Abundance over lack!

Thanksgiving is my least favorite holiday, I'll admit it. As the primary cook in a ravenous family with steadily increasing grocery bills, focusing on more food and cooking does not feel like a holiday.

I'm into gratitude and abundance, but just can't equate them with turkey.

I have been thinking about abundance a lot in the context of our work, and want to share those thoughts with you. For this work on news functions I've needed to delve back into my old notes, when I was first trying to articulate that framework. It was then I first heard of an “abundance mindset.”

It was the winter of 2020, so those memories are pretty hazy. I was overworked and exhausted. There was so much work and, on top of it, ceaseless worry. Zoom school times three was very hard, times three. Our news project—not yet a fully fledged newsroom—was broke again.

Candice Fortman and I had a decision to make. Candice is my work and thought partner and a true gift in my life. We had to decide if we should shut down the project or try to grow into a fully functional newsroom. During the pandemic our work had matured. The demand for more and better information grew more acute as people couldn't access their in-person networks easily, and we stepped up. We went from sending a few thousand text messages each week to sending 10,000 each weekday. Our accountability reporting on everything from unemployment to prison conditions was faster, and better. And somehow, our small team of reporters was still hungry to broaden our work beyond these two core functions.

But increased production and more visibility gave us a sense of the responsibility it would be to operate at a bigger scale—the money we would have to raise, the energy and resources more people would deserve, the systems we would have to think up or agree to stick with. This was a different endeavor than what we'd set out to do, and our energy reserves were ransacked. Candice and I were each searching for a way to anchor ourselves and then to make a good decision about what came next.

Of course, I went nerdy. I obsessed over finding a framework that could guide more expansive work by a newsroom without deprioritizing the most acute needs or addressing the most acute harm. I came up with the essential functions we're now reworking.

Candice was trying something different. I was tracking both efforts in my notebooks. I still have them, and they are more chaotic than usual. The desperation of my scrawled, “What is essential about NEWS!?!” is totally unanswered. It just transforms into a “to-do” list of FOIA's and “mom-time.” A few pages away, also unanswered, I wrote Candice's question, “Scarcity v. abundance. How do these co-exist?”

Candice was willing herself to cultivate an abundance mindset. Willing. Herself. She had a whiteboard instead of a notebook where her words shouted, “Abundance over lack!” from behind her left shoulder. Sometimes I could see them on Zoom, backwards.

I was trying to get on board, but it felt unnatural. Woo-woo in a way that I am not. But I trust Candice. She's often pushed me toward things I didn't know I needed. It was unnatural for her, too. As she explained it to me then and since (listen here from 30:34 to 35:30 for a crash course), she knew we couldn't meet bigger challenges unless we accepted that we were equipped to meet them whether material resources remained tight or increased.

This change in thinking sounds simple. It is not. The abundance mindset is, instead, a more gracious and deliberative version of “no excuses.”

Coming from a place of lack is starting from a place of fear, where both Candice and I were stuck. That mindset creates thought spirals like, “We don't have enough money to keep going. Nobody takes us seriously. They won't give us money because they don't take us seriously, so there's no way out of this. We will let everyone down.”

An abundance mindset doesn't change circumstances. You can't “Manifest It Motherfucker!” your way to actual cash. The mindset can, with discipline, change the thought spirals to be more productive, though. Something like, “We know what we're doing. Our ideas and the people we work with are solid. We'll see what we can do about the money. We'll figure it out and do what we can.”

Fear is a reaction; an abundance mindset is a disciplined slow walk through possibility. During that winter of 2020, if Candice could do it, I could, too.

COVID had already killed some of her friends. She lived by herself and was stuck alone in a house full of memories. Because she is a Black woman and was running a news organization serving a predominantly Black city, we were appearing on the radar of funders more interested in equity after George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis. Candice was so conflicted about benefiting from that harm in any way. It was upsetting and depressing. She knew a larger commitment to real racial reckoning was unlikely, another generator of dark thoughts. And in response, to her unending credit, she looked for a framework to be forward-thinking, more generative, and more generous. “Abundance over lack!” Slowly but surely.

I found it hard to let go of fear of failure as a reliable motivator. It was a crutch that has taken years to put down. Years to really believe in the abundance mindset. I'm there now. I think that the collective “we” is full of possibility and resources.

I know many of you aren't with Candice and me yet. I've lost count of recent responses to my work that include the words “overly optimistic” or its near echos. It's fine.

I know how hard it is to move away from fear and lack.

This time of year is often hard. Trying to celebrate and be grateful even if we feel or see struggle, pain, cruelty, and greed can feel overwhelming.

I hope that you can tap into some abundance, and believe in your resources. I hope it helps you meet your needs and the needs of others.

Until next week.

What I'm reading

Community News Roles by the Journalism + Design Lab is a new framework for anyone can use to organize information roles and flows within a community. The examples are plentiful, the design beautiful and the ethos democratic and distributed. I plan to metabolize it faster than my Thanksgiving meal.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In law school, I was demoralized to learn this declaration has no teeth. That led me to ignore it for decades. I returned to it while looking at frameworks for the public interest. The declaration was drafted after World War II when the United Nations formed. An international commitment to the rights of people as individuals, not members of nations, feels both ambitious and antiquated.

Bad Mexicans, by Kelly Lytle Hernández. I made it almost all the way through this book more than a year ago, and finally finishing now. It is the story of the Mexican Revolution, told primarily through the role of the magonistas, a rebel movement led by Ricardo Flores Magón. It is also the story of the roll of Regeneracíon, a radical newspaper published by Magón on both sides of the U.S. Mexico border in both Spanish and English.