April 23, 2025

Hi there - One of the roadblocks I hear over and over again in my work as a business coach is, “I don’t know how to get started.”*

So I’m offering two new FREE opportunities to help jumpstart folks in two different areas of critical thinking and action that are important to me as an informed business leader and concerned community member.

Journalism for Regular Community Members

“Pens Before Swords: Community Journalism 101” - This is a FREE class I’m teaching online during the month of May with my mom, MaryRob Clodfelter, who was an award-winning editor of small-town newspapers in central Ohio for the latter decades of her career. She retired a little over 20 years ago and has been lamenting the demise of truly local journalism ever since, which has led to an alarming lack of community news coverage.

For the past year or so, Mom and I have been dreaming out loud about teaching regular people how to do journalism right in their own communities, to become better informed and advocate for their neighbors and neighborhoods. Since I help people get new things off the ground all the time, I figured why not apply my work to this dream, too?

And so, we’re offering this FREE class, and it’s a beautiful bonus that we get to work on it together!

We'll be teaching how to prepare yourself to attend a meeting, what to expect when you attend that meeting, how to write about it (simply and clearly, we’re not kidding when we say that no fancy writing is needed), and how to distribute your write-ups.

I’ll say it again because this is a roadblock that I hear a lot: you do NOT need to be a "good writer" in order to serve as a community journalist. You don't even need a news platform. And you definitely don’t need prior experience.

For this beta version of the class, we are only able to offer it to folks in Ohio (where we live), because the difference in Sunshine Laws between states is an added layer of complexity we aren’t prepared to manage yet.

To register or get more details, reply to this message or send me an email directly (Kay @ Facilitator On Fire .net). Please forward this message to your friends, family and colleagues in Ohio, too - we’d love to have them join us!

Big Read on eugenics and AI

Please join me in reading “The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence,” by Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres (it’s free, here).

The topic is how tightly intertwined eugenics and AI really are. I wasn’t aware that this is a missing piece in my continued growth towards understanding how to dismantle the systems of racism and white male dominance in the U.S.

In fact, it’s so important that at some point in the very near future, I’m going to feature this paper for the next “Big Read” project that I run over in my Patreon (here). I’d like to invite you to read the paper now, share it with your friends too, and then join in the Big Read conversation when I schedule it (most likely that will be in June).

I’m a layperson with no formal training in either the history of eugenics or artificial intelligence, so I am reading this paper from neither a technical nor academic perspective; I freely admit this material is a real challenge for me.

No matter your level of experience with these topics, let’s learn alongside one another. I’ll announce the details of the Big Read as soon as I can.

As always, please keep recommending me to friends and colleagues who might need a business coach. I have an equity pricing structure that means I can help most folks who need a business coach, and I have extensive experience, especially coaching leaders in social justice.

Have a meaningful day and let’s do this together,

Kay Coughlin, CEO and Business Coach, Facilitator on Fire

*I feel so much respect and tenderness for anybody who is willing to admit they are stuck and struggling to figure out how to move forward. That’s kind of my specialty, actually. I can’t tell you how inspiring I find it to get to work with folks who are “still” figuring things out - I mean, it’s not as if any one of us is ever going to reach a place in life where we’ve got it “all” figured out and then we can relax and coast with our existing skillsets. Give me a break. That’s not how humans work! Come be a beginner in something (including these two free opportunities) alongside me.