So happy to be here. My name is Chelsea Fuller and I’m the Senior Communications Manager at Blackbird. There I’ve had the honor and the privilege of leading communication strategies for some of the movements of our time, for the movement for Black Lives, the Me Too movement and dozens of others that are doing really radical work in our communities. So I believe in starting new friendships with honesty, right? We’re friends now, so I’m going to tell you all the truth. When I was informed by my coach that I was presenting in the anger block, I was not thrilled about it. I was actually very angry and I pushed back a little bit. James Baldwin says something to the effect of being black in this society means being in a state of rage almost all of the time and he is accurate, that is correct. But add being a woman, living in a bigger body and Trump and I think folks could probably understand why I wouldn’t want any parts of anything that had to do with anger in this moment. But then the storyteller me kicked in and I remembered that fear, not fear, anger and fear merged together with feelings like sadness and grief, determination, joy and hope. And it’s the stories that live at those intersections that the mainstream media doesn’t often want us to tell because they’re powerful and they elevate our humanity. So I decided that today I wasn’t going to be angry, I was going to tell you one of those stories and hope that it radically changes the way that we think about movement communications and the people who do it. So a few weeks ago I read an article about exposure to trauma and people that answer the phone when you call 911, emergency response operators. And basically it said that those folks experience higher rates of trauma informed issues like depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and to cope and to make sure that they can continue to do their jobs. They use tactics like suppression and avoidance and denial. And for some of you, you might not see the similarities there, but for them and folks like me who respond in moments of crisis, we are often the first people that have to hold the worst stories that folks will ever tell in their lives. We have a responsibility because of that to make sure that we are relaying that information carefully and accurately and expediently so that resources and aid can be dispersed and the harm can hopefully be mitigated. I found zero articles about exposure to trauma and communications people. And I realized that that’s because the folks that are best equipped to do that research to study that are probably somewhere in this room. They’re folks like us. So I want us to think about a few things today. I want us to consider how our own experiences inform our work and that our experiences can actually inform our work only for the better if we allow ourselves to feel them. The second is that empathy, and I’m going to use my own words here, empathy actually is not something that we can guarantee in our storytelling just by using shared experiences and shared values. And the third is a question that I’m posing to you all. It’s that can communicators actually be good stewards of other folks’ stories if they’re muting and suppressing their own? So when your iPad freezes, so across social chain spaces in this moment, we’re seeing communicators from marginalized and impacted communities be trained up and placed into movement organizations. And that’s fantastic, right? We need that. That’s amazing. But we’re also in a space where we have to talk about what’s required to retain them, right? We have to give ourselves space to talk about how lived experience and trauma impacts those folks and their abilities to do their jobs. So just a quick show of hands. How many of you are members of the community that your work is in service of? Okay. A couple of you. A few of you. Not cool. So I want to be clear that I’m making a distinction today between working in a community as a member of that community and working with a community, not because one is more valuable than the other, but because they are different. When your safety and your liberation are connected to your ability to do your job, when you know that your folks that you’re in community with are also there because it’s their familiar home, it’s their physical home, it’s their political home, all of that is a heavy burden to bear. And it’s not one that a lot of our allies in this work have to carry every single day. So as we move through this presentation, I want us to consider, you know, I want us to consider all of that. And I want us to think really critically about the ways that we have engaged in movement work and the ways that we’ve engaged with people who do it. So in order to ground that a little bit, let me share a little bit of my story with you, if that’s okay. So I entered movement communications work in 2015 in the midst of what felt like a never-ending assault on black bodies. Ferguson and the uprising that happened after the death of Mike Brown. Freddie Gray’s death and the uprising that happened in Ferguson. Walter Scott and Charlotte. Alton Sterling. Tamir Rice. Eric Garner. Sandra Bland. And countless others. So in those moments of doing that work and after several years of showing up and showing up, I was exhausted. I was tired and I was very angry. I’d become a trusted professional in my space and I was someone that folks knew would come in when called, not parachuted in, but come in when called and work with integrity and support people and work at a really high level. And I was privileged to work on projects that, you know, included influential people. We were making impactful change and, you know, I should have been okay. I was filming documentaries and I was working with organizers to make tangible change in community, but I actually wasn’t okay. I was numb. And I, you know, working with somebody like that, you’d feel all right, but I wasn’t. I was not okay, right? And don’t tell them I put them in this slideshow. And at a certain point, I had to ask myself, though. I did. I had to say, as a black woman who is experiencing systemic violence in many intersecting ways in my personal life, how the hell am I showing up each time? How am I coming, protest after protest, and grieving family after grieving family? And you know, a part of me said, well, maybe this is what rigor and commitment to liberation looks like. Maybe this is what my colleagues at Southerners on New Ground mean in the mandate when they say you must be willing to be transformed in the service of the work. But that wasn’t holding up because I was watching equally committed and equally rigorous comrades leave movement work altogether because they were depleted. They were traumatized. They were angry. And they were tired. I realized that exposure to black death and suffering had become such a frequent part of my daily life, my regular life, that I didn’t have space to hold the stories and experiences of my folks and mine, so I suppressed mine. I subconsciously kind of numbed myself out, and I kept working. And I will say that I’m proud of the work that I did and the stories that I helped to tell during that period. But I wonder, what could I have done? What could I have avoided had I allowed myself to move through those and feel those moments versus just putting my head down and charging forward? So let’s fast forward a little bit to 2017. It’s October 15th, and the viral Me Too moment is happening. People around the world are post by post, virtually raising their hands and saying Me Too. And after what felt like hours of just reading all of the posts across Facebook and different social media platforms, Twitter, I took a deep breath. And I typed Me Too. And that was the first time that I had disclosed that I was a survivor of sexual violence since I had told my mom and dad some 20 years prior. And the stories that were shared that day, they spanned the emotional spectrum from anger and rage to joy and celebration. But it was the stories that were rooted in empathy, those that were of survivors virtually holding hands and sending love to one another. It was those stories that like yanked me out of that emotional numbness that I had put myself in so many years ago. And my coach asked me, Mark, he asked a really critical question. He said, what was it about those stories that differed from the ones that you had helped to tell doing racial justice work? And for me, it was because my blackness has always been visible, right? It’s a part, it’s actually at the center of who I am and all of my other identities I viewed them then as secondary. I didn’t want to separate myself from my blackness. I needed space and I needed time and I needed support in processing what was happening to black people at that time, what was happening to me and my people. And I didn’t have it, so inter, denial, suppression, avoidance, all those things. But that’s the thing about empathy. It’s powerful enough to force us to give ourselves space and grace to feel and connect with ourselves and connect with other people in ways that anger and grief and sympathy sometimes can’t. I could not have done the Me Too work the way that I did had I stayed rooted in that place of emotional numbness and not gone back to a space of understanding the power of empathy and the power of my own story. So empowerment through empathy is a core principle of the Me Too movement. I’m sure you all have seen that in some way, shape, or form. And that’s because there is nothing in my opinion more radically transformative than telling another human being, I see you, I hear you, I believe you, and I feel that because it happened to me too. My team told thousands of stories about the Me Too movement and we had millions of earned media hits all solidifying that this movement is not about angry women taking powerful men down. It’s about all survivors. It is about empowering survivors to have the space, the support, and the resources that they deserve to figure out what healing looks like for them, what justice looks like for them, and what accountability looks like for them. So in closing, I want us to think about what we can do together to shift some of these cultural norms within communications to make it so that people that come from marginalized communities to do this work don’t have to choose between their stories and the stories of their people. Because at the end of the day, our work here is movement work and movement work is legacy work. It’s about people fighting today and hope for a better tomorrow. And as long as there are people in this country and in this world who are not free, we have a responsibility to uplift the needs and the stories of those folks, even if those people are the storytellers themselves. Thank you so much.