Takeaways from a powerful week in Río

How might we improve journalism and boost female leadership in the media? How can we make Chicas Poderosas a sustainable organization and increase our reach in Latin America and other countries? How can we organize our community to channel so much energy and talent into actual impact? How can we work together to change the media landscape?

With these and more questions in mind, Gia, Mariana and myself (Belén) gathered for a week in the inspiring Rio de Janeiro to work on structuring Chicas Poderosas as an organization, laying out the plans for 2019 and strengthening engagement with our community. With lots (lots, really) of Google docs, a tight schedule, some beach time and several brainstorming sessions and conversations, we created a plan to make Chicas Poderosas even more powerful and involve our community in these efforts, developing a shared governance model, sharing responsibility and leadership across the organization..

Along the way, we learned a few things that we think might be useful for others who are also working on big plans to conquer the world (of media, at least):

• There are many types of leadership — and all are necessary to make things happen. When working in groups, there tends to be someone who takes the lead, but when you bring together different types of personalities you get many leaders — one for every part of the process. After a few days of working together, we realized we were all working towards the same goals but focusing on different aspects that were all important to plan our projects and make sure they happen. A free, limitless and wild vision is necessary to make big plans, aim higher and further; an insightful analysis makes it possible to create informed plans and communicate them to our partners and community; and an organized workflow that prioritizes tasks with a tight schedule to work on them is essential to keep things moving forward. Collaborative, horizontal leadership is our new formula for success.
• Work-life balance can’t be overrated. Many times we hear companies and people talk about the importance of compensating working hours with free personal time. In many jobs, however, this balance is hard to find. Working for about eight hours a day and taking the afternoon-evenings off to go to the beach and relax, we found ourselves coming up with some of our best ideas during these “free” hours. We proved a relaxed, happy brain — or actually, three relaxed, happy brains — can plan, envision and exchange ideas in a super productive way. The balance: turns out that “life” can also have a positive impact on “work”.
• The power of the one-pager. To put our ideas on paper, force ourselves to be concise and communicate more clearly what we were thinking about with each project, Gia put us to work on one-pagers for every project we envision for Chicas Poderosas in 2019. This exercise helped us focus, discuss and sharpen ideas and keep in mind what is most important: why it needs to be done and the impact we can have as a community.
• It’s all about structure. For five years now, Chicas Poderosas has been growing and growing, and communities around the world have been doing different things: mediathons, workshops, a podcast, a collaborative investigation, power sessions, fact-checking projects and more. To organize these different initiatives and create spaces for them to happen and grow, we organized Chicas Poderosas along three verticals: Chicas Poderosas Lab, which includes all initiatives related to innovating and finding new ways to improve journalism; Chicas Poderosas Network, which includes all the spaces that allow our community to interact and grow; and Chicas Poderosas Academy, which includes all projects related to training and providing skills for women journalists.
• Sharing can make people care. One thing that striked me (Belén) after spending so much time with Mariana, is how she seizes every single opportunity to talk to everyone — literally everyone — about Chicas Poderosas. She does it with genuine passion and energy and an immediate call to action inviting people to get involved. From a girl who was selling zines on self care on the street, to a police officer who loves to play online poker, with whom we got to share a table at a bar — and also journalists, designers, producers and activists — Mariana shared the plans we were working on, and also the process we were going through. So that’s how you build a network with professionals from different industries and backgrounds in 18 countries.
• Rely on community sourcing. As we were working on everything from looking for sponsors to discussing the learning needs of women journalists in Latin America, we realized there are too many things to do to get a community going and growing. Trying to take care of them all by ourselves just isn’t possible. And also, the whole point of being part of a community is being able to rely on others: on their talent, their insights, the information they have and the time they can contribute to help make things happen. That’s why we created a list of tasks, specific things needed to make big a reality, and shared them with our community.
• Take the time to better know your people. As we were thinking about some of the new projects while also trying to convey to potential donors the power of Chicas Poderosas, we realized we were missing some information, some basic and some less basic facts about our community. Do our members live in small or big cities? How old are them in average? How would they describe Chicas Poderosas? And, most important of all, what concrete impact has Chicas Poderosas had on their lives? To gather this and more information we created a Google form and asked everyone in our community — from social media followers to ambassadors — to complete it. Only by knowing better who we are trying to impact, and how we’ve already impacted them, can we work towards our mission.

These were some of the takeaways from a very productive one-week session. We are working now to make those plans a reality.

Please share your own lessons and any suggestions you may have to improve the way we are tackling our community’s challenges and female empowerment in the media. And if you are interested in joining us to make the revolution of the media happen, reach out to hola@chicaspoderosas.org or tweet at us using #JuntasMejores