At the start of our interview, Gabrielle Wyatt didn’t allow me to just jump into my curated questions until I accepted her invitation to breathe first.
“Can we just take a collective breath,” she asked. “We all just came from something into the next, so I want to encourage you to breathe in and…exhale.”
This is what you can expect to experience at one of Wyatt’s Reporter Rest events, which is a pop-up retreat series specifically designed to help journalists tap into wellness practices. It will be making stops in Atlanta, New York and Washington D.C. throughout the year. She says it aims to provide a sanctuary where Black women in media can rest, dream new possibilities, and fellowship with other women across newsrooms. Essentially, she’s imploring passionate professionals to, for just a moment, put their health before their work.
“Our goals as we enter this year is to continue to expand our table of dreamers and to frankly love folks who we know are essential to pursuing this abundant vision of wealth that we see,” Wyatt explains.
The series is one of the programs presented by The Highland Project, an organization Wyatt founded in October 2020 that focuses on building and sustaining a pipeline of women leading communities, institutions and wealth-building systems. But Wyatt wants to make it clear that her work is not all about helping her clients make money; it’s about holistic success.
“We hold a responsibility at Highland to not become a talented tenth organization,” she says. “We ask every member of our community to sit with the dreams they have and ask themselves how are they showing up in their legacies? Are their daily practices helping them to create the legacy they want to leave behind?”
It’s those powerful, teachable moments that betray Wyatt’s storied career in education.
Before founding The Highland Project, she worked as a strategist supporting education leaders in expanding opportunities for public school students through strategic advising, board service, and philanthropic investments. During her tenure, she launched the City Leadership Fellowship, an executive leadership development program focused on empowering Black and Latinx leaders pursuing bold education visions.
Now, she’s taking her wide breadth of experiences and pouring it into the leaders that need it most.
“When we first started, our goal was really to transform the power of leadership, and more specifically, Black women leadership,” she says. “In that endeavor, our aim now is to equip communities with a set of retreats and experiences that focus deeply on their exploration with rest, and what it would mean to nurture their minds.”
The retreat pop-ups include a wellness workshop led by Highland Project mindfulness practitioners, as well as opportunities for attendees to foster true connections with one another. In a world where journalism jobs are disappearing and the ones that exist are getting harder and harder to thrive in, Wyatt says she wants the women to truly lean on one another.
“We’re going to be standing with journalists to say, ‘we see y’all,’” she says. “‘We need you all to keep telling our stories. But with that, we also have a hunch that you are likely tired, too.’ So we want to implore everyone for some time to regulate their nervous systems together and to really sit in some community care…to ask ourselves, what is that horizon we see? How do we keep our eyes on that horizon?’”
This article was edited for clarity and brevity.