A Profile of Lizzy Hazeltine –
What it takes to build a healthy, resilient local news ecosystem

One of the frameworks that I rely on is the hierarchy of news and information needs developed by Bettina Chang and Harry Backlund, as well as the broad research that has been done by many, many people, including Melanie Sill and Fiona Morgan, about how to translate that for a place and asset-based community development.

One of the core things that helps me do my job is having a systems analysis and understanding the role that individual organizations and leaders can play. And then zooming out or getting up on the balcony above the many different actors, understanding the dynamics and how power plays a role there, how race and place and class are all in that mix, too.

Another frame I rely on is trying to think like an organizer. What do we have in common, what is our shared interest, what is motivating us in this moment? Marshall Ganz’s public narrative framework is something that I really, really love and lean on and Trabian Shorter’s asset framing. There’s a notion that just because I can’t see something as an outsider doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or doesn’t mean that only the deficit is the most interesting or most important thing about a community or a person.

Because we are a low-altitude intermediary, we are simultaneously a funder and an organization that is building a funding coalition and raising money. We’re working to do that in an open-handed way where it’s not just a centralizing force. We’re trying to do it in the spirit of Team North Carolina. I want more money to go to organizations that are helping inform our neighbors. Full stop.

The kind of tension that I live with is: the timeline of fundraising and the timeline of learning and the timeline of wanting to move money. My ambition is to move money as soon as it hits the checking account. I want to get it out the door as soon as possible.

So that is really the crux of it: I need the patience to build a coalition, the patience to build shared interest, the patience of the time fundraising takes and the impatience to do what people in North Carolina cannot wait for. To fund the work that people in North Carolina cannot wait for, because many of them have waited for it for a long time.

We bridge from the field to funders and back again. We have these two really core constituencies, so we lean on a community frame, and we collaborate with others who have that. I lean on the authority and insight of field leaders and our grant partners to ground me every day.

I am lucky to build with the folks on my board, like Nora Ferrell, who’s the VP of communications at the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, and Teresa Gorman at Democracy Fund, Sorien Schmidt at Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, and Lillian Ruiz. Teresa, along with Josh Stearns, were actually the first people who helped develop the Fund, along with Sorien and other NC funders. Lillian Ruiz, who is a social entrepreneur and news entrepreneur, connects the non-trivial dotted lines between civic life and information, building organizations, and has a very expansive, generative view.

But there are so many others, including Charles Thomas at Knight Foundation, who’s on the communities team and has been instrumental in the expansion of our work in Charlotte.

The Fund has never been the work of just one person. That’s so clear to me and sometimes can get lost in the shuffle. Ret Boney, who is at the North Carolina Community Foundation, helped me understand philanthropy. This is my first job in philanthropy.

And then there’s the operational backbone, the infrastructure and the operational effectiveness to make really good grants, and have a good grant-making process. So I also lean on what is now a team of three people, Natalie Roper, Sam Spencer and Jemima Abalogu, for these relational constituencies in the field.

I was two weeks into this job, and I had coffee with a partner. We had made a grant to this organization, and I asked them about a plan for sustainability and revenue generation. I asked them how long they would need support from the Fund. That leader looked across the table and said there isn’t a revenue generation strategy that would take philanthropy off the table for the service. She helped me understand that my question had an assumption buried in it.

I was coming in a little hot with my entrepreneurial background, and it was a mistake to work from the assumption that philanthropic funding is only a bridge. I think the nut of it is, I approached a grant partner with an assumption about revenue and I needed to begin with the economic context they were working in, and the value of the service that they continue to provide.

I’m still grateful to that leader for helping me understand where I want the starting point for my questions to be.

I look to my peers. I have an incredible personal board of advisors, who see me as a person, including but not only as my work. I ride my bike. Sometimes if I really need it, I’ll pull out the concept of the 200-year present that I was introduced to by Krista Tippett and her On Being Foundation series. It’s a reminder we have influence on a 200-year timescale, starting with the birthday of the oldest person who ever held you in their arms when you were an infant, and then it extends to the 100th birthday of the youngest person that you ever hold in your arms.

I get emotional thinking about it, but it helps me understand the human scale of what we’re actually doing. When I remember that perspective, it boosts my sanity. And not just my sanity, but to grieve what’s hard and to figure out what’s mine to do.

Ross Gay’s Book of Delights.