Gumbo Media

08/18/2022

CALL FOR PITCHES!

Living Cities (.cities) and Gumbo Media () have partnered up again for a collaborative storytelling initiative that pushes us deeper through questions of wealth building and sustained abundance.

Our newest project, A New Foundation, seeks a more abundant and dignified future where wealth is a tool for catalyzing human flourishing and honoring intrinsic prosperity. This editorial ensemble will examine the language and systematic realities of generational wealth building through the lenses of homeownership and business starts and growth.

- What does it look like to shift the center of wealth away from whiteness?
- What does it mean that the communities with the least historical monetary wealth are often the richest in culture, art, and expression?
- What would be the impact of reorienting our comprehension of wealth as something more human, more dignified for all?

We are seeking pitches for story ideas from BIPOC journalists and writers to help answer these questions. Selected writers will be commissioned, published and heavily featured. We are accepting interest from folks in the following cities:

Albuquerque (NM)
Austin (TX)
Memphis (TN)
Minneapolis (MN)
Rochester (NY)
St. Paul (MN)

We will commission one writer per city to write a long-form editorial that examines racial wealth gaps in their city and explores curiously and creatively how we might reorient our comprehension of wealth as something more human and dignified for all.

Pay: $2,500
Deadline: 5 pm EST, September 01, 2022
Focus: Black, Indigenous, People of Color and/or people who identify as women, trans, non-binary, q***r, disabled, youth, immigrant and/or formerly incarcerated are strongly encouraged to apply.

We would love to hear from you!
Application in bio.
Full link: gumbo.typeform.com/ANewFoundation

07/15/2022

When you love what you do.

Scenes from “Forum Mantra” Production.

2022.07.13

In partnership with @1504.co .
Content by @1504.co.

02/02/2022

“A two-story building looms over 43rd Street in Bronzeville. Three murals — of artist Margaret Burroughs, jazz singer Nat “King” Cole and poet Gwendolyn Brooks — are painted where windows used to be. Photographs commemorating a history of Black voices adorn the outside walls.

This is The Forum ().

Built in 1897, The Forum became a vital part of a commercial neighborhood known as the city’s Black Metropolis, which flourished from the 1920s to the 1950s. In that time, The Forum hosted some of America’s most prominent Black figures.

Civil rights gatherings were held there. The Black Elks Fraternity met in the building for decades. And Cole, the jazz legend (who lived only a few blocks over), used to serenade audiences in the hall upstairs.”

Grateful to be featured alongside our partners at in today’s front-page story of honoring the legacy and the exciting future of The Forum. For those who don’t know yet, The Forum will now also be the home to Gumbo’s FIRST OFFICIAL OFFICE SPACE, our Chicago HQ.

Collectively, we’re calling this space the Metropolis Gallery, making it a home for community, expression and storytelling that honors the past, catalyzes the present, and reimagines the future of Black Chicago, rebuilding what once stood here as a Black Metropolis.

We’re excited to share much more about this journey as the year moves along, but for now, it feels good to be cemented in history, literally.

For the full story, use link in bio.
Photos by .
Final photo by .

11/11/2021

Final recap of the marathon and our primary programming 2021. Next year we hope to continue to bring you more reasons to move in community through sport. It’s really just the beginning.

Thank you / for capturing this moment.

11/09/2021

GumboFit fam. We can’t thank you enough for a full year of training, community, and gathering. To run these programs successfully, it takes a lot of dedication, time, focus, and hard work (much of it unseen) from both the community and our captains. And as we know, recovery is part of what it means to train effectively.

And so, in an effort to fully recharge and recover holistically—especially with the holidays around the corner—we’ll be taking a small break away from all structured in-person meetups and activities for the remainder of this year.

We will still be hosting challenges and finding creative ways to engage, so stay tuned for that! But we encourage everyone to keep up the good work, meet up with your running buddies, explore the city, and hit up other running communities like , etc. But just as importantly, we encourage you to enjoy the holidays and to honor whatever level of rest your mind and body craves. Remember, sometimes we have to slow down to speed up.

Celebrate yourself this holiday season, and all you’ve accomplished this year. We’re so proud of you. Back in a flash!

11/07/2021

Over the course of the final 10 weeks leading up to the marathon, and hosted a Sports Photography Fellowship, powered by . The premise was simple, really. Begin to shake up a niche sports photography market in Chicago that’s pretty systematized, and open up new doors for representation, opportunity, and innovation with a focus on Black and Brown photographers.

In those ten weeks:

- Amazing photographers offered up their time as mentors ( .briella ). Thank you!
- Amazing communities opened up their spaces for practice ( ).
- All fellows shot for , and several fellows were published.
- All fellows received media badges to and will be published and featured heavily in their annual results book and social media.
- Fellows established new connections and relationships that are still generating opportunities.

What we learned is that opening space for emerging creatives is not difficult. And it fundamentally begins to alter creative ecosystems that need fresh perspectives.

Shout out to the fellows for your hard work, focus, and dedication. We love y’all! ❤️🚀 If you’re looking for sports photography (or photography in general), these are your people:



rez

kinglens









Photos by .

11/05/2021

“Gumbo represents a group of people on parallel journeys who arrived, each in their own time and experience, to a place where we no longer wanted to conform to systems and structures that asphyxiate our peace, our wonder, our joy. We are unabashedly choosing our own joy and doing so successfully.

This is a call to all Black and Brown creatives: embrace your power. Trust your intuition. Do not surrender any part of yourself to meet the status quo. Ask for more; demand more.”

Link to full feature in bio.

Photography:
Production:
Art Direction:
Words/Article:
Editing:
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Hair/Make-Up:
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09/25/2021

Family.

Beautiful selects from for ’s series.

Gumbo community strong 💪🏾.

06/19/2021

We honor Juneteenth today by releasing a true labor of Black love, expression, and liberation.

Back in January, we selected 6 amazing storytellers to join us on a journey of personal and communal unearthing—what turned out to be a true uncovering of buried traumas, an overdue process of communal healing, and an invitation and demand for our cities and their white majorities to reckon with their racial histories, champion anti-Blackness, and reimagine new futures.

We are excited to present Reckoning with Race, a six-part, interactive storytelling initiative on racial reckoning in U.S. cities in partnership with Living Cities. We could not be more inspired and rejuvenated by these fantastic artists and their commitment to free expression and truth-telling. We are so grateful to have the opportunity to do this work.

We will continue to do our part to excavate and amplify our birthright, Black joy. , family!

https://bit.ly/ReckoningWithRace

12/08/2020

Living Cities has partnered with us (Gumbo Media) to tell the history and imagine the future of racial dynamics in select U.S. cities.

Over the course of the next year, six cities are taking part in a Year of Reckoning cohort, uniting leaders from cities committed to imagining what an anti-racist society might look like, and to playing an important role in building it through transforming government policies, practices, and operations.

These six cities are: Albuquerque (NM), Austin (TX), Memphis (TN), Minneapolis (MN), Rochester (NY), and St. Paul (MN).

We are seeking ONE writer/researcher from each of the six cities above to engage in a three-month-long research and storytelling process, culminating in a comprehensive historical narrative on their respective city. Work will honestly reckon with the history of these cities that created the racial inequities we see today, and reimagine more equitable futures. All work will be compensated $1,000+.

Black, Indigenous, People of Color and/or people who identify as women, trans, non-binary, q***r, disabled, youth, immigrant and/or formerly incarcerated are strongly encouraged to apply.

Could you be the voice to represent your city? If so, pitch today at: bit.ly/2Lk67AD

Application closes 5 pm EST, January 01, 2021

Seeking writers/researchers for work in racial equity. Pay: $1,000+

10/09/2020

Check out our recent project featuring the amazing work from . It’s incredible to see how they’ve reimagined and reclaimed abandoned spaces to provide resources for the community.

As an artist-led non-profit, the work they do is crucial to the revitalization of our communities. We’re inspired by all that they do and are encouraged to get out, take space, and stake claim into our futures.

It was so fun and rewarding to lead this project, and we’re so grateful for all of the talented creatives that helped bring this to life:

Video by /
Produced by .oshay
Art Direction by
Directed by
Edited by Rubin Daniels Jr.
Music by
And special thanks to