From the Publisher: The Annual Report 2023
Written by Kési Felton
In June of 2023, we scaled back most of our operations to focus on sustainability, development, and growth. With that, I want to start off by saying thank you to our team and community of writers, partners, donors, and friends who have stuck with us and offered their patience and feedback during this time.
To be frank – Better to Speak is at an impasse right now, we’re thinking more fundamentally about our place in the world and the industries we sit at the intersection of – media and social advocacy.
While this annual report will speak to more tangible updates about where we are – namely in the steps we took in 2023 and are currently taking to explore our potential for scale and sustainability – I keep coming back to a more existential re-evaluation point for Better to Speak: Who are we? What exactly do we do and offer? Who is our base? How do we define impact? Can we actually achieve sustainability in our work individually and as an organization? If so, how might we be able to pivot and/or restructure to better support the humans who are also sitting with these questions?
During this time of reflection, I watched as the news and entertainment media industries faced layoffs and labor strikes, distrust of media at large, and the ongoing issue of inequitable workplaces and ineffective business practices. I continue to witness the genocide of Sudanese, Congolese, and Palestinian people. Specifically, I’m sitting with the pointed attacks on Palestinian storytellers and those abroad who’ve worked to denounce settler colonialism and apartheid, its profiteers and sympathizers, and western media’s manufacturing of consent. As I’m writing this, I’m following updates on Palestinian Solidarity protests and encampments; seeing a young Black student brutalized by police on the campus of Emory University here in Atlanta (the link between the Palestinian Liberation and Stop Cop City movements is unavoidable).
Admittedly, I’ve struggled deeply over the past six months with how to respond to these ongoing and amassing global crises as a media publisher and, really, as a human being. However, I do know that the role of the writer is to use words and the pages they fill to dream and explore new possibilities for personal and collective self-determination and transformation. The role of the journalist is to inform the public and resist perpetuating white supremacist and colonialist language. The role of the human being – to not ignore and be silent about the unrelenting dehumanization around us.
“In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear – fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation…For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson – that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.
We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.
…We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.”
– Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action (1977)
Better to Speak has strived to explore the breadth of our capacity to use storytelling as a tool for social change. My personal commitment to that has not waivered, but as an emerging community media organization, last year represented a plateau for us – nonetheless, we are proud of what we’ve accomplished so far on this journey #Since2017 and the progress made in 2023. Thank you again to our community of partners and supporters, we hope you’ll stick with us for the journey ahead in 2024.
In Solidarity,
Kési Felton
Founder + Publisher
Our 2023 Annual Report is live! Explore the full report here.
