How “futures thinking” is shaping my journey as a publisher, storyteller, and memory worker
A significant lesson learned during the first half of my JSK Fellowship
When I first started the John S. Knight Community Impact Fellowship at Stanford University I expected much of what I have experienced: access to some of the brightest minds in the world, focused attention on my community information project to make solutions-driven data journalism more accessible to the Black Press, and engaging regularly with an impressive cohort of colleague grappling with how to address critical information needs in their own communities. These were expectations that were not only met, but exponentially exceeded.
As a way to measure the success of my fellowship journey, I wrote a letter to myself sharing my expectations for both personal and professional growth to be viewed at the end of the 10-month period. As I wrote the letter, it reminded me of another letter written during a significant milestone in my life that wasn’t written to me, but instead written about me to my mother. It was written by Lydia Minter Johnson, her paternal grandmother and mailed from Pittsburgh not long after my birth in the late sixties. In the letter, Grandma Lydia expressed her excitement that her favorite grandchild (and only granddaughter) had just birthed a second child (a second great granddaughter). This is significant because my great grandmother had three sons and no daughters and my mother, her granddaughter, was really the first girl in the family in a generation.
Grandma Lydia expressed two wishes in that letter. She asked my mother to not limit what the girls can be: my older sister Lynn, she said, could be a teacher and Paulette, a seamstress.Yes, a seamstress! As a young woman, when I found the letter and read it, I couldn’t understand that aspiration. I guess I understood that as a woman born one generation out of slavery, that’s all she could imagine we could be, not a doctor, not a lawyer, not a scientist. Later in life I had a revelation, in her world, that was dreaming big for us. As a woman who supported her boys by working as a day maid and cosmetologist, by saying she thought I could be a seamstress, she was saying she wanted me to be an independent woman, a woman who could make her own money, who was self-sufficient, creative, skilled, and a respected entrepreneur.
Although, like most Black families, education is one of the most valuable goals to attain, I doubt she could have envisioned me, her great granddaughter, with a bachelor’s, master’s, and definitely not a doctorate degree.
Her wish for me so many years ago was on my mind at the beginning of the JSK fellowship because I often think of the work we do as journalists, especially journalists in the Black Press, as memory workers. Like the griots of our West African heritage we have been entrusted with the stewardship of our communities’ stories…of our important information, and I believe, because of that, we have a certain duty of care.
During the first half of my fellowship, I have been exposed to new ideas and frameworks for understanding this work and my project. Through design thinking, for instance, I have learned how to better listen to the community, to center their information needs, to lead with empathy, then to define, ideate, prototype and test. The exposure to design thinking led me to take a course on “how to think like a futurist”. That led me to read the book Future Good by Trista Harris, where she offers foresight tools to develop an exponential mindset, including “looking backward to appreciate exponential growth” and “making time for the future in your present” by scheduling time and mental energy to “think about what is possible.”
All this “futures thinking” led me back to the past, to the concept of Sankofa that has been a type of critical methodology I have subscribed to since graduate school. Sankofa is the Adinkra symbol represented by a bird with its head turned backwards while its feet face forward carrying a precious egg in its mouth. It is taken from the Twi language of Ghana, and translates to “Go back and get it” (san — to return; ko — to go; fa — to fetch, to seek and take). Sankofa is often associated with the proverb, “Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi,” which translates as: “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.” The Sankofa bird appears frequently in traditional Akan art, and has also been adopted as an important symbol in the context of the African Diaspora to represent the need to reflect on the past to build a successful future.
This takes me back to my great expectations for my fellowship year. Yes, I have already met some of the brightest folks on campus who are experts in data journalism, information technology, and data storage and visualization. I have been exposed to technologists who are building leading edge solutions in blockchain and information science, and I have learned so much from our JSK directors, visiting lecturers, and my amazingly smart, committed and thoughtful colleagues. But I’ve also been reminded to not forget the foundation of what we do. We tell stories.
When I was a young girl living in the historically Black community of San Bernardino’s Westside in Southern California, Grandma Lydia came to live with us. I will never forget her eccentric habits, like the way she poured her hot tea into a saucer and blew on it until it was cool enough to sip, or the way she knotted her stockings instead of using a garter to hold them up, or the way she would greet us in the morning with a sing-songy rhythm “What’s your story…morning glory?”
As memory workers we tell stories about our families and neighbors…of injustice and triumph…of pain and progress…and of the solutions to the challenges our communities face. So while my fellowship project may focus on solutions-driven data journalism, I have to always remember that we may try to convince people with data, and empower people with information, but we will truly inspire people with stories.
