We’re making things official in 2023 [Annual Launch Blog]
We had an amazing year in 2022, from experiences like attending the GAIN Power Expo in D.C., ONA22 in Los Angeles, and being accepted into the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program at CUNY. I’m super thankful for the roles all of you played in 2022, and I’m excited to see how we grow in 2023. Here’s some of what we accomplished in 2022:
Launched Stories and grew our Contributing Writer Network to over 50 writers
Reframed The Podcast production process
Launch of State of the Young Black Advocate narrative power and outreach campaign
Piloted internal recruitment with The Dream Team
Raised 24 percent of our fundraising goal with the #Since2017 campaign
and more! To see our other accomplishments and milestones, check out our 2022 annual report.
We’ve been thinking about where and how we’re needed in media and in Black liberation work - and how we can show up consistently and with integrity in those spaces to accomplish our mission and be in service to Beloved Community. That said…we think it’s time to make things official in 2023.
What will that look like specifically? As a reminder, here are the strategic priorities that guide our work each year:
Content – Expanding our editorial content offerings.
Community – Facilitating collaboration and co-creation of our offerings.
Capacity – Building internal capacity to promote sustainability.
CONTENT
With the support of a grant from Press On’s Southern Movement Media fund at the end of 2021, we launched our editorial content offerings publish over 20 articles from contributing writers and produce season three of Better to Speak: The Podcast – which was nominated for Best Black News/Informative Podcast at the Black Podcasting Awards!
Stories
We plan to continue optimizing our editorial process to improve the contributing writer experience – including the launch of this new web page that has all the info you need to pitch and submit work to our platform.
Becoming a home for Black youth and young adult media
We also plan to continue to refine our editorial voice to make Better to Speak a go-to source for storytelling by and for Black youth and young adults. This means uplifting the voices and stories of Black youth and young adults across multimedia content including written articles, audio, and digital (social media, SMS and email).
EDUCATION, SERVICES + PARTNERSHIPS
2023 Service Offerings
Better to Speak’s service offerings aim to support young Black community leaders (18-30) and supporting organizations to feel confident about their storytelling and content-creation capacity. We also hope to inspire and empower our partners to understand the value of effective communications in advocacy work and community-building and develop an effective communications program that amplifies – rather than burdens – their on-the-ground efforts.
ANNOUNCING: ‘What’s Your Story? Content Strategy’ online course
Soon to be offered as an online course, the What’s Your Story? Content Strategy Program will offer participants the space to gain clarity on your unique story, talents, and strengths as it pertains to your role in community advocacy and Black liberation work, and learn how to apply them sustainably to impactful content marketing for social advocacy.
This course will give you the dedicated space and resources to outline key aspects of a content strategy. Including – your brand story, key audiences, core issues, messaging, and tools for content resourcing, planning, production, distribution, and measurement.
PROGRAMS
Our programs aim to build community and long-term partnerships, relationships, and coalitions. The State of the Young Black Advocate campaign houses this work, and aims to bring together all of these programs and goals with community outreach, and take us toward our long-term goals of narrative power-building.
State of the Young Black Advocate campaign
We will initiate and complete the State of the Young Black Advocate survey of Black youth and young adults ages 18-30. In 2022, we tested and explored different ways to reach and engage our community and broader network of peers, partners, and supporters – this year we plan to continue those efforts and launch the official SOTYBA survey to learn more about our target audience and inform our work with the programming and stories that our peers want to see.
ANNOUNCING: Jamii Collaborative Membership Program
We plan to launch a beta membership program to work towards officially establishing Better to Speak’s cooperative governance by July. Beta members will help to inform and co-create the membership program – including any exclusive content, events, resources, and other types of programming.
CAPACITY
And of course, we can’t accomplish these goals without tapping into the power of our network and community this year – will you join us?
By having the capacity to consistently publish content – we plan to have more room for community-building through our own original events and other creative partnerships with other brands and organizations. To support this goal, we’ve opened recruitment for volunteers to support our work as we plan to grow our organization. Sign up here!
You can also support by donating one-time or monthly – now with our new fundraising platform Givebutter!
