EPISODE 14: Lessons in nonprofit storytelling from a nonprofit news outlet, with Lucas Grindley

(Episode transcribed electronically)

Matt Pearl: Hello, friends. This is Dot Org, Episode 14, the podcast all about how nonprofits tell their stories. I'm just really excited today. I have had some great conversations the last few days with people doing terrific things in the nonprofit space. It is invigorating. It is inspiring. I hope that I convey that energy today.

By the way, my name is Matt Pearl. I was a broadcast journalist, a TV news reporter for 20 years. Now I run Pearl Impact Media, where I craft videos for nonprofits that get used and remembered. In addition to that, I also host this podcast where we help you build your nonprofit's storytelling strategy.

Let me take you back almost five years. I just accepted a job with Scripps Media to be a national correspondent. Now, Scripps owns more than 60 local TV news stations across the country, and that meant I would be traveling the country, putting together stories that would air on all of these stations.

The subject matter would be the issues that the news simply was not covering enough, as well as the people, the groups, and communities bringing solutions. So my first task was to become as well read on as many issues as I could facing our towns and cities. And that's when I discovered Next City, a nonprofit news outlet telling these very stories in print form.

Over the next few years, the perspective and insights that I gathered from groups like Next City and nonprofit news outlets like Next City guided my own storytelling in so many ways. I remain a regular listener to their podcast and I am happy to have their executive director today on mine. He is here to talk about storytelling from a nonprofit news model and storytelling tips that any nonprofit can use. Lucas Grindley, welcome to Dot Org.

Lucas Grindley: So glad to be here. Thanks, Matt.

Matt: Question number one, Lucas, always the toughest, but you're a podcast pro, so you'll probably nail it. Tell us about Next City in 30 seconds or less.

Lucas: 30 seconds or less. Okay. Well, I think it's cool to talk about it from the perspective of the people who founded it 22 years ago, who were college students. They weren't journalists. They were working in urban planning or they wanted to one day. And they saw cities being talked about only in terms of their problems. And they knew that that wasn't right. They knew that there were people working on solutions who were being overlooked. And they thought, well, one way to solve this problem is to start a magazine. And so they started something that was called back then, The Next American City. The New York Times covered it when we launched and it was called A Subtle Plan to Change the World, because it is, which is just talk about the things that are working and help spread them from one city to the next city, which is what we do with journalism.

Matt: That's great. And I'm going to give you more than 30 seconds because I think that when we talk about what you do, and I'm glad you talked about the founding, because that really has been fascinating to me as I've gotten to know your organization and listened to interviews with you and read on your website, just the history of Next City. Storytelling is the catalyst for so much of how you build your community and deliver results. And it's interesting to me that as this launch was occurring 20 years ago, the founders landed on storytelling as this way to bring solutions. What was it about storytelling, about having this magazine concept that made it feel like the ideal vehicle to do the things they were trying to do? And today, to this day, remains the way that you choose to lead the way in the work that you do.

Lucas: They've gone on to coin a term for what we do, which is solutions journalism. And 22 years ago, that wasn't a term that existed, but the goal of solutions journalism is to empower people, to inform them and equip them with information about what's working. And in our case, we're reaching a group of people who are literally working in these fields. So they come from economic development, or they might come from even media or the arts, or they work in transportation, and they are making the goal of their work to achieve greater racial equity. So they need ways of keeping in touch with each other about what is actually working to build more affordable housing, or what is actually working to reduce homelessness, or what are ways that we can help moms living in historically disinvested communities to better care for their kids by equipping them with guaranteed income.
And then, can I copy that guaranteed income program? Or is there something I can learn from it?

So we're helping people keep in touch about what's working and then inspiring them along the way. Because oftentimes it's not like, "Oh, I read this one story about a great affordable housing development and I just went out and started one right then." It takes years, maybe over a decade to do an affordable housing program and you need encouragement that entire time because the people that we're serving are often told actually that thing you're doing is going to be impossible. And there's a huge system that you're up against and you should just try to work within it. And so you need inspiration that entire time. You need to know that you're not alone in the work that you're doing that entire time. And I feel like Next City is doing that by just making sure that the people who feel overlooked in that or part of communities that have been ignored by the media feel like they're part of a larger movement that they're not alone.

Matt: And I think I'm right on this, but let me know if this is indeed the case. But my understanding is that many of your readers and a large majority of your readers and the folks who really invest and engage with what you do, they work for cities. They are within City Hall or they are working for particular agencies within a city. And a lot of what you're able to provide is that proof of performance from other places that are doing the work that they really desire to do, but might be having trouble building that support for.

Lucas: They do work in cities, yes. We over-index quote unquote on people who work in cities as part of our audience and we also over-index for people who work in nonprofits compared to the percentage of people who work in the country in nonprofits, a higher percentage who read us come from nonprofits. And I would say, I used to work in Washington DC and DC journalism, and I worked at this magazine called National Journal, and there's like a picture of President Obama carrying it onto Air Force One. It was very inside the beltway, and it was part of this business model that says, target the people who are in power with your information. And then everybody who wants to stay in power, wants to be close to power, has to be reading it. That's how you get people to read what you're doing to be influential.

And we at Next City take the opposite approach, even though we're talking to people who maybe work in cities, the goal is put that target on the grassroots and the people who are working in their communities and say, "Listen, if you want to know what's really going on at the grassroots and change, then you have to read Next City." And that means that all the way up to the mayor, you need to know what's happening by reading Next City.

So we try to change that power dynamic in media by putting our focus on the people who aren't necessarily holding the levers of power, though they're definitely changing them.

Matt: It's really interesting to go back to something you said earlier. You brought up the phrase solutions journalism. And I can say on the inside of the journalism world for the previous 20 years before I launched my business, I can remember when that term became something that started to infiltrate our newsrooms. And it was a very exciting concept for folks like me because that was always the kind of storytelling that I gravitated to and that I aspire to be a part of. And even within the lane of solutions journalism, both on the local and national level, I experienced this, there came to some degree almost a stopping point where yes, you want to do journalism that showcases solutions, but as a journalistic entity, you have to figure out where your participation in this stops, right? And there's an argument to be made that as a journalistic entity, our job was to provide these solutions and show these solutions so that people in power or people on the grassroots end of things could then use that to whatever end they wish.

What I love about your model is that yes, you adhere to the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, you operate with journalist integrity. Anybody who reads your work, I think sees the backbone of facts and research and reporting that goes into the work that your team does, but that base of storytelling and reporting has enabled you to take on so many other different initiatives that take the ball and really do carry it a step further. And I love that. I'd love for you to talk about some of these efforts and the way that storytelling has been able to catalyze them for you.

Lucas: A good example that is beyond what people usually do in media would be our Vanguard conference, which is really a leadership conference. When I first got to Next City about eight years ago, I was like, "What is this? Is it we're just having an event?" And I was like, "No, it's not a regular event. This is not our regular conference at a hotel ballroom with breakout sessions." This is hundreds of people apply to come to this conference. The editors pick 40 people who can describe how they've already had impact in their communities, who can talk about how their vision for their work would advance racial equity. And they come to a host city where this year we're going to Chicago and applications are open now to learn about solutions in person. So it's like our journalism brought to life. It's like the physical manifestation of our journalism and we might have sent a reporter to go talk about a particular thing that's working.

And in this case, you get to come along with us and we're going to have a panel discussion while we're there. And we're going to travel for three and a half days all over the city and meet the most impressive people who are working on models for community ownership, who are working on solutions for economic mobility or supporting small businesses along their corridor. And the reason we do that is one, yeah, we want to spread solutions. We want to inform people and give them more information about what's working, but also we think it's really important to create connections between, we'll say readers, but just anyone who's working in this space.

So we intentionally pick people who are working across all the silos that typically separate these movements in cities. If you work in transportation, you're at the transportation conference with the transportation people. And this is, you can't solve a solution like poverty only from transportation access and free buses, which is important, but that's only one thing.

You need to talk to everybody across the sphere. So Next City intentionally picks people from all different lanes, brings them together, just like we do with our journalism every day. We're the one place where people are maybe reading from the same playbook about how you can solve a solution as big as poverty. I mean, solve a problem as big as poverty. So we go, we traverse the city for three and a half days, we introduce you to solutions, you meet the other Vanguards, but you also meet the people who are part of the host committee that created this itinerary because Next City isn't an expert on every single city and what you should know there. We convene the people who are there to help select, basically to select the itinerary, the things you're going to go see, the people you absolutely have to hear from.

And it becomes kind of like a large scale community engagement project that informs the journalism that happens because for a year afterward, we then base a journalist in that city to follow up on conversations that happened while we were there and to maybe report out stories specifically on things that we experienced. One really cool example was that one of the first times we did that model was in El Paso at the border. And the goal of the conference was to discuss the true borderland narrative. What do people at the border say it's like to live at the border? And we were doing a tour of Chicano murals through El Segundo Barrio, and there was this one figure who was coming up a lot. It was this priest and he was depicted on his red bike all the time. And they said, "Well, he's a famed, respected figure from the history of this neighborhood." And he founded this credit union that was there.

The credit union had disappeared and people didn't really know what had happened to it. That was a part of the tour. They were like, "We're not sure, but we know they did this thing and he's done a lot of things he's very respected." So the reporter who was based there a year afterward, Christian DeJesus Bentoncourt at El Paso Matters, local nonprofit newsroom there, that's awesome, then followed up with people to track down the history of this person and the murals and we published that story first in El Paso Matters. And then we got even more feedback from people who were like, "Well, actually, I also know this part of the history and what happened to this credit union." And then that even updated version ran at Next City. So to be able to preserve the history of a place and the culture of a place is, I mean, part of what our readers do.

And then also part of what we're doing with stories that are talking about lost history. Same thing happened in Philadelphia where we visited the Stenton Museum. They had, as part of the tour, introduced us to the Dynamemorial, which is something everybody should look up and is really an example of a monument that can be created in partnership with community to transform the story of that place. And so when we were introduced to that monument in Philadelphia itself, we heard the story of a woman who came there and told her story about how she used to walk by this place, which was absolutely not available to her as a black woman. And now she's there as one of the creators of this monument remembering a black woman who had been enslaved there and her role in preserving this place and sort of the moral dilemma that occurred when a fire happened there and whether or not she should help save the building.

So it's really became this great conversation piece around the history of Germantown in Philadelphia, the Germantown neighborhood. So there's all kinds of stories like that that emerge while we're there and then get told to a broader audience. And you could call it community engaged journalism, you could call it solutions journalism, you can call it a leadership conference to build relationships and help these rising leaders go on and stay in touch. There's about 700 people now who've gone through the program. I don't know, but I know that when people go to this program, they leave feeling like they've found their group, they feel like they've fallen back in love with their work. And I don't know if a journalism organization should make it their job to help people fall back in love with their professions and with helping their neighbors, but I'm proud that we do it.

Matt: I think that is both such an inspiring story of how you can recultivate that desire in people. But I also think there's a really good lesson there for nonprofits that might not be journalism outlets necessarily, right? But every nonprofit has an audience that they can communicate with, whether it's through their email newsletter or through their social media platforms or through donor communications, right? And just as you host the Vanguard and then you station a reporter in that city to continue reporting on the results of the Vanguard essentially.

Nonprofits anywhere can use that model, right? You've got an initiative that you're doing, you should be reporting regularly. It doesn't necessarily have to adhere to the highest in journalistic ethics, but you should be able to show your audience, whether it's your funders, whether it's your stakeholders, your partners, you should be able to show them what you're doing and why the work you're doing matters.

That is fundamental to nonprofit survival. And I think it's such a beautiful thing that you're doing both organically, but also that is just sustaining the work and showing the proof of hosting these vanguards in the first place. And it's not just that, obviously you have your film festival, the virtual film festival, which I believe is annual and I've loved what you've done with the first few. You have Solutions Fest and I was happy to attend. I think all of those events that you had this year, which were great. So there's just so much that The Next City is doing using storytelling as kind of the base for that and a way to catapult all of these additional efforts. So it's wonderful to hear.

Lucas: Thanks for mentioning the Film Festival and Solutions Fest because I mean, they're good examples of our belief that we're just giving people access to this platform that we've built over 22 years, that the best service we can offer people who want to tell their stories is to build the 60,000 people on our newsletter, 175,000 people on social media, a million people come to exited.org over the course of a year and offer that platform to them to tell their stories.

And Solutions Fest was, I think it was eight hour long events of the best solutions of the year being highlighted in webinars. And over the course of, I don't know, the last two years with the Film Fest, we've done over a dozen screenings for solutions oriented documentaries where it's just a better way of connecting ... I shouldn't say better. It is better for some group of people that you want to hear this story told in this way. Like you have to engage with everybody in the way that they want to be met and documentary filmmaking, I think is an important way of engaging people and solutions.

Matt: That's a beautiful point, meeting people where they are and so many ways to extrapolate that, but a really, really good point. I wanted to make sure I highlighted that. He is Lucas Grindley, executive director of Next City. I am Matt Pearl, and this is Dot Org, the podcast about how nonprofits tell their stories.

Let me take a quick minute to tell you about how I tell stories. I was a journalist for many years. I traveled the world, covered the Olympics three times, and won national awards for video journalism, mostly for stories about the under-reported issues facing our communities and the people and organizations offering solutions. Now I get to work directly with those people and organizations at Pearl Impact Media. I provide meaningful, memorable video storytelling for nonprofits and purpose-driven businesses. Maybe you want to raise funds, maybe you want to raise awareness, maybe you want to showcase your services in ways only video can do. I'm based in Atlanta, but work with clients across the country, and I would love to work with you. Head to my website at pearlimpactmedia.com to schedule a free consultation.

Back with Lucas Grindley, executive director of Next City. Lucas, you and your team tell stories all day, and I think the first half of this conversation is such a beautiful display about how storytelling can lead to all of these other initiatives. I would then love to hear about how you choose to tell your own story because Next City is a nonprofit. You are relying on donations and grants and funds from a variety of different places. How do you, as an organization, distinguish yourself and use storytelling to build your identity?

Lucas: Yeah, that's a good question. One thing we talk about a lot is narrative change at Next City. And the founders, going back those 22 years ago, were trying to change the narrative that nothing could be done or that our problems were greater than our solutions. And every day with every single story we do, we're showing that change is not only possible, it's already happening all across the country. And we think that that is incredibly important to defeating what I think is a systemic narrative trying to encourage apathy. It's trying to encourage people to sit on the sidelines and say, "Eh, these systems of finance that have kept us down for years or pick your poison are too big to counter when actually there are people all over the country who are working on ways to counter them."

So I think plugging into that narrative that change is not only possible, it's already happening is a big part of what we do.

And now there's a pervasive feeling that change is especially not possible because at the federal level, maybe it feels chaotic or it feels counterproductive to you depending on your work. And I've cribbed something I heard someone else say, which is that progress is not lost, it's local. More than ever, we should be looking at neighborhoods and at community leaders to spearhead the change that's possible in the world because they've always done it without the help of big federal systems.

Those federal systems have always benefited the powerful and not the most vulnerable among us. So if you're looking for ideas about what the future should look like, look to the people we cover in communities to figure that out. I mean, a good example of something I think is amazing, and we actually visited during our Vanguard conference in Philadelphia is the Kensington neighborhood where the Kensington Corridor Trust is creating a model for community ownership of commercial property there, where there's great concern in any low income neighborhood that as development happens there, there's going to be displacement, there's going to be gentrification.

In Kensington, there's a great train line that could go right through there that already exists. And there was a developer, Shift Capital, that was reinvigorating a lot of properties there. And they thought, how do we show people that we're not here to create amenities for people who aren't from here, that aren't? How do we show that we're not trying to push them out? And they helped along with many others, but they were part of it, established the Kensington Corridor Trust, which now is a place where once that building has been redeveloped, it can then be sold to the community and run by the Kensington Corridor Trust. That's not only one example, Kensington Corridor Trust will go and purchase other buildings from other developers or things that have not yet been developed and redeveloped them. They have a lot of models we should look up and read about their work, but they're a special example and then they are literally spreading that model to people who've heard about it. I don't know if I can claim credit that they heard about it from Next City, but they're definitely a Next City reader in Trenton, New Jersey. I know they're trying to spread the Kensington Corridor model there via April De Simone, who's awesome as well.

But there's a network of people like this all across the country. In Atlanta, where I know you are, there's the Guild, which is doing a community ownership model where they literally redevelop properties, but then they are also selling shares to people there so that then they are benefiting from the wealth creation that happens around that property. They're also working on affordable housing. I mean, there's many factors that go into all these different models. One of the cool things though about them is that people will spend time trying to look around the country for what's already working before they establish their model, and I feel like that we're working specifically for them on trying to help accomplish those goals.

Matt: So I'm curious then from a fundraising perspective on your end, is the idea that you are producing this work and that funders will see it and respond to it and fund it. Are you doing more outbound work to try to connect with folks on a larger scale who might have a vested interest in this work? How does storytelling help you build up your funding?

Lucas: I feel like people are supporting us because we are storytelling, and then the funders who do support Next City will often talk about us as movement infrastructure, that there needs to be this knowledge sharing across people who are working against systems and cities, and there also needs to be awareness of who is telling those stories. So we are champions of media representation.

Over 70% of the stories that were written in 2025 were by authors of color, and that has been an increasing number every year for the last few years. We are tracking that. I don't know that most nonprofit newsrooms are tracking that, though I encourage them to do it. And we're 75% people of color in our staff, same with our board. So representation is very important to the outcome of the stories and ensuring that the people who have felt excluded by media are not only the sources, but also the subjects of the stories and the storytellers themselves.

So I think that's a big driver outside of even just making the case that we're showing that change is possible and that it's already happening in places. So I think that those things together are reasons that people often support us.

And the last thing I'll say is that there's been some really great research about how nonprofit newsrooms in particular should tell their stories from an organization called Press Forward that's doing a lot of support for nonprofit newsrooms. And it just came out late last year. You should look it up, but we took some things from that research and adjusted how we've been talking about ourselves because they found in this survey that they had done that amongst at least progressives, I like zeroed in on their cross tabs about progressives because a lot of the people who read Next City are more progressive than other folks.

And a thing that was a top driver for people was whether or not you were creating a form of government accountability. Are you holding people responsible in some ways? And so the way we changed talking about ourselves was to focus on how people will often read a story in next city about a new way of doing something and they'll forward it to someone else, maybe a city councilman, maybe a colleague who is doubting, and let's use it as a way to prove what's possible.

So we think of ourselves as a form of accountability to the future to say that you can achieve all of these things that people want to do in their hearts. And we've changed the way that we talk about ourselves to emphasize that sort of accountability factor, even though it's not the normal accountability journalism that you hear about rooting out corruption and that sort of thing. I think we're holding ourselves in the communities that we serve accountable to justice.

Matt: Really, really interesting. And I'm curious for you, for the nonprofits out there that are not news organizations, storytelling might not come as naturally. So you have a background in writing, obviously you have a team full of writers and editors who have a way with words. What are some kind of base level storytelling tips from the journalism space that, A, that you found effective, but that you feel like nonprofits who aren't steeped in this work, aren't steeped in journalism and aren't turning out content that regularly can take and use to benefit their own work?

Lucas: We actually work with a lot of clients on the sponsored content side and write sponsored stories in which I am asked to explain this sort of thing often, which is a good story starts with some sort of main character, some person or organization that is trying to achieve something. There's like, identify that person and identify what it is that they want to achieve. Whether or not it's, "I want to ensure my neighbors can stay here and are not displaced." And there's a person who is working on that, maybe who is your grantee or it's yourself, or it's someone who you support, maybe whatever you might call that person, a client or someone that you're helping. Establish them, establish what they want, and then there are always things that are helps or hurts in trying to achieve that. And that's the basic creation of tension in the story.

So that main character has a thing they're going after and there's something that's trying to stop them. And sometimes it's just an entrenched system that's been around for years. It's the old way of doing things. It's the old way of banking and the old way of doing real estate in your neighborhood. Maybe that's the thing that's stopping them, and that's a really simple one, but there could be others. And then there's things that are helping them, and maybe that's you. Maybe you're the solution and then the helpful friend, and maybe you're not the main character. It's good to know where you are in that story. And then the resolution is when they've achieved that thing or helped them get closer or whatever it might be. And that's a great tension in a regular story is just to find that main character, the thing they want and the things that are hurting and helping them get there. And you'll tell a much better story.

And then the other thing I would say is working on narrative change all the time and interviewing people all the time who work in nonprofits, they will talk about the narratives they're up against. And being able to plug into a counter narrative that is working across the country is I think super helpful in supercharging your work in the same way that a false narrative can be disruptive or delay your work.

So a good example, we did this podcast called Not My Narrative and we ran a pilot episode and we have identified the famous bootstraps narrative that everybody knows of as a false narrative about personal responsibility in which we essentially blame people for their own poverty and say, "Well, you should just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Why can't you? You should try harder." And as long as that is the narrative that exists in the country, then it dictates the solutions that we have to this so- called problem.

And the solution is really, well, as long as you have the same opportunity as everybody else, or as long as we don't disrupt you, then you should be able to do it because everybody else could. And the counter narrative to that, that I've heard often is some form of it takes a village. Rather than it's your personal responsibility, it's a collective responsibility to help those around us and help the people who are experiencing poverty, living in disinvested neighborhoods, pick your thing. So how can you plug into that narrative that says it does take a village and that we're all part of the solution that's being worked on?

Because I think if you can plug into a larger narrative that then you're part of a movement then that maybe you're one solution. Like to solve poverty, it's not only transportation, it's also all these things. And that's the same thing with a narrative is like, you're going to play your role in this larger thing we're all trying to achieve.

Matt: I really think that not necessarily a form of storytelling, but an advantage of storytelling that not enough folks are pursuing is that idea of plugging into the counter narrative and really plugging into your wider community of folks who are doing the work that you're doing. I think there's just such power in A, amplifying the work that you're doing, but also being able to provide that motivation, provide that undergirding of support that a lot of other organizations need. And there is so much to be said for building up that snowball and creating that change communally as a village and using your storytelling to do that. So I love that you just highlighted that.

Lucas, I have really enjoyed this conversation. I'm going to end it by asking you that famous last question that all reporters love to ask. Is there anything we haven't talked about that you would like to add?

Lucas: I could go on for days, Matt, about the ways that Next City is important. And then I'll leave with one last thing, which is that sometimes when I'm talking with funders, especially now in a world where, oh, we have ICE agents in the streets and we have bombs being dropped and we have pick your horrible thing happening in the world and you have to sort of encourage yourself to recommit to your part of what you're doing and say that it does matter and it does change the world that there are ripple effects to everything that you're working on.

And so I have to psych myself up all the time to remind myself that even as those horrible things are happening across the world, I still think that what we do at Next City and amplifying things that are working at the neighborhood level can have ripple effects that then lead to even bigger and bigger change.

And that one day, all of that will be given a chance to become the basis for rebuilding what's being torn down now. So I hope people will feel encouraged going into whatever it is that they have to do where they're being asked whether or not what they do is really valuable in the world. I'm telling you it is and you're your biggest cheerleader, so just believe in it.

Matt: That is Lucas Grindley, executive director for Next City. You can find them at nextcity.org. Lucas, thanks so much for your time. Thanks. And that is episode 14 of Dot Org. If you found this helpful and want others to hear it too, a great rating or review wherever you get your podcast goes a long way, please take the time if you can and check out my work at Pearl Impact Media. Video storytelling can be so beneficial for organizations. I would love to work with yours. Book a free consultation right now at pearlimpactmedia.com. All right, friends, I am Matt Pearl. Thank you for listening to Dot Org. See you next time.