This Is Entrepreneurship: Chelsie Walter on Putting Empathy to Work
We cap off our series with our very own, Chelsie Walter, executive director and co-founder of Women of Cincy. Chelsie talks about how this idea to capture a few inspiring stories grew into a volunteer-driven media outlet that has published nearly 400 stories in just three years. She shares how she’s dealt with this rapid growth, a global pandemic that sent the organization into a tailspin, and how she stays committed to the Women of Cincy mission by keeping empathy at the heart of everything she does.
There is no single definition of an entrepreneur or the obstacles they face. As part of our year-long series sponsored by Main Street Ventures, our community chose 12 of the biggest obstacles female-identifying entrepreneurs face, and we found 12 women who spend their days conquering them. Explore the whole series here.
Interview by Michaela Rawsthorn. Photography by Karly Nemeth.
What’s your elevator pitch?
Women of Cincy is a nonprofit media platform built to awaken and amplify changemakers through storytelling, community, and mentorship. What that really means is we put empathy to work. We believe that every citizen can create a more equitable and inclusive community, but that starts with understanding our collective narrative and understanding and respecting each other.
How did Women of Cincy get its start?
Women of Cincy started on a whim in January 2017 as an Instagram account. At first, it was just a way to document a couple of stories from the Cincinnati Women's March. That was supposed to be the end of it.
A couple of weeks later, a group of us – Kelsey, Kiersten, Kali, Mackenna, and me – were hanging out at my house. We were kind of talking about that experience, and we were like, “We should give this a shot.” So, the next big piece that we had to define was what this is.
What we knew from the beginning is that we wanted people to see each other as people. Many barriers separate us, whether that be political, religious, socio-economic, race, you name it. A lot of the time, we put each other in these buckets, and we try to create stereotypes around each other instead of seeing and understanding each other as people all wanting the same things.
We want a safe place to rest at night. We want the best schools for our kids. We want access to health care. But we allow stuff to come in between working together, instead of just being the kind of neighbors that we should be to each other.
How does Women of Cincy help people see each other as people?
The biggest way we do it, hopefully, is through empathy.
Empathy is not a buzzword for us. It is just a way of being. If you tell your story, and I can feel what you feel, and I can connect with you on a deep level, then it’s going to impact me. It will affect the way I think and how I make decisions, hopefully in a positive way. I am not going to just think about myself anymore. I am going to think about you too.
At the end of the day, Women of Cincy belongs to the community. They built it. Everything from nominations for our feature stories to photography to writing, it’s all community-driven.
It’s really the core of our mission to create empathy and strengthen communities through empathy building. We also live our mission by making connections that would not be made if we were not there. A great example of that is the mentorship provided through our residency program.
Our residency program is a huge piece of Women of Cincy, and it is fundamental to our success and everyday operations. We connect these young people to their community and make them invested in their community, and give them a good foundation to work off of and real-life experience.
Are there lessons about empathy that can be applied to the big problems that the country struggles with right now?
We believe that when you change hearts and minds, you change behaviors. We change behavior to change systems. A good way to do this is by changing how we talk about each other and to each other. That starts with empathy.
How do we understand each other? How do we come to a place where we can agree on an outcome? Then, how do we get there?
For instance, let’s say you and I are on different sides of the spectrum as far as housing goes. But maybe we both believe that everybody in one of the world's wealthiest countries deserves to lay their head down at night in a safe place they can call home. Now we can talk about how we get there. But first, we have to agree on fundamental morals. That starts with empathy because if I don’t have compassion for other people, then I don’t care where they lay their head down at night.
Without empathy, we do not have a democracy. We do not have a city that works well and serves everybody. We are unable to do some of these significant system changes that we need to do. We will continue to just treat the symptoms or just dig in our heels.
That is why I do this work every day, even when it’s tough. Plus, I’m having a child. That has solidified in my heart why this work is so important. I don’t want my kid to live in the world that I live in right now. I don’t want them to inherit the same problems that I inherited. I want them to grow up respecting everybody from different backgrounds and cultures, and everybody who has a different viewpoint, and have a conversation with them. How can I have this child without caring about the world that they inherit? Our kids deserve better than this.
Can you teach empathy?
I don’t know if it’s so much as teaching empathy but helping people feel it. We can put people into situations where they can experience compassion, but it’s not something you teach. But I also think that it is something that all of us are capable of feeling.
Our job is to make sure that we’re creating as many opportunities as possible to put people in situations where they can experience empathy. Empathy is something that you have to work on. It’s a muscle. My job is to deliver empathy to your doorstep every single day to help you use that muscle and flex it.
Out of all the stories Women of Cincy has shared, do any stick out as really powerful?
We have published over 370 stories. There are a lot of them that stick out. We’ve had many positive responses from folks, but I think one of the most powerful stories I worked on was our housing insecurity series.
That series was just different. You don't see many stories that focus on housing as an in-depth look at people's lives, who they are, what they have been through, and what they experience every day.
Back in 2018, there were a group of people who were living in tents underneath a bridge near Paul Brown Stadium. They were evicted from that area. It was in a lot of the local newspapers. While many outlets covered it, they didn’t do it in a way that showed who the people were. That was something that just really kept eating at me.
I went down there with Angie Lipscomb, who is one of our photographers. We went underneath the bridge where everybody was living. There were probably about fifty tents. Understandably, people were hesitant toward us when we walked down there.
But we talked to Bison, who was the mayor of the tent community. We told him, “Listen, we know that you guys probably don’t want a lot of media down here, and we get it. This is your life. We’re walking in your living room right now, but you know, we just want to tell your story in your own words and figure out who you are.”
That was the whole point of the We Are Here series. We were not trying to sensationalize anything. It was not poverty porn.
After that, he was super receptive. Another guy came and brought us some plastic chairs. He set us up, so we could talk to people one by one and get to know them.
It was really powerful to work on that series. We have another series that I think is super powerful as well. It’s about the economic mobility of Black women in Cincinnati. We interviewed six women who are all at different stages of their careers and have different things going on in life. We examine the American dream, and ask if it is possible in the society that we created. It’s fascinating. I loved working on it.
Then, of course, this series around entrepreneurship is just amazing. It helps me to keep going because this shit is really hard.
I am the 17th entrepreneur in this series. I have sat in on 16 of these interviews [five initial interviews and 12 monthly interviews]. Just hearing everyone's stories and realizing that no one has it figured out, but we all get up every day and do what we love, and try hard, and make mistakes along the way? That is just really reassuring to hear, especially when it’s told to you 16 times.
How hard is it to keep Women of Cincy going?
Women of Cincy started on a whim, but it was not built on a whim. It was built with a lot of late nights and all-volunteer work. It was built really from nothing.
We were a couple of twentysomethings. We didn’t have any money. We didn’t have any connections with people who had money. We still don’t! [laughs] So if you are out there with money to give, let me know!
Empathy is not a buzzword for us. It is just a way of being.
We didn’t know what we wanted to do besides helping people to see each other as people. We had to build the brand, the mission statement, the guidelines, etc. Our volunteer team now has 100 people on it. We started with four. We had to put all those pieces into place while maintaining jobs while figuring out how to live life and make sure that we ate.
It was really hard, and it’s still really hard. There are days I still ask myself why I put myself through some of this shit. But then I look back at all these different, amazing experiences I’ve had and know that I would not have had without Women of Cincy. It’s just what makes it worth it.
Talk to me a little bit more about that growth.
Well, it happened honestly pretty quickly.
Luckily, I have a background in design. I went to DAAP. That came in handy in building a brand and a website. The other folks that I co-founded this with have backgrounds in writing, publishing, and journalism. So those skill sets came in handy. You have to have your visuals together and your language together for people to take you seriously and to trust you – especially to trust you with their story.
And our community just stepped up. Kiersten and I were doing some of these early interviews, along with Kelsey and Kali. We realized that we could not do it alone. It was tough to produce on a regular schedule. We didn’t have any money to pay people or to quit our jobs to focus solely on this.
We needed help. We decided to say it on Instagram like, "Hey, is anyone interested in helping us tell stories?" Hillary Copsey and Stacey Wegley signed up. You [Michaela] came along, not that much later. People just started showing up!
Once people started showing up, we had to figure out what to do with everyone. How do we structure this? How do we make sure that people are also getting what they need out of this? How do we make this a good experience for everybody across the board? We didn’t have any legal entity around us at that point, either.
It was just this giant learning curve. And people kept asking us how they could help, so we told them what we needed. We always try to be clear about what we need because that’s what it takes to grow.
Another critical piece of this was that we knew pretty early on who we were not, and what we would not do. We didn’t want to lock people out of content because they couldn’t pay for it. We wanted to be accessible. We knew that we didn’t want to put advertisements across the top of our website. It felt inauthentic even though it would have made life a lot easier to sell advertising when we were all trying to figure out how to keep the lights on day after day.
By solidifying what we were not and sticking to our guns, we realized what we wanted to be. We wanted to tell people stories. And we wanted to make them feel empowered by their own story; to make them happy to see their life in print; to be proud of it, and to want to share it.
As you built Women of Cincy, what are some of the structural decisions you had to make?
At first, it was just a blog. Now we hate that word. Do not call Women of Cincy a blog. We are so much more than that.
One of the first things we did was create an L.L.C. We did it through LegalZoom in a night and paid our fee. And that is what we thought we were for a minute. We thought, "Well, we’re a publication, and publications are businesses, and businesses are L.L.C.s." We learned later that that was not right for Women of Cincy.
Keep in mind, at the time we were building this, I had just graduated in 2016 from DAAP. I had never held a full-time paying job with paid time off and all that stuff. I had only been an intern. Now we were thrown into this thing that kept growing fast.
I did not know what an L.L.C. was, so I had to do that research. I did not know how to balance books, operate QuickBooks, do my taxes, or any of that stuff. You can’t ask people to do these things for you for free. And it’s tough to find people to do it for cheap, so we just had to do it.
The problem was that we needed to figure out a way to fund Women of Cincy. As an L.L.C., you can’t ask for a lot of donations, and finding grants is hard, so Kiersten and I started a sister company called Notice. The idea behind Notice was to help small to medium-sized women-led businesses with their design work, writing work, and branding. Notice enabled us to fund Women of Cincy because we didn’t have a way to do it before.
We couldn’t sell advertising or have sponsored events because people didn’t know who we were yet. We had to put in a foundation and get readership. So that was how we stayed alive for a solid year, but I think that whole time, we knew it wouldn’t work long term. We knew we just couldn’t run Notice, have it bankroll Women of Cincy, and make enough money to pay ourselves.
We started to think about switching to nonprofit status. Notice had been around maybe like six or seven months when Kiersten had to step back for some family issues. So, then it was just me. I couldn’t run Notice and Women of Cincy, and I knew that Women of Cincy needed to have more leadership besides me. Because, really, at the end of the day, Women of Cincy belongs to the community. They built it. Everything from nominations for our feature stories to photography to writing, it’s all community-driven.
So it didn’t seem like any single person should own Women of Cincy. It seemed like the community should own it. The decision to become a nonprofit wasn’t hard, but the paperwork, the process, and working with the I.R.S. was.
It was a lot more work building the nonprofit than it was the L.L.C. Our readers, though, did not see a difference. We were the same entity to the public, except now, we can rely more on the public to participate and help keep this alive because Women of Cincy does belong to our community. It is not any one person’s to have.
How have you had to pivot the last couple of months because of the COVID-19 pandemic?
We changed the way we interview. We had to change the way that we connect with our team. Our residency program is all online now. Before the pandemic, we had just put in place a whole new team to help us with our nonprofit: two new editors, a new residency director, and a new communications person. Suddenly, we were thrown into this tailspin and had to figure out how to sink or swim.
It was really hard, and it’s still really hard. There are days I still ask myself why I put myself through some of this shit. But then I look back at all these different, amazing experiences I’ve had and know that I would not have had without Women of Cincy. It’s just what makes it worth it.
We had all these plans for fundraisers over the summer. We set a goal of $20,000 in 2020. We’ve never tried to raise $20,000 before. So, from a fundraising standpoint, it has just really been awful. I can’t sugarcoat it. Fundraisers are pretty much dead. We’ve had to cancel everything. We don’t qualify for a lot of grants right now because foundations are focusing on giving money to organizations that help shelter people and provide childcare, food, and basic needs. There aren’t a lot of opportunities for us, right now, to apply for grant money. We’re just trying to figure it out until the economy gets better, but it’s not easy by any means.
Who is the woman who inspires you, and why?
This is really cheesy, but it’s all of our interviewees.
I’m just so blown away by all the women that we interview. I was terrified to do this interview. You asked, and I was like, “No, I don’t think I want to do it.” Because I’ve been through some of these conversations. I know how amazing all the people are on the other end of these. It’s big shoes to fill. I am continually impressed by the people we interview and the women on our team. All of these women just figure out how to accomplish so much with so many things going on in their lives. It’s just truly inspiring
If somebody wanted to give, how can they do that?
Go to womenofcincy.org/give.
There is no single definition of an entrepreneur. Check out our year-long series, "This Is Entrepreneurship." Sponsored by Main Street Ventures.