Finding my voice (again) as a young Black journalist
At the beginning of my journey with EJCP, I was fresh off of my first trip to the West Coast to attend ONA22 in Los Angeles — feeling excited for the opportunity to attend my first journalism conference representing the community media platform I founded, Better to Speak.
I remember feeling excited, yet intimidated navigating the space with people who I considered to be more “real-life” journalists for “real-life” publications. I tried my best to soak up all the information I could about how to further improve and grow Better to Speak — which I’d only started to consider as more of an actual media organization, rather than a passion project.
I came into 2022 with my first-ever grant for Better to Speak — having used it to launch our contributing writers program, bring on my first paid team member, and bolster the day-to-day work that started to make me feel like a real entrepreneur of a real budding media business.
Similarly, when EJCP5’s 100-day journey officially started, I experienced a similar feeling of excitement and intimidation, realizing that aside from the technical knowledge and professional network the program offered — this was a major boost to my confidence in myself as a young founder and in Better to Speak’s potential.
Looking back, our sessions with Ariel Zirulnick of the Membership Puzzle Project (whom I met at ONA22), Amanda McLoughlin and Eric Silver from Multitude Productions, Bola Awoniyi from Black Ballad, and Candice Fortman of Outlier Media specifically stand out to me as sessions that affirmed the mindset and approach I hope to take with Better to Speak as a business.
Their presentations offered tangible and actionable practices and emboldened my plans for the platform I hope to build — a sustainable media organization that centers Black youth and young adult perspectives through quality multimedia storytelling, and is deeply rooted in and connected to its community.
Here are the steps I am currently working on this year to get Better to Speak closer to that goal:
- Establish and work towards revenue goals with a focus on establishing core income sources while continuing to explore grants, fiscal sponsorship and cooperative business loans.
- Grow our internal capacity by recruiting volunteers, long-term team members and other supportive roles to better resource the work.
- Launch a beta membership program to be able to open up Better to Speak for cooperative governance by July.
- Complete the State of the Young Black Advocate survey of Black youth and young adults ages 18–30 to learn more about our target audience and inform our work with the programming and stories that our peers want to see.
- Optimize our editorial process to improve the contributing writer experience and continue to refine our editorial voice and content to make Better to Speak a go-to source for storytelling by and for Black youth and young adults.
As we approached our second-to-last task for the program — our group presentations — I struggled to figure out how to fit a five-year journey into a five-minute presentation and comprehensively talk about Better to Speak and everything I’d learned from EJCP.
However, I realized that if there was one thing that I have taken away from my experience building Better to Speak so far, it would be to highlight the inspiring community of young Black change makers who have given life to this platform beyond what I’ve been able to imagine.
Those 100 days truly came and went, but I’m leaving this chapter with EJCP feeling much more secure in myself as a young founder, more affirmed in my work, and equipped with the tools and resources to move forward.
At this point, I want to challenge myself to dream beyond Better to Speak simply existing. I want to genuinely contribute to building better media-making organizations and establishing more generative pipelines for emerging Black storytellers to thrive in all facets of life — in public as well as private spaces.
That requires being bold with my goals and ideas and brutally honest about Better to Speak’s capacity to achieve them as an organization, as well as my own as its founder. It requires me to be open to community support and collaboration, in deeper and more generative ways.
This program has empowered me to think more deeply about where and how Better to Speak is needed in the media landscape and in Black liberation work — and how we can show up consistently and with integrity in those spaces to accomplish our mission and be in service to our community.
Which leads me to our theme for 2023 — “Community Before Content!”
This theme — which will guide our work across editorial, community engagement, and strategic organizational development — draws inspiration from 1973’s Black History Month theme of “Biography Illuminates the Black Experience.” Throughout the year, we’ll explore different issues by taking a look back and grounding our storytelling in the state of those topics 50 years ago. We’ll also use our storytelling to take it back to 1973 to highlight the important experiences and stories of young Black folks that connect to ours today.
For our Strategic Goals, this theme points us towards a North Star of prioritizing flexibility in Better to Speak’s value to our peers. Meaning, we won’t be approaching content production for the sake of it, but with the goal of using storytelling as a means to further connect with and build community. Check out our annual launch blog to learn more about the steps we’ve been taking to make this happen as we kick off 2023!
Thank you to Jeremy, our guest speakers, my mentor Marcia, EJCP alumni who lent their time and experiences, and all of my fellow EJCP5 cohort members (especially learning group 2!) for a truly memorable experience. Here’s to letting our stories lead us toward a more liberated self, community and world.
How to stay connected to me and Better to Speak:
- Read and listen to the many powerful voices and stories from our community
- Make a one-time or monthly donation
And if you’d like to get more deeply involved, visit this overview page on our website to…
- Find our social media links
- Sign up for our email list
- Sign up to volunteer
- Learn more about writing for Better to Speak
