Darting Bird
The darting bird block is one of the more dynamic designs in this quilt. It has suggested movement through a very basic design. This pattern is perfect for a person who is always moving forward, barreling into the next challenge ahead of them.
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Chelsie Walter
Executive Director of Women of Cincy
Chelsie WalterChelsie Walter is the Executive Director of Women Of Cincy, a nonprofit media outlet that celebrates everyday Cincinnatians and brings our community together through storytelling, community building, and mentorship. During our time together we talked about how Women of Cincy was created, the uplifting of women, and what it’s like to manage such a large project.
Now that we are recording, why don't you go ahead and tell me your name, your pronouns, and why you think I asked you to be here today?
My name is Chelsie Walter, she/her/hers. Why did you ask me to be here today? That's a good question. I would guess because my work with the Women of Cincy. I'm the executive director of a nonprofit media platform that celebrates local Cincinnatians, and tries to create community through empathy. We also have a residency program where we mentor college age students cause we're all in this together.
Awesome. Tell me about the work that you do.
Yeah, so I kind of mentioned it a little bit already, but mostly I work on Women of Cincy. So I started it in 2017, kind of on accident, with a couple of friends of mine. We were just kind of realizing that there was a lot of division in Cincinnati and a lot of people not seeing each other as people. And that was right after the election. It was January 20th, 2017 when we started. We're a nonpartisan organization. We were at the Cincinnati Women's March and we decided to just ask people why they were there. We started to get some cool answers, put it on Instagram, humans of New York style, if you're familiar with that. We really had a great time getting to know people in our community and just kind of hearing their stories. We decided that we wanted to kind of expand the work that we were doing there. So the first day we got about 30 stories and at first it was supposed to be the end of it. After we posted them all on like a two week span, we were all at my house one night hanging out, started talking about our experience and decided that we wanted to do this on a bigger scale than just Instagram. So we started by reaching out to different people from our community and asking if they would sit down, just to have a conversation with us. People started to say yes, and we were kind of shocked by it. We decided to do it a Q&A style. So it was their story, not ours, and to eliminate any bias that we might have on top of it. And then we decided that maybe we weren't the ones that should be selecting the women. So we opened it up to our community to start nominating people for us to interview. So everything that we do is through nominations. And then we decided maybe we weren't the ones to tell all of these stories, so we opened it up to our community to also join us in the storytelling.
WE JUST PUT IT ON INSTAGRAM BECAUSE WE DIDN'T HAVE A WEBSITE AT THE TIME AND SAID, 'WHO WANTS TO HELP US TELL STORIES?' WE HAD AN OVERWHELMING RESPONSE OF PEOPLE WHO WANTED TO TELL STORIES WITH US. WE DECIDED WE NEED TO PUT SOME SYSTEMS IN PLACE TO DO THIS WORK. SO WE STARTED WORKING ON OUR MISSION STATEMENT, OUR BRAND, WEBSITES, KIND OF AN INTERVIEW PROCESS FOR OUR VOLUNTEERS. NOW WE HAVE REACHED OVER 105,000 PEOPLE SINCE WE STARTED.
Which is crazy. Through our website, WomenOfCincy.org. We've got 70 volunteers that are all content creators in their professional lives or just volunteers who help us with things like HR, or volunteering at events and all kinds of stuff to keep the team moving. But yeah, it's just like really grown from there. About a year in, we decided that we needed an intern, not realizing how big the program would grow. Ellen Huggins was our first intern. She's awesome. She also went to UC and so we started meeting in coffee shops. It was before we had an office space. And then Ellen kind of helped us figure out what the program looked like for our first residency. And so since we started, we've graduated 18 people from our residency program and built it out. We've had students from Xavier, Cincinnati State, Miami, UC, kind of all the local schools around here. So it's been pretty crazy.
That is crazy. So why did you decide you wanted to publish the stories of people in Cincy?
Yeah, so the biggest piece of it was just to bring people together.
IT'S HARD TO LOVE AND RESPECT YOUR NEIGHBOR IF YOU DON'T KNOW YOUR NEIGHBOR. SO WE THOUGHT THAT EMPATHY BUILDING, WHICH IS CRUCIAL FOR HOW WE MOVE FORWARD AS A CITY, AND I THINK ESPECIALLY RIGHT NOW, OUR COMMUNITY IS JUST DEALING WITH A LOT. SOMETIMES LIFE CAN BE A LITTLE DIVISIVE. IT'S HARDER FOR YOU TO ATTACK SOMEBODY OR FOR YOU TO FEEL 'OTHERED' IF PEOPLE KNOW YOUR STORY AND YOU CONNECT WITH THEM. SO STORYTELLING FOR US HAS BEEN THE WAY TO KIND OF BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER AND BREAK DOWN SOME OF THOSE WALLS THAT SEPARATE US.
Definitely. That's really awesome. So do you still get to do interviews or are you kind of on another side of it now?
Yeah, I still do interviews. For the most part I do our series. I don't do a lot of the normal interviews anymore. We've had quite a few series that we've run. So we did one on eight female filmmakers in Cincinnati. We've done one on housing insecurity, which is 22 stories of those experiencing housing insecurity or advocates in the space. And so that was a huge lift. 22 stories is a lot. I manage that and I did a lot of the photography for it. So I haven't been writing in a long time. But I do a lot of photography and just kind of manage the processes for the series. And we've also got one going on right now that's around female entrepreneurship and another one is going to be launching in the fall around women's economic upward mobility in Cincinnati.
That's fantastic.
So lots of interesting stuff in there.
So you got to hear all sorts of amazing things in your work.
Yes. Which is the only reason why I can show up every day.
Yeah? What does that mean?
Well, I mean it's a hard job, to start something from nothing. And so I feel like if I didn't have all that inspiration surrounding me every day, there's no way I would do this work. But it's hard to quit when everybody else around me is so bad ass.
So, so this is your full time job?
Yes and no. It's 40 hours a week and I'm in the office 40 hours a week. But we're still working on fundraising enough money to hire our first employee, who will be me. Probably an editor will be our second employee. Until then I'm still freelancing, so I do design work. I have a degree in graphic communication design. So I've got a couple of clients that I still work with and then I still do a little bit of photography on the side and I run an Airbnb out of the third floor of my house. So just lots of side hustles until we figure out what Women Of Cincy looks like financially.
Yeah, that makes sense. So you're volunteering your time so far? That's amazing.
Yup yup yup, 40 hours a week. Hence why I said I wouldn't keep doing it if I didn't love all the people around me.
Yeah, definitely. That makes sense.
And see a need for it.
So have you seen the empathy that you're building in your community? Do you talk to the people who experience your stories and see the impact that they make?
Yep. I've got a little folder on my computer that says like, 'when I need to pick me up' and it's literally screenshots, or prints of different letters that people have sent us. Good things that have happened since their story was told on our platform or connections that they've made or just cool things that people's kids have said about them. Whatever it is, it's just a folder of nice things. It's pretty cool to see the ripple effect and who gets involved in what afterwards.
So it sounds like the base of this, it being after the election- I saw on your website, you talk about a little bit about the importance of voting. Do you want to say something to that?
Yeah. Women Of Cincy is a nonpartisan organization. We encourage everybody to make up their own mind and do their own research and establish their own beliefs. But we do support women. So people who support women, policy to support women. Granted that is up to interpretation depending on who you are. We just try to make sure that we are always looking at things from a positive, educated light. But yes, we are nonpartisan, but we do believe that people should use their voice. Because their voice is important and their story is important and lived experience is important. You should use that to make better decisions. So that's kind of where we come at it from. We've got a really big emphasis, not so much on federal or even state level politics, but more on a city based basis. So we are hyperlocal, so we don't get into conversations that are outside of Cincinnati usually. Because we believe that there's a lot of good work we can do right here. And we know we have the base impact here because that's where our people are. We didn't start out that way, but we realized that to do this work well, we had to have some kind of focus. And so by making sure that we were always Cincinnati based, that was the way we were able to focus.
Gotcha. So what did you do right after college? Did you go straight into this?
Almost. What did I do right after college? I got married, I think I was 23. My husband and I have been together since we were 15. So it wasn't like a shock or anything. For a hot second we thought we were going to move to Portland and then we didn't. Which is a whole other story in itself. He ended up getting a job in Cincinnati as a teacher and then I tried to apply for all of your big agencies, but I just literally couldn't even bring myself to finish the application.
Why is that?
I just didn't want to do it. I mean I'd co-oped at a bunch of different big agencies an. There was nothing wrong with them by any means, but it just wasn't the work I wanted. So I didn't know what to do. And then I ended up applying for People's Liberty. People's Liberty doesn't exist anymore, but it was an organization funded by the Haile Foundation, which is one of the big foundations in town. Basically it was created on the belief that if you give people a chance they can become great leaders. They funded people, instead of organization. So if you were a person who had an idea, you could apply for funding and there were three different levels. There was a $10,000 level, $15,000 level, and then a Haile fellowship, which is $100,000, where you quit your job and work on your project for an entire year. So that was really exciting. I did design work for them and communications and it was just a residency, so it had a time limit on it. After that was done, I started working for some people that I had met through People's Liberty, some of the past grantees. I Started freelancing basically full time. And then People's Liberty hooked me up with Flywheel. Flywheel, Social Enterprise Hub, which kind of a mouthful, is a nonprofit that helps businesses or nonprofits create social good businesses. So businesses that have some kind of like social good aspect to them. So that was a really cool job, as a first step into what an alternate career might look like. I was being paid on a grant, and so I had a time limit on that job. I helped them with branding work and some communications work and just trying to let people know about all the great work that they were doing. That was really fun, did a lot of interviews, met a lot of really cool people. During the end of my residency there Women Of Cincy started, and all of the chaos that came with it. But I was still freelancing for I think an entire other year after that. And then, while we were building Women Of Cincy, we weren't sure whether or not we wanted to be an LLC or a nonprofit. But we wanted to be a social good based business. So probably a B Corp is what we would have originally gotten. An LLC, you can start it in a day. A nonprofit takes a year with the IRS. So we needed something to put around Women Of Cincy, some kind of legal entity. So we became an LLC and then to fund Women Of Cincy me and some of the woman that I started it with started our own design agency. And so the idea was that we would bankroll Women Of Cincy with a design agency for however long it took for it to stand up on its own because publications don't make money unless people are following them. You have to be around for a minute for people to follow you. So we knew that there was a process to it. And so then I ran a design agency with one of the other girls that I had started Women Of Cincy with and then we hired women from the team as contractors basically to do work. Cause we already had an entire team of people that were writers, photographers, editors. So we were kind of a built in agency already, which is great. And that was successful. We served small to medium size women owned businesses, helped get a lot of people, kind of started as some of their first brands. And we did that for a while. But Women Of Cincy was just growing so much and we found that we hardly had any time to do the agency work. Then the woman I had started it with had to step back for some personal reasons. So then we decided we were going to shut down the agency, it was called 'Notice'. Beautifully branded. We were going to shut down the agency, turn Women Of Cincy into a nonprofit and basically give this a go. Now I'm back to freelancing with some of the clients that I had worked with when I owned and ran Notice. I stayed with a couple of them myself. And here we are. So Women Of Cincy just got its nonprofit status, finally, from the IRS at the end of December, we announced it to the public in January, and then in March we're kicking off our first fundraising campaign. So I have never worked in a place that was a full time, salaried, days off, kind of thing.
So is that just not something that you're into? Is that not something you think you'll ever do?
That's a good question. I don't know.
SOME DAYS IT'D BE GREAT TO BE LIKE, 'HEY, I KNOW HOW MUCH MONEY IS COMING IN THIS MONTH' AND YOU KNOW, THERE'S DISABILITY WITH IT AND 401K AND HEALTH CARE AND ALL THAT STUFF. SO I WOULDN'T SAY NEVER, BUT IT'S JUST NOT WHAT I'M PASSIONATE ABOUT. I'VE ALWAYS BEEN ABLE TO KIND OF FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO MY OWN THING.
Women Of Cincy is my sole priority right now, besides making enough money just to exist. If Women Of Cincy ever fails, I don't know what my next step is. I've got a lot of things I'm passionate about though. I think that at this point, after I've been through all of this, I run a business and now a nonprofit, there's a lot of doors open. Cause I know how to do a lot of things. I can do books and I can write contracts and I can manage sponsorships and do design work and copywriting and photography. I'd hope I'd be able to figure out something with all of those skillsets.
Well, that's really cool. With all of these things that you do, do you have any time for anything else?
Yes. Not all the time, but I try. I'm around people constantly. I kinda mentioned we've got like 70 people on our team. There's literally always somebody hanging out on my couch. I'm around people a lot. I also have an old home in North Avondale that I'm renovating with my husband. That's what we run our Airbnb out of. I'm working on our house a lot. I always have a ton of flowers in the summer, so I like to do a lot of yard work and housework, as in wallpaper and painting, tearing down walls and all kinds of stuff. It takes up a lot of my time. I'm also really interested in antiques and thrifting and spend a lot of time just walking around reuse stores. I have a dog. I'm not that great at cooking, but I try.
That's awesome. Did you get your house right out of college?
No. I graduated in 2016. I think I bought my house a little over a year ago, so we were living in different apartments. We actually got our house because rent kept going up and we were like, 'this is ridiculous'. You might as well just buy a house because we were paying as much in rent as we would in a mortgage. So that kind of pushed us into our first house. We didn't expect to get this house, which is big and old and has a lot of issues. But I just fell in love with it when I saw it.
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Trying to think. Do you want to do industrial design?
No.
What skill sets do you want to act on?
I enjoy fabrication. I enjoy designing furniture and building furniture and making it, but I also enjoy this. I enjoy talking to people, getting stories out. Teaching is something also I've been doing through just through co-ops and things like that. But most co-ops I've had have made me pretty miserable and I don't want to do that forever.
Yup. Totally get you.
Were you feeling similarly in your co-op experience?
Yeah. I won't say where all I worked, but yeah. I've always been pretty responsible and good at my job. I was never bad at any of the jobs and I always liked the people. But it was just the work felt super soul sucking. And I felt like I was just creating landfill a lot. I just was never passionate. Honestly the best co-op I ever had, and sounds kind of silly coming from a graphic designer, but it wasn't an agency. It was at Donatos Pizza in Columbus. I worked in the marketing department. The work wasn't what I was passionate about, but the people were just super fantastic. I had so much pizza and food, I gained like 10 pounds during that co-op. I just felt super comfortable and automatically when I came in, maybe it's just out of necessity on their end, but they trusted me and gave me a ton of work. I helped work on a new website and that was one of my first co-ops. That seemed really huge cause it was like a $20,000 website or whatever. I had my own office, which is cool, with a door that shut and a big swively chair and I got paid well. Which felt really good. And I got paid over time. I did a commercial when I was there, which is hilarious. I pretended to make pizza in the background of the commercial and some got paid pretty well and got a car. I just really enjoyed being there. The work wasn't great, it was just making pizza ads. But the people were great. But that one was almost enough to make me want to stay there because everything else around me was so good. Even though the work wasn't what I was passionate about. But all the other ones,
I JUST KNEW THAT IT WAS NOT FOR ME WHEN I WOULD WAKE UP IN THE MORNING AND BE LIKE, 'I DON'T KNOW, DO I HAVE THE FLU?' LIKE I'D TRY TO CONVINCE MYSELF THAT I COULDN'T GO IN FOR SOME REASON OR IF I WAS DRIVING ON MY WAY TO WORK AND I'D BE LIKE, 'YOU KNOW, I'D BE OKAY IF I GOT A FLAT TIRE RIGHT NOW. CAUSE THEN I WOULDN'T GET INTO WORK FOR ANOTHER TWO HOURS'. THAT'S NOT A GOOD WAY TO LIVE LIFE.
Even though Women Of Cincy hasn't figured out how to necessarily pay me a salary, I believe that it will. I love being there every day and the work that I'm doing freelance wise is not bad at all. I really like my clients. The Airbnb is interesting. Sometimes you have great people, sometimes you don't. But I get to meet a lot of people. I don't mind where I'm at. I'm just kind of all the odds and ends. It's a lot. And I would love to not have to do all of it. But it's not bad. It's better than the alternative. I mean, I don't wake up hoping that I have a flat tire. And I can go on vacations- well, granted you have to have money to go on vacations- but I don't have to ask anybody permission to leave or go to a doctor's appointment or whatever. I'm my own boss, which is great.
That sounds worth it to me. Sounds pretty great to me.
I think that money is definitely not everything.
How do you balance that in your life? Are you ever concerned about doing your passion and the effect that has on the rest of your life?
Yeah. It's always a push and pull. Trying to figure out, 'okay, so I want to do this with the house or we're going to go on this vacation, so I should take on more work'. But does that work, because I don't have a lot of free time, affect the other work that I do? Or is it going to hurt my relationships because I'm stressed out and tired. It's always a push and pull. I always figure it out. I always do whatever we need to do what we want to in our personal lives. It's just a matter of how bad you want it sometimes.
Do you ever get additional side hustles? Like some people I talk to who do these types of things, they'll have Etsy shops, or they'll work at a coffee shop, stuff like that.
Yeah. Every now and then I'll just take on more design work if I need to. For a hot second I thought about getting something like bartending or in a coffee shop or whatever. I don't think the timing works. Because my schedule is so sporadic and we're all volunteer run. I work around a ton of nine to five schedules. So my schedule is always crazy cause I've got to talk with my volunteers when they can talk. So I've never acted on it. But I've picked up more design work or photography. I'll do somebody's head shots or family friend's senior portraits for their kid or whatever I need. It ebbs and flows depending on what we need.
So you said that Women Of Cincy is a nonpartisan organization, but it still cares about policies that support women. Is that ever contentious?
Yes and no. We've been pretty lucky that we haven't really seen a lot of pushback on our end. Everybody's been super supportive when we run content that might feel controversial to some people. We've been pretty lucky that most of it's been pretty small or more private. We'll get an email or we'll get a private message about somebody not wanting us to publish this. But we've never really seen people act super disrespectful. I'm sure that's coming and we'll have to figure out what it looks like when it comes. It's kinda hard to attack people on their story. It's literally a direct Q&A, so it's their words, not ours. And so that's a way to kind of distance yourself a little bit from it too, cause you're just literally talking to somebody about their life and sometimes their life does have things in it that might not sit well with everybody or whatever. But it's kinda hard to attack somebody on their own story.
What type of topics are those do you find?
It depends. We've interviewed people who are running for office. We've interviewed folks who have been experiencing homelessness before. There some policy stuff there that we've seen people just not react well to. Or people talk about the whole 'get a job' thing, which is ridiculous. You've got some people who are just ridiculous and that you just kind of ignore. We've also done quite a few stories on folks who are trans or gender nonconforming. And honestly, we've not had anybody give us any negative comments on those, which has been really great. Every now and then, there's something, I'm sure somebody would have taken offense to. You can't please everybody.
But that's not that common occurrence for you guys?
No. It hasn't been. Everyone's been pretty supportive. I think it says something to the community that we've built around us. It's a community of people who don't always have the same beliefs but are respectful of one another and engaged and just mindful of how to be good neighbors to each other. I think that's the expectation that we've set too. If you're going to be a part of this and engage with our content, you're going to be respectful when you do it. That's kinda how we like walk that line.
That's good to hear.
And disclaimers everywhere. If there's something that's political, we have a disclaimer talks about that we're not partisan. This is someone's story and we encourage you to make up your mind and go do some research yourself and make up your own beliefs. If there's a story that talks about someone's childhood that we can't verify, but they might've talk about something traumatic that happened to them because of a family member we'll usually remove a name. Usually the person themselves will not say the first and last name. We'll say something about 'this is a story told from a first person perspective'. We just try to tell people if we think that there's gonna be something. Or if there's cursing, we'll say at the beginning 'hey, just a heads up, someone's cursing in this. If that isn't your thing, stop reading'. Or if there's something traumatic in someone's story and we need to put a trigger warning or something up, we will. But I've gotta hand it to our community that everyone's been pretty good. Pretty receptive of our work, which is awesome.
That's great. So people get nominated in order to be interviewed?
Yeah. For our feature stories. We've got a couple of different types of content. We've got our feature stories, which run every single week. They're the ones that you see that are the long form Q&A's about someone's life. We run this thing called 'Community Mix', which is a hodgepodge of different pieces that the team creates. So sometimes that could be more interviews, maybe on a smaller scale. Sometimes it could be a series. We've got one that's 'Sex Talk With Your Local Librarian', which is super fun. It's just kind of a bunch of different things that we cover. So that one is up to the writer. Then we also do series. It kinda just depends on what the series is and who we need to go find to speak on the series. The last one would be, we do have some sponsored content. We've got people that we partner with and we tell their stories too. But our feature stories are what we're most known for and that's what happens every week. And those are all done through nominations through our site. So the community chooses the majority of our content.
That's awesome. I really liked that you extend that cause they're the people who are consuming your content and they get to pick what they want on it.
Yup. The community writes it, the community picks it. And now, since we're a nonprofit, the community owns all of it. Being a nonprofit, I don't own anything, so I could be fired technically from Women Of Cincy, which is crazy. I obviously don't see that happening, but I don't own it. No one owns it.
So what do you identify as your community? Is it a geographical location? Is it a shared interest? What is that to you?
Yeah. Both of those. So we are location-based. Women Of CINCY. We want to be Cincinnati or regionally based at least. So we've definitely interviewed people from Northern Kentucky or Mason or whatever, but it has to be within this region. Then as far as from a personal standpoint, community is anyone who's engaging with us and believes in the mission. So it's pretty broad. But that's kind of the way we look at it.
Cool. And then it is called WOMEN Of Cincy. So how do you keep that inclusive?
Yeah. So anyone can nominate anyone. So there's no barriers on that. There's also no barriers on who can join the team, what leadership looks like. We're very inclusive when we say the word 'women'.
WE KIND OF JUST OPERATE AROUND THE BELIEF THAT WHEN YOU UPLIFT WOMEN, YOU UPLIFT EVERYONE. BECAUSE, IN CINCINNATI, WHAT DOES POVERTY LOOK LIKE? POVERTY LOOKS LIKE A MOM AND TWO KIDS. WHAT DOES GENDER BASED VIOLENCE LOOK LIKE? EVERYONE EXPERIENCES IT. BUT FOR THE MOST PART IT'S BASED AROUND WOMEN. SO WE'VE KIND OF GOT A BIT OF AN UNDERTONE FOR WHY WE'VE PICKED WOMEN. BUT WE'RE INCLUSIVE OF EVERYBODY.
Our board has men on it. We've got one male team member. Our volunteers go in and out but we've had some gender nonconforming folks on our team. It's all been everybody. That's kind of how we approach it. The name started on a whim the morning of the Women's March with an Instagram handle. While we're keeping it and that's who we are, it's always definitely been a struggle for us to let people know that we are inclusive and that Women Of Cincy is everybody. So we've tried to do a lot of things on our end to make that apparent.
Okay. What do you do?
WE DID AN ENTIRE AUDIO SERIES ON 'WHAT IS GENDER INCLUSION?' SO WE INTERVIEWED A TRANS WOMAN, A TRANS MAN AND A PARENT OF A TRANS CHILD TO TALK ABOUT SOME OF THEIR EXPERIENCES AND THE FLUIDITY OF GENDER. SO THAT WAS REALLY COOL. SAME THING WITH OUR NOMINATIONS. IF YOU GO TO OUR NOMINATION SHEET, IT REMINDS YOU THAT WE'RE ACCEPTING OF WHOEVER YOU WANT TO NOMINATE. WE ALWAYS REINFORCE THAT. WE PURPOSELY MAKE SURE THAT WHEN WE'RE REACHING OUT TO COMMUNITIES THAT THAT IS APPARENT. SO WE CAN REACH OUT TO FOLKS FROM, FOR INSTANCE, THE LGBTQ COMMUNITY THAT WE KNOW AND ENCOURAGE THEM TO NOMINATE FOLKS TO MAKE SURE THAT WE'RE TELLING THOSE STORIES AND THAT WE'RE NOT MISSING THEM. GRANTED, IT'S NOT A PERFECT SYSTEM, ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU'RE RELYING ON JUST YOUR COMMUNITY TO NOMINATE FOLKS. SO SOMETIMES YOU GET WAVES WHERE YOU'VE HAD, TO BE BLUNT, SIX WHITE WOMEN IN A ROW. OKAY, WE NEED TO DO MORE WORK. SO THEN WE'LL GO FIND FOLKS IN DIFFERENT COMMUNITIES THAT WE'RE NOT REACHING WHO MIGHT BE LEADERS AND SAY, 'HEY, THIS IS ALL COMMUNITY BASED. WE NEED YOU TO SHARE THESE STORIES WITH US'. WE ALWAYS TRY TO BE AS INTENTIONAL WHENEVER WE CAN. WHILE KNOWING THAT WE'RE ALL VOLUNTEER RUN, AND THAT EVERYONE'S GOT WORK TO DO ON TOP OF IT. WE'RE NOT ALWAYS SUCCESSFUL, BUT WE'RE ALWAYS MAKING AN EFFORT.
My name is Chelsie Walter, she/her/hers. Why did you ask me to be here today? That's a good question. I would guess because my work with the Women of Cincy. I'm the executive director of a nonprofit media platform that celebrates local Cincinnatians, and tries to create community through empathy. We also have a residency program where we mentor college age students cause we're all in this together.
Awesome. Tell me about the work that you do.
Yeah, so I kind of mentioned it a little bit already, but mostly I work on Women of Cincy. So I started it in 2017, kind of on accident, with a couple of friends of mine. We were just kind of realizing that there was a lot of division in Cincinnati and a lot of people not seeing each other as people. And that was right after the election. It was January 20th, 2017 when we started. We're a nonpartisan organization. We were at the Cincinnati Women's March and we decided to just ask people why they were there. We started to get some cool answers, put it on Instagram, humans of New York style, if you're familiar with that. We really had a great time getting to know people in our community and just kind of hearing their stories. We decided that we wanted to kind of expand the work that we were doing there. So the first day we got about 30 stories and at first it was supposed to be the end of it. After we posted them all on like a two week span, we were all at my house one night hanging out, started talking about our experience and decided that we wanted to do this on a bigger scale than just Instagram. So we started by reaching out to different people from our community and asking if they would sit down, just to have a conversation with us. People started to say yes, and we were kind of shocked by it. We decided to do it a Q&A style. So it was their story, not ours, and to eliminate any bias that we might have on top of it. And then we decided that maybe we weren't the ones that should be selecting the women. So we opened it up to our community to start nominating people for us to interview. So everything that we do is through nominations. And then we decided maybe we weren't the ones to tell all of these stories, so we opened it up to our community to also join us in the storytelling.
WE JUST PUT IT ON INSTAGRAM BECAUSE WE DIDN'T HAVE A WEBSITE AT THE TIME AND SAID, 'WHO WANTS TO HELP US TELL STORIES?' WE HAD AN OVERWHELMING RESPONSE OF PEOPLE WHO WANTED TO TELL STORIES WITH US. WE DECIDED WE NEED TO PUT SOME SYSTEMS IN PLACE TO DO THIS WORK. SO WE STARTED WORKING ON OUR MISSION STATEMENT, OUR BRAND, WEBSITES, KIND OF AN INTERVIEW PROCESS FOR OUR VOLUNTEERS. NOW WE HAVE REACHED OVER 105,000 PEOPLE SINCE WE STARTED.
Which is crazy. Through our website, WomenOfCincy.org. We've got 70 volunteers that are all content creators in their professional lives or just volunteers who help us with things like HR, or volunteering at events and all kinds of stuff to keep the team moving. But yeah, it's just like really grown from there. About a year in, we decided that we needed an intern, not realizing how big the program would grow. Ellen Huggins was our first intern. She's awesome. She also went to UC and so we started meeting in coffee shops. It was before we had an office space. And then Ellen kind of helped us figure out what the program looked like for our first residency. And so since we started, we've graduated 18 people from our residency program and built it out. We've had students from Xavier, Cincinnati State, Miami, UC, kind of all the local schools around here. So it's been pretty crazy.
That is crazy. So why did you decide you wanted to publish the stories of people in Cincy?
Yeah, so the biggest piece of it was just to bring people together.
IT'S HARD TO LOVE AND RESPECT YOUR NEIGHBOR IF YOU DON'T KNOW YOUR NEIGHBOR. SO WE THOUGHT THAT EMPATHY BUILDING, WHICH IS CRUCIAL FOR HOW WE MOVE FORWARD AS A CITY, AND I THINK ESPECIALLY RIGHT NOW, OUR COMMUNITY IS JUST DEALING WITH A LOT. SOMETIMES LIFE CAN BE A LITTLE DIVISIVE. IT'S HARDER FOR YOU TO ATTACK SOMEBODY OR FOR YOU TO FEEL 'OTHERED' IF PEOPLE KNOW YOUR STORY AND YOU CONNECT WITH THEM. SO STORYTELLING FOR US HAS BEEN THE WAY TO KIND OF BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER AND BREAK DOWN SOME OF THOSE WALLS THAT SEPARATE US.
Definitely. That's really awesome. So do you still get to do interviews or are you kind of on another side of it now?
Yeah, I still do interviews. For the most part I do our series. I don't do a lot of the normal interviews anymore. We've had quite a few series that we've run. So we did one on eight female filmmakers in Cincinnati. We've done one on housing insecurity, which is 22 stories of those experiencing housing insecurity or advocates in the space. And so that was a huge lift. 22 stories is a lot. I manage that and I did a lot of the photography for it. So I haven't been writing in a long time. But I do a lot of photography and just kind of manage the processes for the series. And we've also got one going on right now that's around female entrepreneurship and another one is going to be launching in the fall around women's economic upward mobility in Cincinnati.
That's fantastic.
So lots of interesting stuff in there.
So you got to hear all sorts of amazing things in your work.
Yes. Which is the only reason why I can show up every day.
Yeah? What does that mean?
Well, I mean it's a hard job, to start something from nothing. And so I feel like if I didn't have all that inspiration surrounding me every day, there's no way I would do this work. But it's hard to quit when everybody else around me is so bad ass.
So, so this is your full time job?
Yes and no. It's 40 hours a week and I'm in the office 40 hours a week. But we're still working on fundraising enough money to hire our first employee, who will be me. Probably an editor will be our second employee. Until then I'm still freelancing, so I do design work. I have a degree in graphic communication design. So I've got a couple of clients that I still work with and then I still do a little bit of photography on the side and I run an Airbnb out of the third floor of my house. So just lots of side hustles until we figure out what Women Of Cincy looks like financially.
Yeah, that makes sense. So you're volunteering your time so far? That's amazing.
Yup yup yup, 40 hours a week. Hence why I said I wouldn't keep doing it if I didn't love all the people around me.
Yeah, definitely. That makes sense.
And see a need for it.
So have you seen the empathy that you're building in your community? Do you talk to the people who experience your stories and see the impact that they make?
Yep. I've got a little folder on my computer that says like, 'when I need to pick me up' and it's literally screenshots, or prints of different letters that people have sent us. Good things that have happened since their story was told on our platform or connections that they've made or just cool things that people's kids have said about them. Whatever it is, it's just a folder of nice things. It's pretty cool to see the ripple effect and who gets involved in what afterwards.
So it sounds like the base of this, it being after the election- I saw on your website, you talk about a little bit about the importance of voting. Do you want to say something to that?
Yeah. Women Of Cincy is a nonpartisan organization. We encourage everybody to make up their own mind and do their own research and establish their own beliefs. But we do support women. So people who support women, policy to support women. Granted that is up to interpretation depending on who you are. We just try to make sure that we are always looking at things from a positive, educated light. But yes, we are nonpartisan, but we do believe that people should use their voice. Because their voice is important and their story is important and lived experience is important. You should use that to make better decisions. So that's kind of where we come at it from. We've got a really big emphasis, not so much on federal or even state level politics, but more on a city based basis. So we are hyperlocal, so we don't get into conversations that are outside of Cincinnati usually. Because we believe that there's a lot of good work we can do right here. And we know we have the base impact here because that's where our people are. We didn't start out that way, but we realized that to do this work well, we had to have some kind of focus. And so by making sure that we were always Cincinnati based, that was the way we were able to focus.
Gotcha. So what did you do right after college? Did you go straight into this?
Almost. What did I do right after college? I got married, I think I was 23. My husband and I have been together since we were 15. So it wasn't like a shock or anything. For a hot second we thought we were going to move to Portland and then we didn't. Which is a whole other story in itself. He ended up getting a job in Cincinnati as a teacher and then I tried to apply for all of your big agencies, but I just literally couldn't even bring myself to finish the application.
Why is that?
I just didn't want to do it. I mean I'd co-oped at a bunch of different big agencies an. There was nothing wrong with them by any means, but it just wasn't the work I wanted. So I didn't know what to do. And then I ended up applying for People's Liberty. People's Liberty doesn't exist anymore, but it was an organization funded by the Haile Foundation, which is one of the big foundations in town. Basically it was created on the belief that if you give people a chance they can become great leaders. They funded people, instead of organization. So if you were a person who had an idea, you could apply for funding and there were three different levels. There was a $10,000 level, $15,000 level, and then a Haile fellowship, which is $100,000, where you quit your job and work on your project for an entire year. So that was really exciting. I did design work for them and communications and it was just a residency, so it had a time limit on it. After that was done, I started working for some people that I had met through People's Liberty, some of the past grantees. I Started freelancing basically full time. And then People's Liberty hooked me up with Flywheel. Flywheel, Social Enterprise Hub, which kind of a mouthful, is a nonprofit that helps businesses or nonprofits create social good businesses. So businesses that have some kind of like social good aspect to them. So that was a really cool job, as a first step into what an alternate career might look like. I was being paid on a grant, and so I had a time limit on that job. I helped them with branding work and some communications work and just trying to let people know about all the great work that they were doing. That was really fun, did a lot of interviews, met a lot of really cool people. During the end of my residency there Women Of Cincy started, and all of the chaos that came with it. But I was still freelancing for I think an entire other year after that. And then, while we were building Women Of Cincy, we weren't sure whether or not we wanted to be an LLC or a nonprofit. But we wanted to be a social good based business. So probably a B Corp is what we would have originally gotten. An LLC, you can start it in a day. A nonprofit takes a year with the IRS. So we needed something to put around Women Of Cincy, some kind of legal entity. So we became an LLC and then to fund Women Of Cincy me and some of the woman that I started it with started our own design agency. And so the idea was that we would bankroll Women Of Cincy with a design agency for however long it took for it to stand up on its own because publications don't make money unless people are following them. You have to be around for a minute for people to follow you. So we knew that there was a process to it. And so then I ran a design agency with one of the other girls that I had started Women Of Cincy with and then we hired women from the team as contractors basically to do work. Cause we already had an entire team of people that were writers, photographers, editors. So we were kind of a built in agency already, which is great. And that was successful. We served small to medium size women owned businesses, helped get a lot of people, kind of started as some of their first brands. And we did that for a while. But Women Of Cincy was just growing so much and we found that we hardly had any time to do the agency work. Then the woman I had started it with had to step back for some personal reasons. So then we decided we were going to shut down the agency, it was called 'Notice'. Beautifully branded. We were going to shut down the agency, turn Women Of Cincy into a nonprofit and basically give this a go. Now I'm back to freelancing with some of the clients that I had worked with when I owned and ran Notice. I stayed with a couple of them myself. And here we are. So Women Of Cincy just got its nonprofit status, finally, from the IRS at the end of December, we announced it to the public in January, and then in March we're kicking off our first fundraising campaign. So I have never worked in a place that was a full time, salaried, days off, kind of thing.
So is that just not something that you're into? Is that not something you think you'll ever do?
That's a good question. I don't know.
SOME DAYS IT'D BE GREAT TO BE LIKE, 'HEY, I KNOW HOW MUCH MONEY IS COMING IN THIS MONTH' AND YOU KNOW, THERE'S DISABILITY WITH IT AND 401K AND HEALTH CARE AND ALL THAT STUFF. SO I WOULDN'T SAY NEVER, BUT IT'S JUST NOT WHAT I'M PASSIONATE ABOUT. I'VE ALWAYS BEEN ABLE TO KIND OF FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO MY OWN THING.
Women Of Cincy is my sole priority right now, besides making enough money just to exist. If Women Of Cincy ever fails, I don't know what my next step is. I've got a lot of things I'm passionate about though. I think that at this point, after I've been through all of this, I run a business and now a nonprofit, there's a lot of doors open. Cause I know how to do a lot of things. I can do books and I can write contracts and I can manage sponsorships and do design work and copywriting and photography. I'd hope I'd be able to figure out something with all of those skillsets.
Well, that's really cool. With all of these things that you do, do you have any time for anything else?
Yes. Not all the time, but I try. I'm around people constantly. I kinda mentioned we've got like 70 people on our team. There's literally always somebody hanging out on my couch. I'm around people a lot. I also have an old home in North Avondale that I'm renovating with my husband. That's what we run our Airbnb out of. I'm working on our house a lot. I always have a ton of flowers in the summer, so I like to do a lot of yard work and housework, as in wallpaper and painting, tearing down walls and all kinds of stuff. It takes up a lot of my time. I'm also really interested in antiques and thrifting and spend a lot of time just walking around reuse stores. I have a dog. I'm not that great at cooking, but I try.
That's awesome. Did you get your house right out of college?
No. I graduated in 2016. I think I bought my house a little over a year ago, so we were living in different apartments. We actually got our house because rent kept going up and we were like, 'this is ridiculous'. You might as well just buy a house because we were paying as much in rent as we would in a mortgage. So that kind of pushed us into our first house. We didn't expect to get this house, which is big and old and has a lot of issues. But I just fell in love with it when I saw it.
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Trying to think. Do you want to do industrial design?
No.
What skill sets do you want to act on?
I enjoy fabrication. I enjoy designing furniture and building furniture and making it, but I also enjoy this. I enjoy talking to people, getting stories out. Teaching is something also I've been doing through just through co-ops and things like that. But most co-ops I've had have made me pretty miserable and I don't want to do that forever.
Yup. Totally get you.
Were you feeling similarly in your co-op experience?
Yeah. I won't say where all I worked, but yeah. I've always been pretty responsible and good at my job. I was never bad at any of the jobs and I always liked the people. But it was just the work felt super soul sucking. And I felt like I was just creating landfill a lot. I just was never passionate. Honestly the best co-op I ever had, and sounds kind of silly coming from a graphic designer, but it wasn't an agency. It was at Donatos Pizza in Columbus. I worked in the marketing department. The work wasn't what I was passionate about, but the people were just super fantastic. I had so much pizza and food, I gained like 10 pounds during that co-op. I just felt super comfortable and automatically when I came in, maybe it's just out of necessity on their end, but they trusted me and gave me a ton of work. I helped work on a new website and that was one of my first co-ops. That seemed really huge cause it was like a $20,000 website or whatever. I had my own office, which is cool, with a door that shut and a big swively chair and I got paid well. Which felt really good. And I got paid over time. I did a commercial when I was there, which is hilarious. I pretended to make pizza in the background of the commercial and some got paid pretty well and got a car. I just really enjoyed being there. The work wasn't great, it was just making pizza ads. But the people were great. But that one was almost enough to make me want to stay there because everything else around me was so good. Even though the work wasn't what I was passionate about. But all the other ones,
I JUST KNEW THAT IT WAS NOT FOR ME WHEN I WOULD WAKE UP IN THE MORNING AND BE LIKE, 'I DON'T KNOW, DO I HAVE THE FLU?' LIKE I'D TRY TO CONVINCE MYSELF THAT I COULDN'T GO IN FOR SOME REASON OR IF I WAS DRIVING ON MY WAY TO WORK AND I'D BE LIKE, 'YOU KNOW, I'D BE OKAY IF I GOT A FLAT TIRE RIGHT NOW. CAUSE THEN I WOULDN'T GET INTO WORK FOR ANOTHER TWO HOURS'. THAT'S NOT A GOOD WAY TO LIVE LIFE.
Even though Women Of Cincy hasn't figured out how to necessarily pay me a salary, I believe that it will. I love being there every day and the work that I'm doing freelance wise is not bad at all. I really like my clients. The Airbnb is interesting. Sometimes you have great people, sometimes you don't. But I get to meet a lot of people. I don't mind where I'm at. I'm just kind of all the odds and ends. It's a lot. And I would love to not have to do all of it. But it's not bad. It's better than the alternative. I mean, I don't wake up hoping that I have a flat tire. And I can go on vacations- well, granted you have to have money to go on vacations- but I don't have to ask anybody permission to leave or go to a doctor's appointment or whatever. I'm my own boss, which is great.
That sounds worth it to me. Sounds pretty great to me.
I think that money is definitely not everything.
How do you balance that in your life? Are you ever concerned about doing your passion and the effect that has on the rest of your life?
Yeah. It's always a push and pull. Trying to figure out, 'okay, so I want to do this with the house or we're going to go on this vacation, so I should take on more work'. But does that work, because I don't have a lot of free time, affect the other work that I do? Or is it going to hurt my relationships because I'm stressed out and tired. It's always a push and pull. I always figure it out. I always do whatever we need to do what we want to in our personal lives. It's just a matter of how bad you want it sometimes.
Do you ever get additional side hustles? Like some people I talk to who do these types of things, they'll have Etsy shops, or they'll work at a coffee shop, stuff like that.
Yeah. Every now and then I'll just take on more design work if I need to. For a hot second I thought about getting something like bartending or in a coffee shop or whatever. I don't think the timing works. Because my schedule is so sporadic and we're all volunteer run. I work around a ton of nine to five schedules. So my schedule is always crazy cause I've got to talk with my volunteers when they can talk. So I've never acted on it. But I've picked up more design work or photography. I'll do somebody's head shots or family friend's senior portraits for their kid or whatever I need. It ebbs and flows depending on what we need.
So you said that Women Of Cincy is a nonpartisan organization, but it still cares about policies that support women. Is that ever contentious?
Yes and no. We've been pretty lucky that we haven't really seen a lot of pushback on our end. Everybody's been super supportive when we run content that might feel controversial to some people. We've been pretty lucky that most of it's been pretty small or more private. We'll get an email or we'll get a private message about somebody not wanting us to publish this. But we've never really seen people act super disrespectful. I'm sure that's coming and we'll have to figure out what it looks like when it comes. It's kinda hard to attack people on their story. It's literally a direct Q&A, so it's their words, not ours. And so that's a way to kind of distance yourself a little bit from it too, cause you're just literally talking to somebody about their life and sometimes their life does have things in it that might not sit well with everybody or whatever. But it's kinda hard to attack somebody on their own story.
What type of topics are those do you find?
It depends. We've interviewed people who are running for office. We've interviewed folks who have been experiencing homelessness before. There some policy stuff there that we've seen people just not react well to. Or people talk about the whole 'get a job' thing, which is ridiculous. You've got some people who are just ridiculous and that you just kind of ignore. We've also done quite a few stories on folks who are trans or gender nonconforming. And honestly, we've not had anybody give us any negative comments on those, which has been really great. Every now and then, there's something, I'm sure somebody would have taken offense to. You can't please everybody.
But that's not that common occurrence for you guys?
No. It hasn't been. Everyone's been pretty supportive. I think it says something to the community that we've built around us. It's a community of people who don't always have the same beliefs but are respectful of one another and engaged and just mindful of how to be good neighbors to each other. I think that's the expectation that we've set too. If you're going to be a part of this and engage with our content, you're going to be respectful when you do it. That's kinda how we like walk that line.
That's good to hear.
And disclaimers everywhere. If there's something that's political, we have a disclaimer talks about that we're not partisan. This is someone's story and we encourage you to make up your mind and go do some research yourself and make up your own beliefs. If there's a story that talks about someone's childhood that we can't verify, but they might've talk about something traumatic that happened to them because of a family member we'll usually remove a name. Usually the person themselves will not say the first and last name. We'll say something about 'this is a story told from a first person perspective'. We just try to tell people if we think that there's gonna be something. Or if there's cursing, we'll say at the beginning 'hey, just a heads up, someone's cursing in this. If that isn't your thing, stop reading'. Or if there's something traumatic in someone's story and we need to put a trigger warning or something up, we will. But I've gotta hand it to our community that everyone's been pretty good. Pretty receptive of our work, which is awesome.
That's great. So people get nominated in order to be interviewed?
Yeah. For our feature stories. We've got a couple of different types of content. We've got our feature stories, which run every single week. They're the ones that you see that are the long form Q&A's about someone's life. We run this thing called 'Community Mix', which is a hodgepodge of different pieces that the team creates. So sometimes that could be more interviews, maybe on a smaller scale. Sometimes it could be a series. We've got one that's 'Sex Talk With Your Local Librarian', which is super fun. It's just kind of a bunch of different things that we cover. So that one is up to the writer. Then we also do series. It kinda just depends on what the series is and who we need to go find to speak on the series. The last one would be, we do have some sponsored content. We've got people that we partner with and we tell their stories too. But our feature stories are what we're most known for and that's what happens every week. And those are all done through nominations through our site. So the community chooses the majority of our content.
That's awesome. I really liked that you extend that cause they're the people who are consuming your content and they get to pick what they want on it.
Yup. The community writes it, the community picks it. And now, since we're a nonprofit, the community owns all of it. Being a nonprofit, I don't own anything, so I could be fired technically from Women Of Cincy, which is crazy. I obviously don't see that happening, but I don't own it. No one owns it.
So what do you identify as your community? Is it a geographical location? Is it a shared interest? What is that to you?
Yeah. Both of those. So we are location-based. Women Of CINCY. We want to be Cincinnati or regionally based at least. So we've definitely interviewed people from Northern Kentucky or Mason or whatever, but it has to be within this region. Then as far as from a personal standpoint, community is anyone who's engaging with us and believes in the mission. So it's pretty broad. But that's kind of the way we look at it.
Cool. And then it is called WOMEN Of Cincy. So how do you keep that inclusive?
Yeah. So anyone can nominate anyone. So there's no barriers on that. There's also no barriers on who can join the team, what leadership looks like. We're very inclusive when we say the word 'women'.
WE KIND OF JUST OPERATE AROUND THE BELIEF THAT WHEN YOU UPLIFT WOMEN, YOU UPLIFT EVERYONE. BECAUSE, IN CINCINNATI, WHAT DOES POVERTY LOOK LIKE? POVERTY LOOKS LIKE A MOM AND TWO KIDS. WHAT DOES GENDER BASED VIOLENCE LOOK LIKE? EVERYONE EXPERIENCES IT. BUT FOR THE MOST PART IT'S BASED AROUND WOMEN. SO WE'VE KIND OF GOT A BIT OF AN UNDERTONE FOR WHY WE'VE PICKED WOMEN. BUT WE'RE INCLUSIVE OF EVERYBODY.
Our board has men on it. We've got one male team member. Our volunteers go in and out but we've had some gender nonconforming folks on our team. It's all been everybody. That's kind of how we approach it. The name started on a whim the morning of the Women's March with an Instagram handle. While we're keeping it and that's who we are, it's always definitely been a struggle for us to let people know that we are inclusive and that Women Of Cincy is everybody. So we've tried to do a lot of things on our end to make that apparent.
Okay. What do you do?