I remember the rejection letter that hit me hardest. It was the fall of 2020, and after a series of small grants, El Tímpano, the civic media organization I had founded three years prior, finally had enough money in the bank for me to take the leap and step down from my day job. But raising the money to support myself, no less hire more staff before I burned out trying to do it all, felt like an insurmountable task. This funding would have helped us add critical reporting capacity at the height of the pandemic.
I’d faced plenty of grant rejections. But something about this one got to me. El Tímpano was designed with and for Latino immigrants, who were experiencing the most devastating impacts of the public health and economic crisis, due in no small part to the lack of trusted and accessible sources of information. When I asked for feedback, the funder told me they love what we do, but wanted to wait until we had more money in the bank. It was a mind-boggling catch-22 that I was learning was common for nonprofits founded without independent wealth. Meanwhile, several organizations they funded had reached out to me wanting to learn from our strategies. I lost a few weeks of sleep after that.
My five years as a solo entrepreneur weren’t all about struggle. They were also filled with the delight of experimentation, the joy of building a support team (albeit part-time, moral, or volunteer), and the satisfaction of seeing the impact of equitable journalism at a moment when it was so clearly in need.
But amidst all this, I developed a cycle of burnout. I proved to be persistent and resourceful, and lasted long enough for more and more funders to come onboard. But the long road to get there changed me: competing for grants, sacrificing time with my family, having a front row seat to the inequities of philanthropy — it left me with resentment, cynicism, and a proud protectiveness of my ideas, for fear that if I shared them, better resourced organizations would run with them while funding that would allow us to do so was often out of reach.
In what felt like the blink of an eye, El Tímpano’s fortunes changed. I woke up a year ago and had a team of 12 talented, creative, and committed colleagues. My organization had grown immensely. But I was still harboring bitterness. I was still hustling as if I was a team of one.
In the first week of my John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford, I heard this nugget of wisdom:
“What got you here won’t get you there.”
It clicked: many of the qualities that got me through the survival period as a founder no longer served me. Stubborn persistence and long hours got me here. To get there called for something else. To lead a team requires compassion, humility, and the grace and courage to have difficult conversations. To foster a culture of care, I needed to take better care of myself. To get there I needed to look inward to understand what I wanted my role to be in a growing organization.
At Stanford, I’ve learned new skills and adapted new practices that will serve me in this next stage.
Meditation & mindfulness
I’d tried meditation in the past, but it didn’t stick. A class from Sarah Meyer Tapia, PhD., who leads wellness academic programming at Stanford, was the first time I invested in not just trying meditation but learning the concepts and science behind it and its relation to mindfulness, as well as a variety of meditation techniques. Of course, this imbued my own meditation with the meaning that had been lacking, and allowed me to develop a practice that works for me. Experience taught me that meditation, similar to regular morning exercise, helps me show up as my best self for me, my family, community, and colleagues.
Leadership & management
For those of us who spent most of our careers as journalists and are now entrepreneurs or executives, it is management skills that will make the difference for our organizations. Classes and workshops on giving and receiving feedback and having difficult conversations have been the most valuable for me. I’ve learned that shying away from addressing performance issues or having difficult conversations is never helpful. But also, difficult conversations don’t have to be as adversarial or difficult as we may fear. Conducted with compassion, skill, and mindfulness, they can lead to a stronger relationship and shared understanding. Way easier said than done, but a business school course that role plays such conversations has been one of the highlights of my experience.
Learning from the frontier of technology
2023 was the year that AI evolved in the mainstream from an abstract concept to a game-changing technology with clear and present implications for journalists and news consumers. Having the opportunity to think about these implications in the heart of Silicon Valley has not only equipped me to better envision my organization’s role in an AI-saturated future, and how we can leverage the potential of AI in our work; it has also served as an exciting reminder that in a constantly changing information ecosystem, innovation is a necessity. I’m returning to my newsroom committed to spending more time learning from peers outside the news industry, to understand possibilities of growth, evolution, and inspiration.
This is the year I began to shift my mindset from that of a founder to that of a leader. I know it will take time to shed my old habits and practice my new skills, but the JSK Fellowship helped open the page to a new chapter of my entrepreneurship journey.
Madeleine Bair is the Founding Director of El Tímpano.
