our global garden of joy Hi 👋 I’m Jasmine, founder of The Bloom. We have a phenomenal selection of social impact resources this week for you to bloom & forward to your friends!
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Welcome bloomers, Here is your summary of the newsletter this week: 🌱 Career interview with social impact multimedia producer 🌱 Young champions of the earth UN award for USD 20,000 🌱 LGBTQI+ young professionals global program with love & light, Jasmine Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up to get your own copy of The Bloom to your inbox with top social impact jobs, uplifting stories, and global resources. Partner with us! We're looking forimpactful organizations to partner with The Bloom to bring connections, resources, and opportunities to our global community.
Social impact learning community: Joinour buzzing social impact community to learn from extraordinary social impact professionals in networking and mentorship events.
fresh soil
What is your “official” professional role and field?
I’m a multimedia story producer who specializes in ethical storytelling. I work across formats— video, audio, and written. As a small business owner, I’ve partnered with nonprofits and social enterprises in many fields to find stories that will support their missions and connect them with partners/communities/funders. My projects range from short-form video series and case studies to proposals and content strategy. Throughout all this work, I’m questioning power dynamics at every step of production and keeping generosity at the center.
What is your unofficial role and field?
I’m a professional listener, a midwife of stories, a very curious human, and a perpetual student of ethics in storytelling. After ten years as an entrepreneur, I’m now a jobseeker, too, looking for a full-time role where I can collaborate more closely with an impact communications team and help establish a culture of ethical storytelling. My most joyful work comes from asking people questions and hearing their life stories…so regardless of my role, I’m usually finding excuses to interview people.
How did you get to where you are today in your career?
Fourteen years ago, I had a chance run-in with a publisher in Los Angeles. He was an exiled journalist from Ethiopia, and over the course of a conversation that spanned half of lunchtime, we decided to team up. Three weeks later, I was on a plane to Ethiopia to film a project on his behalf—my first documentary story ever.
He has been my mentor ever since, and I owe so many of my skills and experiences to him. When I came home from Ethiopia with a hard drive of footage I had to learn to edit, he encouraged me to continue solving problems as I went. That scrappiness still serves me in my career today. He also showed me how to hold stories with compassion (even hard-to-hear stories) and how much power comes with being able to share and tell stories. 10/10 recommend being open to mentors that crop up unexpectedly!
Beyond my main mentor, it’s my entire support system who has led me here. I’m highly introverted and still recovering from the individualistic values baked into me, but it’s clear now how the wrong turns of my career have all been times I isolated myself. My friends, coaches, peers, and network are the ones who give me important context about my painful rejections, boost my confidence when I feel low, or gently let me know I’ve mis-stepped. Without them, I’d be doing more ugly-crying and less happy dancing.
Your relationship to “social impact”: has it evolved since you began your career? I’ve always seen my storytelling skills as a way to support changemakers and their missions. Now, though, I also see the act of telling stories as a direct tool for advocacy and justice. Process matters. Because standard documentary storytelling practices have extractive, exploitive roots, it’s my job to question the power dynamics involved at every step of my work. Each time I sit down with someone to hear their life stories, I have a chance to use my power as a storyteller with care. I get to treat my interviewees with dignity, listen fully, and honor their experiences. If I started out thinking social impact is about what you do, I see now that it’s also very much about how you do it.
Podcasts?
🎤Guardians of the River: Producer Cat Jaffee was my audio teacher, and I’m an auto-fan of anything she does. This is narrative non-fiction that involves ELEPHANTS but also some amazing perspectives on a complex environmental situation in southern Africa.
🎤When Bearing Witness: Learnings on trauma-informed storytelling. Highly recommend for anyone who works with humans.
🎤Into the Depths, National Geographic: I’m halfway through this series following an international team of Black scuba divers who searches for long-lost wrecked ships that were carrying enslaved Africans to America. (Featuring: underwater stories and unexpected poetry.)
Connect with Briana and inspiring social impact leaders in directly in our global social impact community! And make sure to check out the upcoming incredible mentorship and networking events. 🌺
Rotary Peace Fellowship: Through academic training, practice, and global networking opportunities, the Rotary Peace Centers program develops the capacity of peace and development professionals to become effective catalysts for peace. The fellowships cover tuition and fees, room and board, round-trip transportation, and internship and field-study expenses.
Black Girl Environmentalist's Hazel M. Johnson Fellowship: For early career Black women and gender-expansive persons in USA - fellows are placed with a partner organization for a 10-week summer internship placement and cohort experience, gaining the skills, resources, and connections necessary to enter and stay in the environmental and climate sector. Fellowship positions are full-time paid positions and will also receive a stipend of USD 5,000.
🎉 Awards & Pitches
Ubuntu Climate Movement Storytelling Showcase: The Ubuntu Climate Movement is looking to hear the response of creatives to their call “Ubuntu, I am because, we are”. Tell them a story about a joyful world, celebrating ‘Oneness’, recognizing our interdependence with each other and mother earth. Share your journey, ancestral stories, traditions and practices. Show how music, painting, sculpting, gardening, dance, a poem, or other creative and generative activities represent the meaning of “Oneness.” Multiple awards range from USD 500 to USD 10,000.
UN Environment Young Champions of the Earth: Awards are now open for the flagship initiative by UN Environment Program, celebrating ambitious young minds worldwide with innovative ideas to safeguard our planet. Winners receive: mentorship & workshops, networking opportunities, global media exposure, and USD 20,000 seed-funding.
Greenr Sustainability Accelerator Program: One of the largest sustainability accelerator programs in the world has opened its application for its second cohort. Supported by the IKEA Foundation and the Visa Foundation, it is a year-long equity-free program that supports startups disrupting the environmental action space with access to business & technical advisors, fundraising, and market linkages.
World Bank Group Youth Pitch Competition: The competition will provide a global platform for young problem-solvers around the world to display their unique, innovative solutions in the form of a pitch deck.
💸 Scholarships
Z Zurich Foundation Scholarship: For young leaders to attend the One Young World Summit 2024 in Montréal, Canada. This is for you if you are working on projects related to mental wellbeing, climate resilience, or social equity through education, employability, or entrepreneurship solutions.
community garden
Finding a network of extraordinary social & environmental impact leaders to build relationships of reciprocity with has never been easier 🥰Here's a few Asks & Offers happening over in our community this week:
🌱Gabriela: Hi, bloomers! Is anyone going to CSW68? We invite you to our parallel event "Safe Abortion Care & Reproductive Autonomy: A Path to Economic Empowerment", hosted by the International Rescue Committee, Fòs Feminista and Vitala Global Foundation. We'll explore the vital link between safe abortion care, reproductive autonomy, and economic empowerment 💚
🌱Celine: Hello Bloomers! My first article “The Reimagining of African Indigenous Education,” was published today. It delves into the transformative potential of integrating African Indigenous principles into contemporary education systems. It advocates for a holistic approach that incorporates traditional African philosophies like Ubuntu into learning experiences more intentionally. The piece suggests that such an education system could better prepare individuals for a sustainable future by fostering a deep connection with community, environment, and heritage. I would greatly appreciate feedback on the article; and I am open to ideas or connections or opportunities that allow me either research/write more on the topic of education for Africa or work in education program development.
Reach out & reply directly in the "Asks & Offers" section of our – it's buzzing community platform 🐝
grow new roots
🌟 Social Impact Employer Spotlight
Data-Pop Alliance is an international nonprofit created in 2013 out of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and MIT Media Lab. They bring together researchers, experts, practitioners, and activists to change the world with data through three pillars of work: diagnosing local realities and human problems with data and AI; mobilizing capacities, communities, and ideas towards more data literate societies; and transforming the systems and processes that underpin societies and countries.
Email team@readtobloom.com to feature your organization and job openings to 40,000 diverse and talented bloomers around the world. Warning: spicy sidenote comments might appear when we want to *extra* express how much we love these job openings 🌶️ ASIA + OCEANIA 🇮🇳 Partnerships associate – Good Business Lab 🇭🇰 Education officer – WWF-HK 🇦🇺 Events coordinator – BlaQ Aboriginal Corporation AFRICA + MIDDLE EAST Associate – Value for Women Director of comms in Sub-Saharan Africa – Y Labs 🇷🇼 Content writer intern – Y Labs Rwanda 🇰🇪 Director of engagement – The Nature Conservancy 🇿🇦 Company secretary associate – Climate Fund Managers
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Hi all, I've just started reading Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I'm about 5 chapters in and so far it's very good! I'll link to it again later if I finish it/
