My name is Andrew Fan. I’m a data journalist and the new executive director of the Invisible Institute.
In my five years at the Invisible Institute, including serving as the interim director for the last year, I’ve learned that leadership within our organization is not a solitary act. Our team values shared decision-making, striving for collective leadership on projects, drawing in community perspectives about our work, and gathering to talk as an organization before embarking on new initiatives.
This process is central to what makes our work notable and powerful. Our audio team’s collective approach to storytelling is on full display in their most recent podcast, You Didn’t See Nothin. This way of working also sits at the heart of CPDP.co, our groundbreaking police data site built on hundreds of iterative design conversations between technologists, data analysts, lawyers, and dozens of young people who talked to us about what they wanted to know about police in their communities.
As executive director, my role is to help my colleagues pursue projects that are both creative and help build a more just Chicago. This model of leadership emerges directly from the example set by our founder, Jamie Kalven. Jamie’s decades of work as a journalist are grounded in his long-term relationships with the people he reported on, many of them residents of Chicago’s high-rise public housing. Even as he founded an organization, Jamie consistently embodied a way of working that centers on inquiry and honest conversation instead of traditional hierarchy.
This kind of shared decision-making is not always straightforward or simple; it is a constant work in progress.
Last week, I sat in on a listening party for our inaugural audio class for South and West siders. After just four weeks of intensive classes, the students, most of them first-time audio producers, created incredible audio stories that centered people in their lives, ranging from firefighters to artists to elders.
The class was a testament to talented storytellers building their voices in a new medium and also to their dedicated teachers, Erisa Apantaku and Sarah Geis from our audio team.
It was also a testament to our way of working. Our audio team is fresh off completing their second widely-celebrated podcast in just three years. At the same time, they are deeply interested in finding new ways to incorporate collaborative relationships with Chicagoans into their work and to craft models to train a broader set of audio storytellers. I am deeply excited to see what they do next.
Our work is distinct, but it also needs your support to continue. Investing in alternate approaches to storytelling takes resources. Our investigative reporting on wrongful convictions, police use of force, and public records produces real change, but also takes time and patience. If you’ve taken a minute to use our online tools, listened to our narrative podcasts, or read some of our investigative reporting in the last year, I hope you’ll consider making a donation to help us sustain the work. All donations to our narrative opportunity fund through the end of 2023 are matched through a generous gift from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation. We deeply appreciate the support.