Dream-Shaping Project Check-In: Year One
The Dream-Shaping project hit a milestone this month: We submitted our first report to the Mellon Foundation to share what we accomplished in Year 1 of the three-year grant. Pop bottles!
Be sure to check out the project team so you can see all the amazing people involved in this work.
Here’s what’s good with the grant:
Admin
Admin work is often under celebrated but so crucial to the success of any project or program. We take a lot of pride in this work because the goal is to support project members as much as possible.
We welcomed Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez as our Grants and Giving Manager. She set up an amazing system for tracking our budget and expenses and generating reports.
We met with our Advisory Team, Zakiya Collier, Twanna Hodge, Gabriel Solís, and Laura Tadena, four times this year and asked for feedback to see how we can improve these meetings and communication.
We created a knowledge base for all things related to this grant to make information easily findable and at the ready for project team members.
Team Convening
The first-ever in-person We Here meeting.
We are meeting in-person for the first time ever after many years of working asynchronously and online. In 2024 we worked very hard to determine these meeting details. I’m sure you feel us when we say meeting in-person is pricey with flights, meals, transportation, lodging, etc. Without this grant, we could have never planned an in-person meeting without traveling for other business (e.g. a conference) we all happened to be doing (which is unlikely considering the diversity of our work).
We surveyed members throughout this process regarding things like location and discussion topics.
We Lead
Our upcoming leadership program.
Another project that would have been impossible to initiate without Mellon funding is the leadership program We Lead facilitated by Jennifer Brown and Sofia Leung.
The facilitators met regularly and began working on the program curriculum.
This program will take place in 2026.
We Here Press
We’re excited to announce we’re working with Dorothy Judith Berry on our first physical publication titled, The House Archives Built & Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities.
Identified a series of publishers with similar models and/or values that we resonate with; developed questions and hosted interviews with some of these presses to help us begin imagining how We Here Press might be structured.
Hosted a We Here community event to better understand the needs and desires the community has for We Here Press.
Began working with Dorothy Berry on her manuscript and we’re excited to be working with Amalaeju Design Studio again on both We Here Press branding and Dorothy’s book (See: We Here branding and We Reads branding).
Eventually you can learn more about work at www.weherepress.org.
We Together
We Here’s mentorship program.
Thanks to this grant, we’ve been able to contract a Mentorship Development Coordinator, to give some assistance to program leaders Crystal Chen and Nicollette Davis. Chella Vaidyanathan was welcomed to the team!
Undertook an assessment of feedback of past cohorts to strengthen upcoming future cohorts.
Planned and hosted an information session for prospective mentorship participants (both mentors and mentees).
Developed application criteria for professional development funding for participants.
Facilitated and finalized mentor/mentee matches for the current cohort.
Launched the current cohort with an orientation for participants.
We Reads
Contracted graphic designer Chindo Nkenke-Smith; released re-brand materials and updated the We Here website.
Interviewed, hired, and onboarded Literary Researcher, Courtney Shareef.
Selected podcast hosts, conducted interviews for podcast/editor; and made selection for producer/editor (contract begins April 2025).
On Deck
Year One was a lot of prep work for the last two years of this work. We’re excited to meet in person, publish a physical book, learn more about the mentors and mentees, create a podcast, and launch a leadership program.