• 90% of revenue generated from print
  • Philanthropy, subs, sponsorships

Inclusiveness

• How are we ensuring we are providing timely, quality news to folks who cannot pay to consume our work or afford any of our subscription models?
• Seattle has Real Change produced by the homelessness population and sold to people outside markets. The vendors get to keep all the money they make. Sometimes the vendors will accept anything. Folks not carrying cash is impacting that model a lot. It helps to sustain a population and they produce the paper in their own voices.

(In this way, the population are journalists)

“Journalism is not to tell stories but to inform.”

[It is absolutely possible for storytelling to be informative]

There’s an aspect of usefulness to journalism that matters, whether or not you agree with it. 

• Complaints from the right: where’s the space for me? 
• How do we communicate this better [during election coverage]: you [politically dissenting audiences] need to know what happened and what this person [candidate] actually did so you can make a decision?
  • The usefulness: do you dig beneath the horse race sort of story with candidates? 
  • Ultimately the usefulness is in the details and the richness and dimensionality of the story.

Inclusiveness and revenue: the most tension 

• As we start to shift to a model for a community, we also need to change not just the product model but also the revenue model!

Let’s talk about how to change the revenue model. We’re past the times when there is just one source of info- there are multiple. 

• This is a big area for philanthropists to step up right now.
  • We need a toolkit and messaging that talks about why they should support local news in order to enable us to be more inclusive.
  • Great Salt Lake is starting a curriculum for 5th graders about the lake, but sneaking in media literacy (inclusiveness, in getting children) can you get funding to subsidize

The big question, again: Where is the money going to come from?

• Playing around with AI, coming away with the fact that this thing is a giant vacuum cleaner of everything we as journalists produce: a quote, a stat, etc…and we feed it into the vacuum cleaner!!
• Is there a way we can collectively defend what we produce and capitalize on it? 
• It’s really important for us to be on top of how we stop being free providers to their data centers.
• If people can continue to get news for free, why wouldn’t they?
• Newspapers threw away their content for free online at first. Then when the paywalls went up, the readers revolted! 

AI is the new incarnation of this. It’s going to be a challenge to wrap our arms around that.

How do we become valuable enough that those who can afford it will want to pay? 

• Having a relationship with communities
• Reach new audiences
  • Who would feel seen and represented by your journalism? 
  • You need more money! 
  • Seeing where the value is, and turning the value into money?
  • That’s where the money is- in AI. 
  • We should come together as a consortium.

This session was hosted outside on the front steps of the building by Jennifer Brandel and included small group conversations to unpack what the word “radical” means to people, what they can do to be more radical, and what blockers are holding them back. 

We discussed these 3 questions (which you’re welcome to think about on your own or with a friend!)

1. What or who is radical to you? Why? (This could be radical people, radical acts)
2. What’s holding you back from being more radical? 
3. What’s one step you could take in your life or job to be your definition of radical? 

Here are some people that were put forward as being radical: 

• I.F. Stone
• Nellie Bly
• Studs Terkel
• Ida B Wells
• Jad Abumrad
• Chicks (formerly Dixie Chicks)
• Cardi B
• Weather Underground
• Angela Davis
• Evil Knievel
• Naked Cowboy
• Bayo Akomolafe
• Jon Steward
• John Lennon
• Chelsea Manning
• Simon’s parents

Here are some acts/actions that people thought were radical: 

• Pentagon Papers
• Simone Biles – opting out of gymnastics for a while
• Political Violence
• Urban Gardening
• Rest / Saying No

We talked about how what’s radical to one person may not look radical to another. (E.g., “not starting something new” is radical for someone always starting things.)

We also talked about what’s holding us back. Folks offered blockers such as conservative funders, the overhead of change management, and fear of judgment/not belonging anymore. 

The group was invited to share their emails with their conversation partners, setting a deadline to take one small step to do something radical or be more radical, and to check in with each other. 

Session Host:

Elise Stolte

Attendees:

• Ashley 
• Cole 
• Liz 
• Diane 
• Heather 
• Eric Marsh 
• Kat 
• Andre 
• Andrea Wenzel 
• Jesse 
• Fabi
• Deborah 
  

This group took on the challenge of building for sustainability beyond singular projects, which always come to an inevitable end. How can we move into a position of lasting change? We delved into this question with a prompt from solutions journalism: What’s working? Initiatives from North Carolina to New Mexico were discussed. The group grounded most of its discussion in examples from WHYY/NICE (News & Information Community Exchange). Eric Marsh of WHYY/NICE used the example of his mutual aid information network, NICE, to illustrate how to cultivate relationships between media organizations of differing sizes and targets. WHYY serves as a backbone org to support smaller outlets in the Philadelphia area. 

Eric’s initiative description: 

NICE funded by Knight/Lenfest (hyperlocal)

• Plan to exist 5 years 
• Future of journalism is hyperlocal
• Empathy interviews/listening 
• Are they from or in the community 
• Mutual aid collaborative, not a top-down org WHYY serves as backbone org 
• Several orgs working collaboratively, sharing content across platforms, taking social and printing it 
• WHYY does not own or control content from collaborators 
• WHYY provides monthly stipends and community sources 
• NICE partners serve as community ambassadors 

Challenges + solutions

• Getting buy-in from the newsroom and community 
• This is slow work 
• The group agreed that funders can help create structures to help build strong programs: “Money can incentivize good behavior.“
• A trend in philanthropy is funding collaborative efforts. 

Funders want to be at the table

• They want to talk about the mission before they fund; bring them along with the discussion, if they are a part of it, they are more likely to come to the table 
• Funders can help create the structure
• Money can incentivize good behavior
• A downside is its hard to get funders’ attention if you’re not already in the map

The group agreed on five ingredients for creating lasting change: 

• Working in network hubs 
• Changing from a news ecosystem to an information ecosystem 
• Leveraging storytelling networks to amplify content and support outlets of varying sizes/reach
• Help partners reach their goals in the context of collaboration outcomes 
• Create an exit strategy instead of focusing on the exit date 

Participants:

• Sadie Scott – Listening Post Collective/The Frontline Observer, sadieevescott@gmail.com
• Jacqué Palmer – Houston Landing, msjacquepalmer@gmail.com
• Sydney Blakeney – Internews, sblakeney@internews.org

Holistic listening practice

• Needs assessment for Houstonians
• What does your life look like day to day as a Houstonian?
• Newsroom hotline is just for members
• Different levels of listening opportunities based on where you are in the funnel
• Trying to ensure everyone who comes to the meeting feels heard
• In-person monthly office hours with pre- and post-surveys—measuring for trust and transparency
• Keeping the office hours small—max 25 people so people feel heard and seen
• Different groups of folks every time
• Groups outside of the metropolitan area can’t necessarily access it
• Bridge Michigan is doing smth similar
• Resistance comes from legacy thought patterns and decision making frameworks
• 25% membership, 25% foundations, 25% grants, 25% corporate funding
• Sitting people down who have been through the process to check in about what they need
• Consistent opportunities for connection
• FilmAid network: https://www.filmaid.org/filmaid-network-fan 
• Building an online community
• Engaging youth and their media is part of building a sustainable listening practice
• Long-term investments are necessary
• Educational Youtube videos
• Google Doc — put in the sheet what you need answers to
• Make surveys as short and sweet as possible (reduce friction)
• 1-1 Zoom chats about local news needs

Models to learn from

• Market research
• Community-centric fundraising uses very different language
• How do we incentivize funding for listening?
• Information ecosystems — large needs assessments 
• Individuals are funded to do months of research so they can present the data to donors
• Givewell
• Matchmaking for donors and journalists
• Sharktank but equitable and for individuals?
• Digitalwomenleaders.com free mentoring for/from women in digital media

How would this transform communities?

• Journalists would be incentivized to listen face-to-face if there’s an opportunity
• Listening improves the quality of our news and the environment it exists in
• Creating an ethic of care
• Helping journalists be of service
• Where is the “Hippocratic oath” for journalists?
• Turn us towards care and community
• We need a new system of ethics in journalism that is relevant today

Individual listening practice

• Set the tone of the meeting verbally and with slides
• Zine that you fill out throughout the meeting
• 1-1 conversations, boxes in the middle of the room, group conversation
• Accessibility for different modes of participation
• Breakout rooms
• QR codes and flyers in the community
• Community group chats and WhatsApp
• Training via text-based conversations
• Meeting people where they’re at virtually
• Radios attached to cars and motorcycles with spontaneous listening sessions
• Discord channels and Subreddits
• Twitter spaces where folks can respond

Who is we? Journalists, artists, librarians, activists, citizens, residents, those who care.

What’s the quest behind the question? How can journalism and engagement help communities to heal and create space for belonging?

“We tell ourselves stories to live.” –Joan Didion

H.S.L. = HEARD SEEN LOVED

TRUST & LOVE; CARE = POWER

---

Heard Seen Loved translates to Belonging → JOY → Commitment and Action

Requires journalists to come from a different intention→

CONNECTING → Brokering relationship.

COMMONALITIES FIRST, not differences.

RELEVANCE to community and decision making; love in action, news you can use.

“THE SYSTEM” makes visible the levers of power.

LANGUAGE, watchwords that diminish or erase points of view.

ATTEND ON MULTIPLE LEVELS→ Historical narratives of a geography, slavery and oppression. Must attend to cultural narratives of dominant and marginalized groups. What are the stories you are walking on/into?

TIME: Slow movement through layers of “soil”, rich stories of communities must be infused with the layers of the history of the geography.

IDENTITY: In and of the world. Duality of identity. Personal/professional/ethnicity

NOT economic/profit motive

PROFESSIONAL CULTURE

Toxic Organizations/Newsrooms CANNOT generate joy. Suppression of expression.

Journalists are MEAN. Heightened emotions when journalists are extracting information and “fixing” communities. Journalists treat each other badly. 

I was treated like shit → so I passed it on.

Silencing → Professional culture. 

Need Journalists Anonymous for personal sharing of trauma FROM newsrooms toward their own.

Newsrooms embodying POWER→ “Plantation Culture”. Being treated as journalists as indentured servants. Commercial/profit motives drives POWER.

But SERVICE with kindness can help generate joy from work and in the communities we serve.

REFLECTION: Need time to reflect on MOTIVATIONS/Intentions. Examine, reflect. Are we seeking “validation”? Chasing reward/incentive structures/awards. Savior complex and ego → When reflecting on the overwhelmingness of engaging in and with communities. Capacity to respond. Feelings that we as journalists have to SOLVE the community issues. When our job is to make visible the systems and issues so communities can work to solve it for themselves.

Competition/Individualism

You’re a “functioning cog” in the machinery of journalism. Different kind of incentive structure. 

$$$–> Figure out what works for your context. Experimentation AND changing from within. Typically underresourced.

Currently hierarchical versus horizontal (democratizing, sharing of power)

How do we → Build a community learning organization?

News→Commerce→Business→Economies→Political→Power. Currently news for the 10 percent, not the 90 percent.

“Representative” vs. Peer-to-Peer

“Every voice is valid.” 

Gilded cages, filter bubbles, Ivory Tower → Research, talk, listen.

SEE ME

Community listening, dialogue and learning;

Civic/news hybrids.

CULTURAL NARRATIVES

Journalism is just one of the cultural producers creating community narratives (museums, city planners, civic infrastructure, artists)

Journalism is a platform for business. 

Connect to assets and community resources

Situated knowledge

VALUE rather than lack

HONOR lived experience

Provide means to communicate, listen, learn, → THEN report.

WhatsApp→ App to consume news in Chile/NY/Documented communities.

Backgrounders/Explainers/Directory of Who’s Who in the community.

Archive→ Use to provide the who/what/when/where

Move COMMUNITY MEMBERS to action. Activism.

“We are activating community intention toward shared purpose,” Michelle Ferrier

News AND Information

Providing CONTEXT (historical, present, future perspectives). How are the stories informed by what has happened before in this geography?

Who was present?

• Steve Dubb, NPQ
• Jody Lawrence-Turner, Fund for Oregon Rural Journalism

How do we lift up first-person worker stories through our media platforms?

• Example: The Bulletin (Bend, OR)
• Faces of Homelessness series: produced first-person stories for a year on the topic every two weeks.  About 800 words. Based on standard interview questions.
• Housed all articles on a common webpage.
• Got good responses, and community engagement. Succeeded at disrupting stereotypes and changed public perceptions.
• Done this on other topics: housing affordability (What defines affordability? Pair with personal stories of difficulties of affording housing). 

Options for worker stories
• Could have a regional focus.

• Could have topical focus (e.g., teachers, restaurant workers, warehouse workers)

Watchdog, guide dog, or no dog?

• Watchdog: accountability
• Guidedog solutions journalism
• No dog: no gatekeepers

Question: Who is allowed to be a guide dog or watchdog?

Response: “No gatekeepers” means letting in those excluded by the media. Example-Detroit: water shutoffs. Considered a “non-story” by mainstream media. Another organization (Outlier) came along. Not only wrote about it but set up a hotline.  Incorporate the voices of people (people of color, low-income) whose stories are not in the media. Address the class and race bias in the media. 

All the dogs can play together. Guide dog/watchdog is not an either-or choice. 

Hosts: Chelsea Naughton & Sabrina Iglecias 

Participants: 

• Summer Moore
• Allison Shirk
• Megan Garvey
• Alex Keefe
• Amir Richardson
• Allie Vanyur
• Edward Wang
• Catalina Jaramillo
• Massarah Mikati
• Steven Aroyo
• Andre Nata
• Eric Marsh
• Elisa 
• Taylor Nazawa 

Notes, observations, and questions:

• How do we get higher-ups to care about engagement work? What’s working? 
• At LAist, engagement work wasn’t considered journalism. The newsroom hated the Hearken slide of the person speaking at the top of the mountain because they felt that meant they weren’t the experts. So, they had everyone create individual mission statements. This seemed to change the thinking. 
• Then they used human-centered design to create “modes.” Each mode needed to be met by 70% of a pitched story. They made it part of the assigning process.
• Then for reporting, they looked at how this process helped them raise money. Missions also need to be periodically updated.  
• At WBEZ, the problem isn’t aversion to change, but that they want to engage in every change so much that things get dropped/confused. 
• They want to be in communities that haven’t heard of them. How do you convince people that this isn’t a special project, but an integral part of their journalism? 
• When reporters/editors leave because they don’t consider this real journalism, let them go. 
• In Birmingham, the engaged approach meant that the microsite actually scooped the bigger media orgs because they had cultivated sources through pop-up engagement events. 
• Engagement is an investment in time. How long are you willing to wait? 
• There is real resistance within the journalism community to being a community member. 
• We have to play the long game. BUT the long game isn’t a selling point for people in newsrooms who aren’t going to be around for the long game. 
• When reporters ask how is this different? We can say that we are giving them time to source. 
• When reporters have a moment with a community member, that’s when they convert. And there’s no way to force it. 

Other needs + thoughts:

• Need to turn anecdotes into data, can it be an email? A database?
• Engagement positions were created out of guilt and shame. That can be a powerful motivator. But now they are being let go. 
• Some higher-ups just don’t care. They advocate publicly to save face. 
• Can you create an impact tracker? 
• WBEZ has an open call for community members to come talk to a WBEZ reporter. Then someone transcribes all the notes and puts them into buckets for feedback. 
• Some folks asked for a cheat sheet for how to talk to higher-ups about engagement work. 

Host:

Steve Dubb

Participants:

• Jennifer Brandel
• Caitlin Tapier
• Eve Pearlman
• Liz Haikes

Why the question?

• Steve: Solidarity economy practitioner, now at NPQ
• Shift communities, not just community journalism from “being fed” to “feeding ourselves”
• The same thing is happening in journalism as in the economy as a whole

Needs

1. Demystify terms and debunk

Example: “Free market economy” does not exist.

Conditions of “perfect competition,” no monopoly do not exist. For example, if perfect competition existed, company advertising and lobbying budgets would be zero, because by definition such expenditures would reduce profits. Obviously, this is not true. 

2. Reveal how “pay to play” works in all sorts of different ways.
3. Make people aware of paths to control resources and build economies that work for them (e.g., community banks).
4. Help people understand the business model is the message and is directly related to equity. Wide variety of forms: community land trusts, cooperatives, new forms of community credit, worker ownership, and community (multi-stakeholder) governance of the economy.
5. Share and explain the business models of what you cover and how they relate to challenges and opportunities.
6. How to make socialistic principles less of a “dog whistle”/triggering?
7. Solutions stories about local ownership, co-ops, credit unions
8. Teach reporters how to follow dollars and learn about ownership business models and incentives.

Nonprofit media: could be seen as part of the solidarity economy; could they benefit from seeing themselves as part of a broader community movement to transform the economy?

Strategies

1. NPQ: Think of ourselves as journalistic organizers. Funding model: subscriptions, ads, membership revenue plus philanthropy.
2. Help people get needed stories into the press.

1. Source stories directly from the community, authored by community members.
2. Partner with intermediary organizations to co-produce series (e.g., labor organizers, solidarity economy).
3. Webinars: series of about 40 webinars to date, average audience of 200-400 people live. For example, there was a webinar on community-owned media as part of that series. Also, produce audio clips (short-form content) from the webinars.
4. Create a glossary of terms of economic justice
5. Allow free republishing to non-profit news/community.
6. Articles and webinars talk about what is not working too, not just highlighting successes. Focus on reflecting on practice and improving practice over time.

Change = dissatisfaction plus vision plus plan

(community organizers, mediators, libraries)

Levels:

• Fundamentals
• Practitioners
• Edge-Innovation

Possible partners:

• NEC (New Economy Coalition)
• Zebras United
• Black and Brown founders: Inclusive Capital Collective

Final thoughts:

• Make business model part of nonprofit journalism onboard experience.
• There is power in community economic literacy.
• Power mapping within stories.
• Trusting news: Explaining business model and funding
• Rejecting the tyranny of the clock: Spend time to find community economy strategies.

Ways to Expand Impact

• Voice service
• Localizing 
• Re-publishing content being generated through NPQ and its partners

Session Host(s): Luisa Ortiz Perez

Participants:

• Steve Dubb
• Jingyao Yu
• Purva Indulkar
• Emily Bango
• Luisa Ortiz Perez

Defining care awareness:

• Duty of care in the non-profit (legal)
• Do no harm and do more
• Positive notion of care
• Organizational care 
• Operate as best you care in the benefit
• Collateral effect
• Prioritize the organization instead of the individual
• Alignment with the collective interest
• It does not always have to be a punitive resolution
• Ex. Human resources, performance improvement plan
• 30 day improvement plan
• Setting up people for success
• Compliant way with HR
• As long as you want to be here
• Diversify the staff and structure 
• What resources are out there and practices
• Punitive, fear and retribution
• Weaponization of care
• Power dynamics

Care for the organization vs. care for the individual:

• Community table in an institutional 
• Access to peer support systems
• Recognition of illness as another condition of the worker not a failure
• Racial components? Who has status in the organization and why?
• Union vs. idiosyncratic 
• Dedicating your life to your work
• Overwork and asking for too much
• Taking advantage of the system AND accountability
• Different forms of contribution
• Qualitative and quantitative productivity – give value to impact; revenue and funding
• Quality impact that generates change 

Tensions:

• How do you set up so everyone have equal access to the structural support to be set up for success
• Additional emotional labor, tapping out.
• Confusing boundaries between person and professional
• Two dimensions: the organizational culture vs. the legal benefits
• Emotional Gaslighting…..support and unhappy performance, lack of honest feedback
• Compliment sandwich
• Binary understanding bad capitalism vs. good doers 
• Women of color and mothering that is weaponized
• Inequitable workplace relations…

Disposing of:

• Not shaming people when they need a break
• ‘Expected to be available and online, even if they are in a mountain or camping
• Social media and cancel culture leads to self culture
• Nobody is born woke
• Toxic positivity
• Conclusions
• Structured worker representation
• Empathic budgeting – budgeting for care
• Let’s be ok with discomfort
• Communities of practice where different conversations and power conversations