Reflections on Restoration

Insights from GoFA’s pilot New/s Incubator

TL;DR:

If you want the short version of how to run an incubator that is inclusive, joyful and liberatory, try these steps:

1. Give people money to participate.
2. Provide time and space.
3. Move at the speed of trust.
4. Expect no deliverables. Outcomes will emerge down the line.
5. Advisors should reflect the lived experience of the community they are serving. If they don’t, they should be what advisor Rob Sinclair calls “culturally competent as fuck.”
6. Try to reach people cognitively, emotionally, somatically and spiritually.
7. Make it intergenerational. Like, really intergenerational. As in bringing in ancestors. As in thinking about legacy.
8. Authentically integrate various forms of expression — poetry, meditation, objects, visual imagery. These elements force people to think differently and to feel and speak from the heart and gut.
9. Honor feelings as much as facts, experience over jargon.
10. Value process alongside product.

The Long Version

From winter 2021 to spring 2022, I advised the Guild of Future Architects’ (GoFA) New/s initiative, a Ford Foundation-funded effort to support innovation for equity in journalism. Now that we’ve come to the end of the project, our team is in the familiar position of evaluating the program. Did the projects “succeed”? Did the program? Was it worth it? Who decides? And what did we do anyway?

Modeled after GoFA’s Shared Futures Incubator, the New/s Incubator was designed to support innovative news projects by women, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ media makers. It was designed to reinvent journalism to more boldly and accurately reflect the communities it claims to serve.

We worked with two Black-led project teams: IF/Lab, a newsroom staffed by experienced Black and Brown journalists collaborating with emerging young media makers, led by entrepreneur Tayyib Smith in Philadelphia and HBCUx, a storytelling hub designed to rewrite the narrative of arts graduates from historically Black colleges and universities who have been overlooked by the mainstream press, led by creative, scholar and Waymaker Erin Michelle Washington in Atlanta.

I’ve participated in dozens of incubators and accelerators over the years as an investor and mentor. When I first came on board to the New/s Incubator as an advisor, I was skeptical. One key goal for the program was rest and rejuvenation for its participants. What does that even mean? Too amorphous (not to mention subjective) to be rigorous, measurable, or even impactful.

In the end, I found the experience to be extraordinarily powerful. But I’ve struggled to articulate what was so transformational about it. So I turned to my fellow advisors and participants in the program to help me piece it together: Jessica Clark (Director, New/s Initiative), Evan Walsh (Program Manager, New/s Initiative), writer and facilitator Robert Earl Sinclair (Advisor), Tayyib Smith (IF/Lab), Cassie Owens (IF/Lab), Erin Washington (HBCUx), Toran X Moore (artist and co-founder of HBCUx) and Aaliyah Simms (artist and team member, HBCUx), worldbuilder Tony Patrick (Advisor), facilitator and healer Miguel Rivera (Advisor) and somatic artist Micheline Berry (Advisor).

Rather than a linear set of interviews, this is a collage taken from text messages, Slack threads, presentation decks, founding research documents, transcripts of program sessions and one on one conversations that took place over the course of the incubator, so that the reflections coming out of the New/s Incubator are as authentically communal as the experience felt. This is also an attempt to create something more reflective of reality than the misleading idea of sole authorship of more traditional program evaluation — an experiment in collaborative sensemaking. Note: since we are putting this up on Medium, I have to post it from my account, so clearly the products available to us have not yet caught up to our vision :).

First, what was the problem we were trying to solve?

As our Program Officer, the journalist and entrepreneur Farai Chideya, has written, “The old ways of doing journalism simply aren’t working: we need true innovation if we want equity in journalism. Equitable news coverage — fueled by innovative new processes and the culturally-competent and empowered staff needed to produce it — is a powerful lever which can move civil society toward justice.”

Jessica: “Journalism models were in crisis before the pandemic. Now they are in freefall. Older forms of journalism are in trouble in part because diverse audiences don’t trust them. And Silicon Valley-style innovation is too often approached from a platform or product angle. It’s clear that our current problems won’t be solved using only the tools and strategies of the past. We need new people, processes, and power relations, not just products or platforms, if we’re going to reconstruct American news. We also need entirely new benchmarks for what success looks like. We know that shifting to a regenerative mindset will take time and imagination. ”

At the start, Jessica laid out a set of gaps in the journalism field that we’d try to address, including:

• A gap in long-term-visioning: Too often, journalism has a focus on reporting about now or tomorrow, but does not reflect on longer-term implications.
• A gap in mission focus: Concerns about objectivity and bias in journalism can shut out diverse reporters and editors who want their work to contribute to social progress.
• A gap in belonging: Many journalists of color, as well as LGBTQIA+ and female reporters, have written at length about their struggles to fit into a profession rife with outdated stereotypes about macho white men in fedoras elbowing each other aside for a scoop.
• A gap in systems thinking: Systems thinking is central to Future Architecture — the guiding practice developed by the Guild’s founder, Sharon Chang.
• A gap in embodied experience: The Guild’s incubator model is unusual in that it offers participants tools not just for ideating projects, developing organizations, or seeking funders and stakeholders — but also for personal reflection and somatic practice.

Jessica’s focus on ensuring inclusion in journalism was deeply informed by her long-time collaboration with Kamal Sinclair—at the time, GoFA’s executive director. As Sinclair wrote in the introduction to their jointly authored project, the Making a New Reality Toolkit, “Study after study shows the negative impact on all of humanity when groups of people are not able to fulfill their potential. We lose human brilliance in every field. We lose important contributions to science, medicine, technology, philosophy, art, culture, and commerce. And we gain the burden of human potential suppressed.”

A different sort of incubator

Traditionally, the general idea of incubation is to give a founder or a team a little bit of money, some technical assistance, some community and at the end of this alchemy, a fully-formed investment-ready entity will emerge. (There are lots of blog posts dedicated to the promises, successes and failures of traditional incubator and accelerator models, particularly for people from marginalized communities. If you’re interested, you can read more here, here or here).

From the beginning, though, we were trying to do something different with this program. The New/s Incubator was a pilot, so we approached everything with a mindset of experimentation. There was no fancy Demo Day at the end of the program. We did a meditation instead. We didn’t dissect product roadmaps. Instead, we put together a Futurist Writers’ Room. Based on a format developed by Sharon Chang, we adapted the Business Model Canvas to a Community Model Canvas, so that community input was considered as rigorously and early on in the process as possible.

What emerged was more of a co-incubation model, where the advisors (us) were supported alongside the program’s participants, accompanying each other on a journey that was raw, joyful and liberatory.

Why center rest and rejuvenation?

In developing the New/s Incubator, we are working within a tradition of movements, activists and thinkers focused on the value of rest as a critical and corrective tool in the fight for liberation — places like the Nap Ministry, Seattle Foundation’s Black Joy & Wellness Fund and Black Women’s Freedom Sanctuary. Rest is an end in and of itself. We tried to build on that idea with an invitation to consider rest as conversation, as community, as care…particularly in the context of a pandemic. We created space for people to be their full selves, to talk, to get to know one another, to not simply rush through a set of exercises. And as organizers we gave up the floor as much as we could, so that the culture of the incubator was defined as much by the program’s participants and their allies as by us.

Rob: “People of color often don’t have the kind of ‘spare time’ that those with more resources do. So what was cool about this incubator was that it wasn’t so much about making them produce something that is justified capital-wise or in terms of justifying their existence. It was more about them just having the space to define what they want and who they want to be, and really take a minute to sit and holistically absorb the truth of what’s being asked of them. Which in turn changes their answers.

People of color are constantly asked to justify their existence. You know how this works in philanthropy. A lot of times what people are looking for in applicants makes the applicants try to become the thing they’re looking for. This space was more about them defining through these programs what their work actually was, what it meant to them, what it meant to their communities, what it could mean to their communities — for example, especially with HBCUx, really thinking of black futurism outside of the colonialist paradigm. This is a radical concept.

In this space, people got to stop running, stop stressing, stop trying to explain why they’re worth something. It takes a few exercises to be able to really soak in what they’re actually being asked to do. And then it becomes a very liberating experience. Liberation was something I heard a lot.”

Micheline: “Rest is as important as taking any other meeting, as something that’s scheduled. Self care is a commitment to community care.”

I had been developing my own practice of restoration — having moved away from leading an organization and moving toward a reconceptualizing of what constitutes labor, reorienting my attention and cultivating my creativity. This incubator came along at exactly the right time to help me deepen my practice with like-minded people.

What did we do + how did we do it?

The New/s Incubator spread over eight sessions, with some time at the end of last year — about halfway through the program — for reflection. The sequence of programs was constructed to help participants reflect on their projects, the futures they were seeking to bring to life, the needs of their community, their group dynamics, and their own superpowers. We also invited the teams to define their own session, based on their needs.

We were also operating on an entirely different time horizon. Instead of the two-week sprints of a more traditional model, we moved at the speed of trust. Trust that was earned, not taken for granted. When asked who else should be in the room, people brought in pictures of their ancestors. In making space for ancestry, we surfaced stories of people whose histories have been hidden, suppressed or distorted; and we were able to use those stories as inspiration for a new kind of news making.

Evan: “The speed of trust allows everyone to show up as their full selves; along the way, it integrates checkpoints and milestones and guidelines and expectations for what that means. It is about not being fully attached to a specific outcome or riding on a deliverable looking a specific way, not predefining or limiting an ending.”

When you move at the speed of trust, you get the benefit of everyone’s participation. Taking seriously the idea of co-incubation meant that everyone’s contribution (not just that of the project leaders) was valuable.”

Aaliyah: “I learned to not be ashamed or scared to speak whatever truth that I’m coming from in the moment.”

Erin: “Our team learned how to not make assumptions around leadership and creation of a new idea. We have known each other for years but this incubator helped us to dig deeper into our shared values to find even more that were also present but not spoken.”

So, did it work?

In the closing session for the incubator, we asked team members to reflect on their experience, and to call their ancestors in as witnesses:

Tayyib: “[When the program started], I was really mired in the bureaucratic diversity, equity, inclusion gaslighting continuum. Then, whenever I would come to GoFA, it was refreshing and regenerative. And usually, even if I was tired, I left the engagement feeling full or fulfilled and rested.

Cassie and I have been kicking around ideas for some time and the privilege and the space to just think about something with other like-minded people who are giving graciously is a tremendous privilege in the 21st century when every moment has to be monetized or you have to have a deliverable.”

Erin: “In times like these, we should be able to make spaces for ourselves and not just wait to be “mistreated” in majority/toxic spaces.” Erin called into the room her grandmother Teacher Belle Whatley, who was the first person on the maternal side of her family to go to college; she talked about the legacy of Alabama State University (originally named Lincoln Normal School), an HBCU started by nine formerly enslaved men: “I’m just super grateful to be in the legacy of black folks that believed in themselves to do more than what capitalism told us, to be more than just the oppressed. To see ourselves and each other from our own perspective and gaze. To see ourselves in a future that was not yet present. The Marian Nine had vision! True Afro-futurists.”

Toran: “We’re kind of surpassing limits that have been imposed upon us….this space has been a great place to dream with folks, to hear how folks have surpassed their living minutes, have passed their level, just really envisioning a future that [in which] we’re not limited by what we can see…but really surpassing by what we feel.”

Cassie shared a picture of her great-grandfather, a native Gullah speaker and talented storyteller. “I’m just so grateful to this space for actually being a space to dream. I’m energized and inspired and thankful; it’s been like a prayer inside of my heart for a while to be able to move towards a space where someone like my great grandpa would’ve actually been able to spit.”

Erin: “Being in this incubator felt like a brave space. The space was made in such a way that we were not judged. That we were not pushed to ‘produce’ or ‘perform.’ This was crucial for me in process. Also, learning side by side with each other as teams was vital and has helped us to continue to create together today. Tayyib and I are now working on a Shared Futures project!”

So why does this matter, and what does it have to do with news?

Evan: “Traditional incubators often result in a ‘pitch’ or a moment of grandeur or some big reveal or some kind of ‘ending’ that doesn’t really match how life really functions. When there’s a focus on the journey rather than outcomes, it allows more room for people to center those things like joy, liberation and exploration.”

Jessica: “This incubator allowed us to bring the personal, political and spiritual to a discussion of journalism, which is often thought to be more empirical or ‘objective.’ The incubator allowed history to matter and to inform our sense of the news, instead of a constant focus on what’s new or what’s ‘breaking.’ It allowed for the centering of new goals: For example, of increasing belonging rather than just informing people. It allowed us to connect the old and the young, ancestors and those who are coming along after us.”

Tayyib: “Many powerhouse media and journalism outlets have institutional ties that results in content and material filtered through a lens that doesn’t authentically portray Black and Brown communities. There is a need for authentic representation of front-facing people telling stories, but also an expansion of those with lived experience represented in the back-end of who’s paying for the reporting (the editors, producers, and staff behind the scenes).”

Rob: “In terms of journalism and in terms of these two groups, there is on one end [IF/Lab] taking agency over community and history and future. [With HBCUx] there is also the radical imagination of black narratives outside the space of hierarchical justification.”

With the exponential cultural, generational shift presently taking place, those in power, in government, in corporations are increasingly trying to find organizations that have developed genuine trust and real community. Those are going to be valuable, and people associated with them are going to be able to set the terms for how they want to be seen and worked with. These forms of community value and action that are not quantifiable in a traditional capitalist system are becoming extremely valuable.”

What do we talk about when we talk about rest (aka what do we tell other people about this thing?)

For myself, I found this experience both transformational and difficult to place into the traditional funder or investor models of impact reporting and success. As a person of color, I found the collective culture that was created within the New/s Incubator to be generous, expansive and, frankly, more interesting than the more homogenous incubators and accelerators I’ve been around over the last two decades. As a group, we spoke about what and how to share, and how the experience might ripple out. Should the incubator be like Fight Club? (First rule: don’t talk about it!) Or could we find ways to replicate and expand it?

We also acknowledged that the kinds of shifts we were talking about making would likely not be seen in our lifetimes. We are working for our descendants. (I struggle with how abstract some of this still feels, but I think that just means my mind is still colonized).

Miguel: “You have to figure out how to morph, how to transpose, how to translate what you have here, so that the outside world doesn’t destroy it, because the rational world doesn’t want this to exist. So it’s really important to protect it. And you have to be very clever as to how you’re going to go about instituting the changes that you have seeded here.”

Micheline: “This journey was a commitment to self-care as community care, relaxing into the questions, the uncertainty as Waymakers holding space for each other, co-creating restorative narratives, potentializing our collective energies, honoring the journey taken and the road ahead.”

Tony: “It’s a rarity to observe a paradigm shift occur right before your eyes, but in this case, in a matter of months, we collectively experienced the transformation of an incubator into a hub for communal and self-care. By providing a space for our selected participants to not only feel seen and heard — but to also redefine themselves and their practices — an expansive new space for self-acknowledgement and self-empowerment emerged. A new narrative about their shared missions, practices, and futures was birthed. And those new narratives will have a ripple effect and impact in the communities and spaces our participants will return to post-incubator. For me, that’s the good news about the New/s Initiative. Together, we are awake.”

The takeaway from all of this shouldn’t be that incubators don’t work or that all incubators should look like this one. It is simply that we can inject some of these values into other spaces and make them more compelling for a wider range of participants. In turn, the experience will feel different for everyone — sometimes uncomfortable, but often more joyful and ultimately more authentic and hopefully more impactful in the long term.