(Illustration by Emma Carew Grovum for OpenNews)

If you want stay up-to-date on our community care programs during COVID-19, sign up for our community newsletter.

To our OpenNews family,

We hope you’re all well, and managing to take care of yourselves, loved ones, and each other in the ways we all need right now. At OpenNews, we’re all working from home, which at first glance isn’t much different from our normal routines. But whether you’re new to this or an expert at it, we know that this is still hard. We know that this is and feels different than working from home on any other day or week or month.

It’s also why right now, the team has decided to focus on the next step following self-care: community care.

We’ve always been grateful for how much the OpenNews community supports and cares for one another, so we’re coming up with a few ways for us to support, organize, and practice community care during COVID-19. For the next couple of weeks, we’ll be focused on helping you, our community, in three ways:

• Mutual Aid: Organizing different ways to easily help community members who need our collective support, and documenting and open-sourcing that process so anyone can do the same.
• Coverage Knowledge Sharing: If there’s an appetite for it, helping the community create story recipes so local journalists anywhere can replicate data analysis techniques to find stories for their communities.
• Building Remote Process and Culture for Our Community: To help us build the newsroom and team cultures we want as we work from home, we’re developing a tailored and lightweight resource that’s rooted in our community values, and uses expertise from community members to filter and focus the mountain of knowledge being shared about remote work.

As every day brings new information both about COVID-19 and what our community needs, we’ll listen and learn, we’ll adapt and adjust, and we’ll take on the best ways OpenNews can support you as we go.

On our most recent community call, we also focused completely on ways for us to support each other. We heard from Ted Han about a COVID-19 Guide being put together by the community, Chris Groskopf about working remotely, and us about this here community call and how you could start one up yourself.

Tina Ye also closed our call with a group feelings share and an emoji garden. Together, we checked in with each other, what we need from others and shared inspiring things we’ve seen and advice we’d like to share. It was a really special experience and we’re grateful for how many of you joined us. For those who could make it, you can still check out what happened here: https://etherpad.opennews.org/p/communitycall-Mar19

We’re already in the process of building projects in all three community care areas we’ve identified, but if you have suggestions, ideas, questions, or anything else you’d like to share with us, let us know. In the meantime, if you want to make sure you stay up-to-date on everything we’re doing, including what we’re planning for future community calls, sign up for our community newsletter. If, in this moment, you’re interested in supporting this work and the community as a founding sustainer, you can support us here.

Please take care, and know that we’re here, and we’re here for you.

—Sisi, Ryan, and Erika