A year of Lioness
It's been a crazy one.
When Lioness launched late in 2019 with the mission of bringing untold stories to the world, we could never have imagined what was about to unfold. A pandemic, a movement for racial justice, a harrowing election, heroic acts by healthcare workers, and the heartbreaking loss of so many lives.
For all its difficulty, this year has taught us the power a story has to create change. Yet for every story that made it to the media, many were left unheard: the stories of the powerless, stories unfolding off the radar of reporters, stories untold because the PR teams and lawyers of big companies overpower the voices they have an interest in silencing.
We set off this year determined to democratize power through storytelling. Whether exposing power abuse, rewriting an inaccurate history, or helping an individual find a way to be heard, we imagined a storytelling mechanism where the discourse was not dominated by those with the most resources, but rather by everyday people whose voices and experiences were able to infuse our hearts and minds with new perspectives.
Lioness is a new company, and we are small - but we brought some big stories to the media in 2020. Here are some of them:
Debbie Kosta had been a top-performing salesperson for motivational speaker Tony Robbins for over a decade when the pandemic hit New York City. As Robbins continued to run events and push salespeople to sell tickets, Debbie came down with a 104 degree fever and was diagnosed with Covid-19. As she lay in a coma, Robbins used her ordeal as fodder to promote his beliefs about the pandemic, stating publicly that he had intervened with doctors to save her life. The only problem is, he lied. Then, he tried to fire her. We helped Debbie Kosta bring her story to light in The New York Times, The Verge, Business Insider, and many other national media outlets.
When Black Lives Matter protests began after the death of George Floyd, we wanted to use what power we had to elevate Black voices. We started a campaign and received an avalanche of story submissions.
We were contacted by David Hughes, a Black police officer in Virginia who had experienced racism firsthand in his 33 years on the police force and witnessed it play out over and over again in his community. He had much to bring to the dialogue around defunding the police. He had never been published before, so we helped him craft an opinion piece. It was published in the New York Times Opinion section in July.
A group of Glossier retail employees contacted Lioness in June. These employees wanted to bring to light stories of racial injustice and a failure of management to support people of color, even as Glossier was publicly voicing its support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Their aim was to create change within the company. Their story was heard far and wide in this feature in Fortune Magazine and led to a response from CEO Emily Weiss addressing their concerns and promising change and accountability.
Many of the stories Lioness brings to light are only possible because of the bravery of people who have intimate knowledge of a wrong, but who face great personal risks if they come forward, especially if they are exposed. Through our campaign that brought free legal counsel to people considering breaking non-disclosure agreements, several people chose to speak truth to power: an engineer brought the story of underage gambling on a popular gaming website to Business Insider, and several employees at a billion-dollar fin-tech company shed light on a soon-to-be billionaire CEO’s abusive and fraudulent practices in Forbes.
Lioness has our own stories to share, too. Over the course of the year we’ve written on topics close to our hearts, such as hiring/firing “hot girls” at startups... pandemic friend drama… the rise of armchair business saviors during the pandemic… and life after religion.
Our company has been featured in national news publications, talking about protecting whistleblowers, outdated employment laws, gender discrimination, breaking non-disclosure agreements, and finding ways to help employees tell their stories.
On our strategies side, we worked with companies and organizations who are working to change our world for the better, whether that was advocating for a national paid leave policy in a pandemic, facilitating backup childcare in a childcare crisis, providing socially distanced, low-emissions transportation to essential workers, or reallocating the way our streets work to create new revenue for cities suffering from decimated budgets.
Here are some of the stories we helped our clients bring into the world this year:
Gabe Klein, former transportation commissioner in Chicago and Washington, DC, wrote for The Washington Post about the need to address the legacy of redlining in our cities.
Corinne Roller, legislative director at PL+US: Paid Leave for the United States, called out Congress for leaving emergency paid leave out of the COVID-19 stimulus bill, as millions of Americans lost the financial ability to stay home if they are sick during a raging pandemic.
Verge Genomics, a female-founded AI drug development start-up pioneering treatments for neurological diseases Big Pharma gave up on for profitability reasons, was featured in the Wall Street Journal.
Kasey Edwards, co-founder of childcare tech company Helpr wrote for Business Insider about how the childcare crisis is a broader economic issue, and why people who aren’t parents should care about it.
Curb management startup Automotus was featured in this Axios story, for their work using video analytics to clear traffic and generate new revenue for starved municipal budgets.
Kyle Rowe, the head of government partnerships at Spin, the micromobility unit of Ford Mobility, argues in Fast Company for scooter and rideshare companies to move away from gig economy models.
Kathryn Kosmides, founder of non-profit Garbo, whose mission is to prevent gender-based violence before it can begin, wrote for Fortune Magazine about the ways our online privacy laws need to change in order to protect women and victims of violence.
As we head into 2021, we wish all of you a very happy new year. Take this note as a reminder that even if we find ourselves alone right now, we are all in this story together.
As always, feel free to share your stories with us as we move into the new year, and send people with stories to tell our way. We’d love to help.
Ariella + Amber
