Our program

Welcome to SRCCON:CARE + group gathering

Building and maintaining psychological safety on a diverse team

Facilitated by Emma Carew Grovum, Hannah J. Wise

One of the most important gifts we can give one another is the ability to show up as our authentic selves. Let’s talk about psychological safety, how to build it on diverse teams, and more importantly: how to maintain it and work through if it breaks down.

Call in the culture builder: Let’s formalize the work of connection and care

Facilitated by Michelle Peng, Emily Goligoski

Those of us who consider ourselves cultural tentpoles within and beyond our organizations know that building culture goes beyond party planning and flashy perks—it’s the prerequisite to creating connection, building community, and driving inclusion and belonging. And as hybrid and remote configurations make distributed work ever more common, the effort in building culture has never been more important or more tricky.

At the same time, culture-building work—including participating in diversity committees, mentoring, and team programming—often means too many non-promotable tasks, a term coined by authors of ‘The No Club,’ which disproportionately falls on women and employees of color. In this session, we’ll cover how to make this invisible labor not just visible, but celebrated and rewarded.

Commitments instead of necessity: How to avoid dread on a consistent basis

Facilitated by André Natta, Diana López

As we continue to move through a period of chaotic change in journalism, it may be time to remind ourselves we have to be good to ourselves. This session allows participants to explore the difference between doing things because we think we have to versus allowing ourselves to commit to those things we know we have the capacity to tackle.

How do we establish what meets the criteria of a commitment? How do we decide what projects and career choices make the most sense? We’ll explore personal statements and how they can help us determine how to commit to ourselves and our goals on a daily basis.

For managers only: Promoting a healthier work culture

Facilitated by Mar Cabra, Kim Brice

Directors, team leads or editors play a key role in starting conversations around well-being and mental health in their newsrooms. They have more power to affect change and have a responsibility to support their staff. However, at the same time, it’s also these leaders that should prevent their teams from being exhausted, the first ones to be hyper-connected and suffering dangerous levels of stress.

In this session, The Self-Investigation wants to facilitate a discussion about the learnings and strategies of media leaders as they strive to change things up in order to build a healthier environment for their teams. We will share techniques that have been successfully tried and tested. We will also offer the inspiration and knowledge we have accumulated from the many leaders we have trained in our tailor-made courses and through the Knight Center’s MOOCs we designed and ran in three languages, reaching more than 2.500 people from 120 countries and territories.

Social break

A culture of caring: Building intergenerational relationships in the workplace

Facilitated by Vanessa Gregorchik, Abby Blachman, Jane Elizabeth

Like each generation before it, Gen-Z is bringing a new take to the role work plays in our lives—are our workplaces ready for it?

Each generation faces challenges that shape their perspectives, relationships, and ways of showing up in and outside of work: stock market crashes, economic uncertainties, global conflict. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception, and many following events like the Great Resignation, Return to Office debates, and mass layoffs have further shaped an attitude that questions the role work plays in our daily lives.

In a climate of difference, how can we create bridges between our generational divides where we can pass lessons both up and down to build a culture of caring and respect? How can we collectively shape the future that we all want to be a part of and build intergenerational relationships upon healthy foundations?

Covering community safety

Facilitated by Lewis Raven Wallace

What is “safety” and why is it such a catch phrase for politicians and police? What questions and perspectives can journalists take into our work from the work of the movements to defund and abolish police and prisons?

In this session, we will use the scholarship of Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie (among other abolitionist leaders) to break down our assumptions about what “safety” means in our day-to-day lives and in news reporting. We will explore strategies for covering “safety” that don’t depend on faulty assumptions or crude statistics such as “crime” stats reported by government entities. We will reflect collectively on what it means for journalists to re-imagine safety, and what kinds of stories and media projects can facilitate re-imagining toward a more just world.

Leading with care: Policies, programs, and managerial practices

Facilitated by Ana Mina, Jen Mizgata

How might journalism leaders invest in community care for our organizations and teams? Join Jen Mizgata and Ana (An Xiao) Mina, two consultants and coaches who’ve supported journalism leaders in a variety of organizations, in exploring this key question. We’ll offer an initial framework to help facilitate a conversation amongst participants, with the goal of collecting feedback and ideas on community care opportunities through the lenses of sustainability, mental health, DEI and holistic support.

As an outcome, we hope to share a set of resources from the conversation with the broader SRCCON community. This will outline specific opportunities for structural, community care that leaders in the field of journalism can apply to their internal work with their organizations. This workshop will be designed to support both introverted and extroverted communications styles.

Building healthier conversations with restorative justice techniques

Facilitated by Allen Arthur, Diamond Hardiman

We all want to have deep, meaningful conversations as we report our stories. Yet despite our best intentions, people often leave interviews with journalists feeling like we’ve not understood them at best or harmed them further at worst. But now, journalists can learn from restorative justice, a discipline that grounds difficult (but healthy) conversations in safety, trust, and transparency.

In a new resource from Free Press, “The Moment Is Magic,” seven RJ practitioners offer transformative, actionable tips journalists can use before, during, and after interviews. Allen Arthur and Diamond Hardiman build on their experiences working in both criminal justice and journalism spaces to adapt these tools to help journalists establish mutual trust and keep people safe during vulnerable moments. In this session, Arthur and Hardiman will be joined by some of the guide’s participants for a discussion of the principles and a Q&A.

How to heal when your workplace is the trauma

Facilitated by Ashleigh Graf, Lisa Carlin

Most journalists are now well aware of how the news and events we cover can lead to significant stress and other trauma reactions, though rarely do we discuss the impact of trauma that can occur within the bounds of the newsroom itself. What happens to workers stuck in the middle of nasty union talks? How does it feel when diversity committee members realize none of their work will be implemented? What does the brain do when a manager has no understanding of the community you’re covering and their ideas are in fact hurting that very community?

Come join a discussion to better understand how traumatic experiences in the workplace impact your brain and body while learning some strategies that can help allow for healing along the way. Breakout rooms will provide an opportunity to discuss how to notice one’s emotional experiences and provide validation to oneself and others. There will also be an opportunity to practice identifying strategies using vignettes and developing one’s own stress response plan.

Radical gardening

Facilitated by Michelle Ferrier

Learn how to use gardening to bring digital resilience and energy back into your work. #FairyGardenMama shows you the parallels between gardening and journalism work and how to strengthen your green thumb!

Exploring our Personal Ecology

Facilitated by Cristina Salgado, Nora Bryne

In this session we will explore our Personal Ecology, which is a systemic approach to managing work life and consists of four main elements:

• Managing our load
• Managing our time, input and focus
• Managing our energy
• Managing our state of being

We will share the four main elements and have an interactive discussion on the impacts of burnout. Participants will have an opportunity to reflect individually and collectively on the connection between burnout and urgency. A sense of urgency is one of the White Supremacy Culture Characteristics that we will explore. We hope participants leave the session feeling curious, reflective and connected.

Social break

Curiosity as care

Facilitated by Jennifer Brandel, Mónica Guzmán

Curiosity is a form of attention and telling someone: you matter. The ways in which we express our curiosity matters a lot: our tone, body language, agendas (or lack thereof) and desired outcomes. They all add up to helping the person on the other end understand if the questions are coming from a place of genuine care, or not.

In this session, I plan to bring together folks doing incredible work at the intersection of journalism, depolarization and mediation to share tactical approaches and get practiced in a few methods of better question-asking experiences.

This session can not only help in the acts of creating journalism, but also in any relationship - family, friends, colleagues and strangers.

Herding cats: How and why animals can be critical for self-care

Facilitated by Stefanie Murray, Kat Duncan

Humans have depended on animals for comfort and care for centuries. Of course, there’s lots of research about the benefits of having an animal companion. Animals help people with disabilities navigate society, they can help reduce blood pressure, help a person cope with depression and so much more. So during this session, we’re going to celebrate and share stories about our companion animals! Round up your cats, dogs, guinea pigs, fish and more and come ready to introduce them, tell their stories and share how they help you care for yourself.

How reducing harm in your journalism helps reduce the harm to yourself

Facilitated by Maye Primera, Kate Travis

In this session we will discuss ideas to change the pace of the news cycles that are burning audiences and journalists out. We will analyze journalism as a system, and talk about the structures, power dynamics and beliefs that are fueling news fatigue and fear within the public, and hopelessness in newsrooms.

As conversation starters, we’ll draw from our personal experiences. Maye will share her experience covering low-income Latino immigrant communities in the US, from producing news on the verge of burnout that often left Latino viewers afraid and disempowered, to the challenge of building new mediums and practices to deliver actionable information that helps them navigate the daily demands of a bicultural life. And Kate will share her experience as a digital leader at a legacy print publication and the cumulative burnout that comes with trying to change from within.

Together, session participants will pinpoint factors within our newsrooms and in the news we produce that have an outsized impact on burnout, and we’ll brainstorm ways to engage the audience and the newsroom as strategies to help us to slow down our journalism, and make it sustainable—not just for business but for the mental health of all.

Suffer in silos or thrive in a hive: Creating our own communities of care in journalism

Facilitated by Bridget Thoreson, John Hernandez

While many of us find ways to connect at events or on projects, too often we’re left on our own to solve problems facing our organizations and our industry. This workshop will explore what it takes to break out of our constraints to cross-pollinate ideas and create critical mass for change within journalism.

Informed by our experience creating a support group for journalism support professionals, we’ll guide participants on identifying your personal goals for connecting with others, establishing objectives and expectations for these conversations, and how to build on these connections over time. You’ll come away with tangible takeaways generated from our collective expertise (and possibly some new co-conspirators).

SRCCON:CARE closing + group gathering