Welcome to the March Need to Know Special Edition, where we’re sharing the latest collection of work by jesikah maria ross on storytelling with care. Her current Care Collaboratory series features conversations and ideas focusing on convening people in ways that generate a deeper sense of connection, belonging and possibility.
In this edition you’ll learn:
- About the Care Collaboratory
- Why convening with care is important for news leaders
- 4 ways to prepare for a care-centered conversations
After a decade of coaching public media newsrooms on how to put community listening at the center of their storytelling — and seeing firsthand the profound civic dislocation sweeping across the country in recent years — I started the Care Collaboratory.
Supported by News Futures, it’s made up of journalists, artists, designers, facilitators, organizers, scholars and evaluators who want to bring more care into their civic storytelling work. (If this project sounds familiar, API covered it in 2024.) I wondered how storytellers and civic organizers could intervene to reverse the devastating fraying of the social fabric — and knew that intervention had to be done with care.
Convening with care is essential to the work we do as journalists. We have an opportunity to facilitate civic discourse within our communities in a way that’s mutually beneficial: it can help people connect over common ground, and it can help journalists build trust with and better serve the communities they cover. But if we don’t do this work thoughtfully — if we show up with a rigid agenda and our own goals — it can cause more harm than good. It can feel extractive, and it can perpetuate stereotypes that further damage the trust between the media and the community.
Throughout 2024, the Care Collab hosted five conversation sessions featuring people practicing care-centered event design, including API’s Sam Ragland. This month, I’ll share highlights from these conversations, as well as tools and frameworks to implement these approaches in your news organization.
We’ll kick off this series with lessons stemming from a conversation between Sam and Erik Fermín, the former senior leadership consultant at the National Equity Project, on the practices that enable gatherings to be spaces of transformation, not transaction.
In fields like journalism, where urgency and control often rule, this conversation offered the possibility that the most powerful intervention is the way we show up and the quality of our presence — not just what we do.
To learn more about the Care Collaboratory or read more from Sam and Erik’s discussion, head to News Futures.
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Convening with care
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