Malka Older, Global Voices’ new Executive Director. Photo courtesy Malka Older.

I am honored to be joining Global Voices, an organization I’ve admired for many years. I first came to Global Voices as a reader, thrilled to find a place where I could read stories about places I knew nothing about and updates from places I missed, written by the people who lived there in the language they lived in. I appreciated getting news about food, music, and local issues along with analysis of the more well-covered stories with geopolitical impacts. Reading Global Voices gave me a more complete understanding of the world and a stronger connection to places I'd never visited.

Some years later, I was looking for an organization that shared my values and was particularly tied into the issues I write about, because I wanted to connect the readers of my fiction to real-life initiatives dealing with the messy, difficult, important work of improving the world. Global Voices was an obvious choice, because it engages with so many of the issues I care about. Providing trustworthy news that is grounded in the perspectives of those who are experiencing it, building understanding across languages and borders, amplifying the voices of those usually ignored, telling stories that go beyond breaking news and crisis narratives: all of these are crucial elements to making the world a better place.

In fact, the more I looked into Global Voices, the more I found to like. Translation, support for indigenous and minority languages, media literacy, digital rights, research —research about narratives in media!—all of these are things I love to see in the world, things that I want to contribute to.

As I’ve been learning more about the organization, another important element became apparent to me: the community. Yes, the stories and translations and research that Global Voices puts out into the world are vital; and so is the way the organization does this, creating a supportive, multi-cultural community of people with active discussions and thoughtful representation. Building and sustaining such a community is an achievement in itself—as a sociologist of organizations, I’m intellectually fascinated by the ongoing experiment in virtual governance, and as a humanitarian worker I’m impressed.

It's also, I believe, part of how Global Voices manages to continue producing such a positive impact: by putting in the effort to listen, to maintain decentralized decision-making mechanisms, to consider the process as well as the outcome; most of all, by becoming a group that people enjoy being a part of. I'm so excited to dig into all the projects at Global Voices, but I am most of all looking forward to becoming a part of a group of people who commit themselves with curiosity and joy to working together to make the world better.