The limits of capacity
How growing as a leader required me to think beyond capacity
When I applied to be a 2022 John S. Knight Community Impact Fellow at Stanford, Cleveland Documenters wasn’t even two years old. We were not even really a stand alone organization, being housed as we were in Neighborhood Connections, Cleveland’s community building organization. The team was small. We joked that we were essentially all working “in the same sweater.” Everybody had a hand in nearly everything. As we learned, experimented, and developed our practices, we were incredibly conscious of staying within our capacity. This was a small and focused project (though, we intentionally never called it a “project”). We train and pay residents to document local government meetings, and make their work available to the public. We grew carefully, ensuring that no matter what, Documenters would always be supported in their work. I honestly thought that if we just maintained this level of work, maybe in a few years we’d secure funding to continue, and perhaps slowly grow our team.
With that in mind, my goal was to use the JSK Community Impact Fellowship to reflect on and codify what we’d learned in our short time, and use that to innovate in ways that would work within the limits of our capacity.
However, as the fellowship began, Cleveland Documenters also began in-depth discussions with the Cleveland Foundation and the American Journalism Project about the Ohio Local News Initiative (OLNI), a new nonprofit newsroom they wanted to fund in Cleveland. Those discussions effectively blew up my fellowship plans. Over the next several weeks, then months, the conversation evolved from talk of a potential partnership with this new newsroom to talk of building this newsroom around Cleveland Documenters and our work.
While I was excited by the potential to supercharge the work we’ve been doing, I was also overwhelmed and unmoored by it.
We weren’t just talking about starting a new newsroom. We were talking about creating a new model for collaborative, community-based journalism. All too often civic information is a residual of reporting the news. Our newsroom sees news as a tool to help residents access and understand critical civic information. Beyond just providing access to civic information, our newsroom plans to provide an easy on ramp to civic participation by building an inclusive community based around the exchange of civic information and knowledge. As we work to codify our “theory of practice” for ourselves, we’d need to understand it well enough to explain it to our audience and to our now much larger team. At the same time, I don’t have enough hands to count the number of newsrooms in greater Cleveland that have folded while attempting even small pieces of what we hoped for. There are dragons hidden in every decision. And in terms of the responsibility we feel to Documenters and Cleveland residents, the stakes are high.
Over the course of our evolving conversations, I went from thinking of myself as a player on a team “working in the same sweater” to realizing I needed to be a leader of this new newsroom. The realization itself was disorienting. Professionally speaking, I am only a handful of years into feeling like people are actually paying attention when I speak. I’m sure some of that comes from being a Black male in white dominated workspaces. But also, while I have worked in mission driven community media and journalism for nearly 30 years, I spent much of that time feeling in service to the mission, but adjacent to the journalism. Wrapping my brain around the shift from service to the mission to servant leadership was unexpected and slow.
What allowed me to reorient myself were the regular touch points of the JSK Community Impact Fellowship.
In a way, the entire JSK Fellowship was a nine month education in what I would need to take on a leadership role at OLNI. And though it took me most of the fellowship to see it that way, the education throughout was invaluable.
The professional guidance and tools from instructors at Stanford’s d.school and Graduate School of Business were both grounding and reassuring. I was often hopping off of our weekly JSK Zoom meetings to share a rubric or other tidbit I’d learned with the Cleveland Documenters team. Those lessons absolutely informed the newsroom and workplace environment we are creating. (For example, leadership coach Dikla Carmel-Hurwitz’s early session on leadership styles — and the idea that a leadership style isn’t a something you have, but a role you play when appropriate — helped us clarify what was working on our team right now, and how we might intentionally work that way in the future).
I’d never had a mentor before JSK managing director Alberto Mendoza. His insight and perspective on nonprofit management and funders, while I was in the whirlwind of these OLNI discussions, could not have been more on time.
Most re-orienting of all was being part of this JSK cohort (my fellow fellows). I felt seen and understood by them, and saw myself in what they saw in me. That may seem like a small thing. But it’s something I am not accustomed to. Every time it happened was a lifeline.
Being connected to this community — to these resources, these people — allowed me to orient myself and my goals to the work ahead.
The fellowship’s investment in me, and the directors’ insistence that we think beyond our current roles and organizations also helped me cement my own professional mission: to develop civic and social infrastructure in Cleveland in order to build resident capacity for self-directed problem solving and action. At Cleveland Documenters and OLNI, I am right where I need to be to do that work.
Perhaps more than anything, this fellowship has taught me that while there are dragons in every decision, avoiding or defeating them often requires a shift in how I see myself and my work. As important as it is to work within my capacity, it is as important to hold space in myself for growth in order to allow room for that shift to happen, when circumstances call for it.
That said, I am not sure if any of this would have been the case had our JSK Fellowship been in-person at Stanford University, as it has been traditionally. I would never have been able to relocate my family, or be away from them for so long. The Cleveland Documenters/OLNI conversations would have gone on without me. And while I don’t think my day-to-day involvement was required, I do think it was important.
Perspective is what benefited me during my fellowship, more than distance could have.
I know that the 2023 JSK Journalism Fellows will be back on campus at Stanford this year, and I don’t have any doubts about how meaningful that experience will be for them. But, I sincerely hope that in the future Stanford and the JSK Journalism Fellowships find a way to allow fellows like me to remain close to their work and communities, to gain new perspective, and hold space for growth in themselves for the work to come.
