My background is mostly working in political campaigns. I’ve spent the past five years working on-and-off on campaigns; my first ever experience in “doing” communications was for a campaign back in 2019. That fundamentally shaped not just my perception of comms, but also my personal relationship with it.
You see, political campaigns are a really fascinating environment. Watching the horse race on cable news, seeing the numbers in the polls change every week, even every day, taking in the hourly news cycle like a fire hose to the face. They’re not kidding when they call it rapid response, and I got used to seeing rapid results — that was how I measured my success. This is the environment in which I learned how to do comms work.
So, you can imagine how I felt like a failed intern after I didn’t change the world in seven weeks. I didn’t get a local government to change its code enforcement policies. I didn’t help a community start a land bank. I didn’t go and get a vacant property rehabilitated with my own hands. I didn’t get the dopamine hits that I’d been conditioned to associate with success.
But a nonprofit is not a campaign, especially when its goal is systems-level change, like at the Center for Community Progress. On my second day of work, the head of the Technical Assistance team told me that systems change can take two to four years, and the actual implementation can take two to four more years. We’re not going to magically fix entrenched vacancy in a year. Results in the nonprofit world can take a lot of time, and sometimes I felt like I wasn’t contributing enough because I couldn’t see huge results overnight.
What I learned through this fellowship was how to reframe what success means for me. Success looks different across different missions. And at Community Progress, my success was finding informative articles for the monthly newsletter that goes out to practitioners seeking to learn more about the field. It was building contact lists and drafting email pitches to bring more people into the fold for our national conference on tackling vacancy. It was writing blogs to educate and inspire our audience. My success was supporting the groundwork for the long game of revitalizing neighborhoods, because in our field, the long game is what pulls things off.
What I did in these seven weeks is not going to make national headlines. What it will do is bring new voices to the Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference, which is about two months out from now. What it will do is educate people about the accessible resources they can use to improve their own communities, like through the blog posts I wrote about federal programs and local initiatives. What it will do is empower community leaders with solutions that will transform their neighborhoods and disrupt the cycle of vacancy, even if the results are a ways down the line.
The public in public interest communications is not a monolith. It’s a huge and diverse group with plenty of differing opinions and wants and needs that can and do conflict. It’s not an easy group to mobilize, especially when your goal is not just awareness, but action, lasting change. You need to have patience in public interest communications, both with the public and with yourself. Your overarching goals will take a long time to accomplish, and burning yourself out, worrying that you aren’t successful enough fast enough, is a disservice to both you and the people you want to help. It’s endurance and thoughtful planning and seeing the bigger picture that will carry you across the finish line.
As I finish my fellowship, I want to emphasize the importance of measuring success in different ways, and valuing all the forms in which it manifests in your life. My success is not going to be the same as your success. My success in this position isn’t going to be the same as in my next job. My success today might not even look the same as my success tomorrow, and that’s fantastic. You can excel at public interest communications and be an asset to the world in countless, countless ways. Don’t cling to a single
idea of success, don’t close off doors before you know what opportunities there are, don’t shy away from continually redefining what success means for you. Just know why you’re doing what you’re doing, and own the unknown.