The World Beyond the Daily Grind

Sara M. Lomax
JSK Class of 2022
Published in
5 min readMar 18, 2022

How I found the head space to better serve my community

When you are deep in the trenches it’s hard to see the light. Head down, grinding it out. Day after day. That’s been my existence for most of my career working to sustain, grow and expand independent Black media organizations. First it was the magazine I co-founded with my dear friend Valerie Boyd, HealthQuest: The Publication of Black Wellness, and now WURD Radio, one of the few Black-owned talk radio stations remaining in the nation. The headwinds have always been strong and relentless — legacy platforms, limited financial resources, and a community that has been systemically and chronically underserved.

To survive, it requires dogged focus and determination. This can morph into a suffocating kind of tunnel vision. Having a space to exhale and explore in the midst of the grind is a rare opportunity. It is an unexpected gift received through the JSK Community Impact Fellowship at Stanford University.

When we started last September, I was overwhelmed. Honestly, it felt like one more thing on my to-do list, which was already brimming with endless Zooms. How could I pack another project into my life when I was already running WURD and co-leading a new startup, URL Media?

What I initially saw as an obligatory two-hour weekly meeting, turns out to be the respite I desperately needed; the light that penetrates and illuminates possibility. It is a place where I am surrounded by a team dedicated to expanding our skills, prioritizing self-care and exposing us to new ways of thinking and being. While I had heard terms like “design thinking” and “growth mindset,” I didn’t really know what they meant and how they could be applied to my work. Deep listening is one of the guiding principles in design thinking. It is a powerful reminder that patience, humility and kindness — which comes when you actually listen — can yield incredible insights. Embracing an audience-first framework similarly shifts the power from the media makers to the people you are serving.

It was during this fellowship I realized that while we didn’t have a technical name for it, engaged listening has always been at the core of WURD’s two-way talk radio format. We are talking — and listening — to the people every day. This daily conversation gives voice to the pain and possibility palpable in our community. This process of engaged listening has birthed several important WURD initiatives. In 2018, we launched ecoWURD.com, a multi-platform project that brings an African American lens to environmental justice and climate change. Over the past four years we have hosted Earth Day events, an annual ecoWURD Environmental Justice Summit and weekly conversations with some of the leading Black environmental activists in the nation. Most recently we launched a weekly show called ecoWURD Magazine to continue to broaden our coverage of how race, income, health and the environment intersect and impact the Black community.

Deep listening also led to the creation of WURD’s Lively-HOOD initiative. Conceived in 2019 when I was participating in the Media Transformation Challenge at Harvard University, Lively-HOOD leverages all of WURD’s platforms — radio, digital, social, events, video — to connect Black Philadelphians to jobs, small business resources, entrepreneurship opportunities and re-skilling information. With the high poverty and unemployment rates in Philadelphia’s Black community, we see this as an opportunity to address the persistent wealth gap that has disempowered our community for centuries.

Neither of these programs — ecoWURD and Lively-HOOD — would have been possible without leaning into the practice of engaged listening. Equally critical was having the head space to step away from the grind to look up and around. The Media Transformation Challenge at Harvard was my first taste of the power of getting “off of the dance floor and onto the balcony.” This program was focused on organizational transformation using a performance-driven change framework. We had to identify a gap in our business and then develop a strategy to create, implement and operationalize it within our workplace — hence the birth of Lively-HOOD.

The JSK Community Impact Fellowship at Stanford is structured differently. Instead of focusing on how we transform our business, they are focused on how we transform ourselves. They are investing in us as individual leaders, as people, as human beings. The assumption is if we can cultivate greater awareness and clearer thinking, we will become stronger leaders who can elevate our organizations in tangible and sustainable ways.

Alongside my nine amazing fellow Fellows, I am on a journey of self-discovery through interactive workshops, readings, weekly reflections using the online whiteboard tool “Mural” and an amazing roster of guest lecturers from Stanford. Amidst this broader framework, we are zeroing in on specific projects to further and better serve our communities. For me this is a continuation of listening intently to the WURD audience as we seek to use our media platforms to provide tangible avenues for empowerment.

As we move into the 2022 midterm frenzy, the exhaustion brought on by two years of the pandemic, the persistence of police brutality, rising community violence, an inexplicable war and ongoing anti-Black racism, has left many in our audience on edge. They have told us — and we are listening — that they are craving more content that inspires and uplifts. Being more intentional about spotlighting our community’s cultural brilliance, business successes and historic resilience will begin to reframe a narrative that too often focuses exclusively on what’s wrong.

Perhaps it is only through this program that I have become more attuned to this need to amplify abundance. At JSK, compassion and kindness are central to the curriculum, coaching, speakers and the selection of the cohort. We are asked to bring our whole selves to this work — mind, body, heart and soul. This requires that we hold each other gently; that we put as much attention on supporting our process as attacking the problems. With only three months left in the program, I plan to bring the JSK toolkit that prioritizes effective communication, self care and deep listening to my work in hopes that the power of positivity and possibility will light the pathway forward.

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Sara M. Lomax
JSK Class of 2022

Sara M. Lomax is President & CEO of WURD Radio, co-founder and President of URL Media and is a current JSK Fellow at Stanford.