Finding Meaningful Connections During a Global Pandemic
Prior to participating in the Public Media Women in Leadership mentoring program, Kate Weibezahl and Elis Estrada frequently collaborated on youth engagement work with PBS NewsHour’s Student Reporting Labs. Elis, Senior Director of the program, builds partnerships with stations to support youth journalism in Reporting Labs classrooms across the country. As the Community Engagement Coordinator for PBS SoCal | KCET, Kate works with Elis to strengthen relationships with local schools and connect her station with young journalists in Southern California. Automatically matched on PMWL’s mentor platform, Elis and Kate built a successful mentor/mentee experience by creating a supportive space to share challenges and opportunities for growth.
Finding meaningful connection through the PMWL Mentor Program (Kate’s perspective)
The Public Media Women in Leadership Mentoring Program matches mentees with leaders in the public media industry. Elis Estrada, Senior Director of the PBS NewsHour’s Student Reporting Labs program, and I were matched this year in the mentor program. After six months of talking about my career goals and challenges, I’ve become more confident in my abilities, with more clarity about my career path, and I’ve found myself a true mentor in Elis. The PMWL program is an opportunity to expand public media networks, and both Elis and I were looking forward to making new connections.
Elis and I have already developed a strong working relationship. I manage the Student Reporting Labs program at my station, and have worked with Elis on multiple occasions, finding ways to connect high school SRL students with PBS SoCal | KCET and our staff. So, when Elis and I were matched to be a mentor/mentee pair, I was initially hesitant. Would I be missing out on the opportunity to network and meet new people in public media? Should we request a different match? But, I also knew that Elis and I worked well together and I was interested in learning more about her career. I decided to work with Elis, and I’m so glad I did. Building a mentor relationship with someone I was already familiar with proved to be an incredibly fulfilling experience. Because Elis and I had already built a strong working relationship, I was comfortable talking about both internal and external roadblocks that I faced as a woman in public media.
The Public Media Women in Leadership mentoring program is structured to lead to success. It is so helpful to have a program that specifically addresses career growth in public media spaces, a world we all know has its own set of challenges and particularities. The fact that Elis and I knew each other prior to the mentorship definitely contributed to our positive experience in the program--I for one really looked forward to our bi-monthly meetings. But, the support PMWL provided created the framework to have the conversations I needed.
The program defines clear expectations between mentor and mentee, with the mentee identifying specific goals and action items to accomplish. This structure guided Elis and my conversations over the Summer and Fall of 2020. Under her mentorship, I defined what skills and responsibilities I’ve acquired over my 3 years in public media, set goals that targeted places I want to grow, and talked with others at my organization about what my future looked like at my station. At my job, I have since taken on new projects that I’m passionate about and had difficult, but rewarding conversations about my career. I can trace those developments to specific discussions I had with Elis, who supported and encouraged me to advocate for myself.
When I began this mentor program I felt stuck. This year is challenging for everyone. I’ve spent a lot of time balancing my desire to grow in my career with acknowledging the immense feelings of gratitude I have for my job, my health, and the security that brings. Participating in the mentorship program created a structure to reflect on how I want to grow and what actionable steps I can take to get there, as well as created a space to talk about the mental and emotional toll 2020 has taken on our wellbeing. The world looks a lot different from when I signed up for the Public Media Women in Leadership mentorship program, but it definitely helped me reflect and find direction in a year filled with uncertainty. I’m looking forward to growing my relationship with Elis as we support one another on our paths in public media.
A welcoming professional respite during COVID (Elis’s perspective)
I signed up as a mentee and mentor with Public Media Women in Leadership (PMWL) in hopes of deepening connections with my colleagues and people I admired. After months of missed connections, I was thrilled to receive an email from PMWL in May 2020 saying I matched with Kate.
Kate and I have worked together for a few years through her work with PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs at PBS SoCal KCET. I had some reservations about how this type of connection could change our regular working relationship and was uncertain about Kate’s expectations for a mentor, but the connection turned out to be invaluable during the pandemic.
There’s no better time than now, we both thought, as we met for the first time to establish our mentor and mentee relationship, and caught each other up on how well we were surviving lockdowns, quarantines, and our overall new way of life. With simple guidelines and suggested frameworks for creating healthy mentoring relationships, PMWL’s program was poised to serve public media professionals during one of the most uncertain periods of our careers.
When we started back in May, I didn’t realize how transformative it would be to start a professional mentoring relationship during COVID. Kate and I set up biweekly, one-hour meetings and were flexible about rescheduling or canceling if something came up. From the beginning, we were open with each other, and transparent about letting our guards down during our meetings. We learned so much about each other, both personally and professionally.
As a mentor, I was able to practice balancing the most important part of mentoring, listening, with sharing stories about my own struggles and lessons I learned about leadership over the years. I gained so much insight and appreciation into the engagement work Kate does and both of us became more informed about the myriad ways stations work and how we could apply what we learned from each other to improve our professional goals.
Mentoring programs take work, but it pays off immensely. In a non-pandemic era, there are many great networking programs in public media for people to meet and connect, but I found so much value in the unstructured virtual time me and Kate had through PMWL to talk through our day-to-day, reflect on our career goals, both large and small, and find meaning in our work amid the ups and downs of an unpredictable year.
Elis Estrada is the senior director for Student Reporting Labs, where she oversees the development, work and content of SRL’s growing national network of schools and partner public media stations. She loves puzzling through large-scale projects that aim to motivate and inspire students and teachers. Elis is deeply invested in creating fun, educational opportunities for young people to engage with news media. Before joining the NewsHour, Elis held dual titles at the News Literacy Project, as program manager for the Washington, D.C region and associate communications director for digital media. Prior to NLP, Elis worked as a producer at NY1 News in New York City.
Kate Weibezahl is the Community Engagement Coordinator at PBS SoCal | KCET in Southern California. As part of the Engagement team, Kate designs and produces engagement projects for both national PBS content and local productions. In addition, she manages the station’s youth engagement work with high school students. A life-long public media fan, she aims to build community and support powerful storytelling. Kate is a native Angeleno and holds a BA in political science from the University of Chicago.
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