What do you do when the story that falls apart is your own?
Lance Gould is the CEO of Brooklyn Story Lab, a media strategy firm that helps purpose-driven organizations tell their stories. Before that came thirty years in journalism, ending with an executive editor's chair at HuffPost and a layoff one week after the 2016 US Presidential election.
What followed, he tells Renay, was "sheer panic." He was 51, with two daughters, in a field that was shrinking under him, and he had never wanted to be an entrepreneur in the first place — he liked insurance and a paycheck.
This is not an episode about losing a job. It's about what a storyteller does when his own story comes apart, and what he learns about hope on the other side of it. Not hope as a feeling that arrives, but hope as something you generate and protect: "the more that we prop that up and don't let it dissipate and don't let it disappear, the more hope that we have."
Lance and Renay cover the layoff and the panic underneath it; the 270 elephants he helped move 1,000 miles from one reserve to another and what a matriarchal species has to teach a moment shaped by male ego; why storytelling is part art and part science — "without the artful delivery, it's just an abacus," and "without data, it's just conjecture"; and how to wear blinders and take them off at the same time.
Through the Noise is about the inner capacities that allow leaders to sustain themselves and their work. This one is about treating hope as something you generate — and refusing to let it disappear.
Lance Gould
Lance Gould is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Brooklyn Story Lab (BSL), a media-strategy firm that helps purpose-driven organizations create content and become more effective storytellers, particularly around their SDG-related work.
He was previously a journalist who held newsroom-leadership positions at The Huffington Post (Executive Editor), The Boston Phoenix (Editor in Chief), The New York Daily News (Deputy Managing Editor), and Spy Magazine (Editor).
In 2016, Lance received a Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award for his editorial work related to the SDGs; and in 2017, he was named to the Leadership Council for the UN's Media for Social Impact Summit. He is on the Board of World Elephant Day and for six years has been a volunteer commissioner for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)'s Commission on Education and Communications.
J. Renay Loper
Renay is a Clinical Faculty in Organizational Leadership for the Bard MBA in Sustainability, where she focuses on justice-centered transformation in the workplace. Previously, she was the Vice President of Program Innovation at PYXERA Global where she served on the Executive Leadership Team, led five country offices, drove the development of new business and programs, co-led the organization's work on inclusive circular cities, and advised corporate clients on their social impact strategies. Renay also led the organization’s ARC (Antiracist Collective) initiatives, which included internal and external efforts toward dismantling unjust systems. To this end, Renay created Rhetoric to Action, a series of conversations to bridge sectors toward collective action around social and racial justice.
Prior to PYXERA Global, Renay led the grassroots exchange and education grant portfolio at the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, and has served in a variety of leadership roles in higher education, nonprofit, and business prior to that. Renay is an avid speaker and facilitator, has authored and edited numerous publications, including a resource journal, Student Affairs Professionals Cultivating Campus Climates Inclusive of International Students (Jossey Bass). Renay serves on the board of directors of nonprofits including Community Change, Harpswell Foundation, and Girl Rising.