Looking back over five years of Media Girlfriends and new paths ahead
Hello friends! Happy summer.
We are marking this year by celebrating how much we’ve accomplished over the past five years. The media business remains tough! And the world seems to become more and more harsh and absurd, politically. But there’s beauty in this world.
For example:
Yes, I'm going to stop to smell these.
What began in the depths of 2020...
Media Girlfriends started as a podcast in 2016 that Nana aba began off the side of her desk. When an opportunity came up to produce a podcast and video series about Black history, we jumped at it. It was 2020, and Garvia was talking about legacy. All three of us were eager to throw our skills into making work that would be lasting and important.
Strong and Free was a beautiful, fruitful (and fun!) collaboration with a team at Historica Canada and together we made something we’re so proud of, in both official languages.
We knocked out that first project, collected a few awards (decided by our journalism peers, which means so much to us!) and didn’t look back.
...we can celebrate today, in 2025
In 2020, everyone’s lives changed, in different ways. I remember talking about community in my own newsletter At The End Of The Day – a lot. Maybe it was the sense of isolation. Some people were floundering, without work. We were lucky enough to experience the opposite, a great surge of interest in telling stories about complex issues with sensitivity and journalistic rigour.
We partnered with many great individuals, across very cool teams, and we learned so much by working with them. Together, we created projects for:
Toronto Star ("Between Us With Wes Hall")
Samara Centre for Democracy ("Humans of the House")
Canadian Women’s Foundation ("Signal for Help")
McMaster University’s Trauma and Recovery Lab ("Healthcare Salute")
Carleton’s political science department ("Black on the Ballot")
We worked on many shorter projects in between that were no less meaningful, including:
Spotify
Hot Docs
Canadian Race Relations Foundation
Dress For Success
And more
We learned from everyone. Looking back over the past five years, we’re grateful for the folks who reached out to us, with contracts in hand. They trusted that we could work together and create something new – and we did.
If you run a business, you know that there’s a lot of education that needs to happen, going in both directions, and that creative collaboration isn’t easy.
That’s why it’s worth celebrating that five years later, we’ve got six journalism awards and at least three dozen colleague relationships to celebrate.
As the core group of Media Girlfriends the company, the three of us are all focusing on different things today. But the spirit of what we do and the constellation of energy and support through like-minded, hard-working people, will continue.
In tough times, I believe we need to tally up the wins, the ones we accomplished together. I hope you do the same. It’s that kind of energy that will keep us all going.
Take care,
Hannah, Garvia, Nana aba
Have you heard?
Sooo, we had a federal election earlier this year (doesn’t that already feel like ages ago? It hasn’t even been two months!). If you want to unclench from the daily and hourly headlines, and think about legacy, as Garvia does, here is a podcast that we dropped earlier this year. It’s called Black on the Ballot and it features new academic research from Dr. Erin Tolley at Carleton University, in partnership with Operation Black Vote.
