At HCN, she found a job – and a community
In early March, HCN’s director of philanthropy, Alyssa Pinkerton, told the staff and board that, after 15 years with the organization, she’s moving on. With her youngest kiddo about to graduate from high school, she plans to return to her career in art. Alyssa is a gifted painter and illustrator, as well as a self-described thespian.
“It’s a terrifying leap,” she said, “and I’m just so excited.”
In her travels, Alyssa loved to ask people about their HCN stories. Many of us talk about how a friend or a mentor introduced us to the magazine, or how we stopped by the office in Paonia, Colorado, or attended a gathering of readers, and realized that we’d found not just a magazine, but also a community.
As she prepares for her end-of-May departure, Alyssa shared a little of her story. It’s something special.
Alyssa was at a crossroads when she found HCN, recently divorced and solo parenting two young kids. She landed a part-time job doing support work in our fundraising department and worked after-hours cleaning the office. Her kids explored and “helped out” while Mom scrubbed and vacuumed the place.
Looking back today, she wonders how she survived, working long hours to pay her bills, sharing childcare with a couple of friends. But for Alyssa and her family, life in rural Colorado was “rich soil.” She recalls river rafting and camping trips, community theater and fashion shows, feasting on organic fruit from the local orchards. And after about a year and a half at High Country News, her pay in fundraising increased to the point where she was able to drop the cleaning job.
Still, those were difficult times. This was during the Great Recession, when readers were forced to pull back on their support. One day, Alyssa picked up the phone when it rang for her boss, the director of development. A reader from California asked how things were going. Alyssa responded candidly that HCN had been forced to cut back staff hours to save money. (Anyone who knows Alyssa knows that she always tells it like it is.)
“Oh!” the reader said — and promptly sent in a check for $10,000.
“I had never talked to a donor before. I had never asked for money,” Alyssa says. “But just being honest, and telling people how things were, was powerful.”
It didn’t hurt that she genuinely loves HCN’s readers. “They’re passionate, curious. They’re all working to make things better in their communities.” We can be a quirky bunch, she laughs, but “HCN is an authentic and beautiful organization, from the readers to the community to the content.”
As she rose through the ranks, Alyssa’s efforts to strengthen relationships with readers and share the power of our journalism enabled the organization to grow and blossom. The salaries and benefits we’re able to offer today are a fitting legacy to her time here.
Alyssa now lives in Fort Collins with her second husband, a talented musician and teacher —who, fittingly enough, she met through High Country News. Asked if she might return to the East Coast, where she grew up, she says “no.” Alyssa fell in love with the West in her 20s, when she hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, and says, “I won’t ever go back. I am a Westerner forever.”
If you’re interested in being HCN’s next director of philanthropy, or know someone who might be, email us at careers@hcn.org.
All together now
In January, almost the entire HCN staff and Board of Directors gathered in Portland, Oregon, for a long weekend of conversation and camaraderie. The last time the whole crew was together like this was so long ago nobody could recall exactly when or where it was — before COVID, at any rate. A lot has changed since then: For many of us, this was our first face-to-face meeting with folks we’d worked with for years! Such is life when your organization is scattered across the West: We know each other best through the smiling Brady Bunch-style images of our faces on Zoom.
We spent Saturday afternoon doing team-building exercises led by local facilitator/coach/storyteller Frayn Masters. Sunday, we meandered around town, learning indigo-dyeing techniques at WildCraft Studio School and touring the massive industrial-era laundry facility that the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation is transforming into a vibrant exhibition and gathering space for Indigenous artists. We’re grateful to Heather Brown of Mind the Bird Media for helping us connect with these local groups and handling logistics.
Of course, we also had business to take care of, so the staff devoted a few days to departmental planning. And at the winter board meeting, staff updated everyone on our progress toward the goals we laid out in our three-year strategic roadmap last winter. A few highlights of our accomplishments so far:
We created a digital news strategy and doubled our budget for news in 2024.
We came up with metrics for measuring the impact of HCN’s journalism, with the goal of producing more stories that drive discussion, encourage new policies and create real change on the ground in the West.
We identified the key audiences we want to reach and began to build a network of friends, ambassadors and peers to help us do exactly that.
We grew HCN’s monthly giving program by 12% and expanded our community of major donors and foundation supporters.
And we commissioned an outside review of our efforts to advance justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, which included strong suggestions for advancing this work.
The stars of the show were members of our Product and Marketing team, who gave us the behind-the-scenes story of the new website and software upgrades you read about in last month’s Dear Friends. That work is crucial to advancing the broader goals in our strategic plan: Reaching larger, more diverse audiences and giving Westerners the information and the tools they need to create positive change.
All this work gives us a strong foundation for 2024, a year of intense experimentation, learning and adapting. We’re thrilled about the new tools we now have available.
Embracing change
It’s official: Members of the High Country News staff have voted to form a union, adding to a wave of labor organizing in the news business and nonprofits nationwide. The High Country News Union is organized with the Denver Newspaper Guild, a branch of the Communications Workers of America. About 80% of eligible employees voted to join the union, which now represents a little over half of HCN’s staff, including members of the editorial, customer service, marketing, fundraising and business teams.
While the vote to unionize changes how managers interact with unionized employees on the terms and conditions of their employment, there’s much that remains the same: We are all here because we believe in this organization, created 54 years ago by a Wyoming rancher and wildlife biologist, and kept alive by generations of passionate people who have served as its caretakers. And we all want stability and security for HCN’s staff.
The management team will begin working with the HCN Union to get a contract in place as quickly as possible, and HCN’s Board of Directors stands firmly behind us.
Welcome Sunnie!
Among those who came to Portland was our new Indigenous Affairs editor, Sunnie R. Clahchischiligi, Diné. Sunnie, who spent 11 years reporting for the Navajo Times and has written for Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, The Guardian and other outlets, just finished a Ph.D. in rhetoric and writing at the University of New Mexico. She has traveled extensively in Indian Country, is from Teec Nos Pos, Arizona, and serves on the board of the Indigenous Journalists Association.
In addition to managing the Indigenous Affairs team, Sunnie will sit on the editorial management team and collaborate with staff in other departments to ensure that our efforts to connect with Indigenous communities are culturally competent and positioned for success.
Greg Hanscom is the publisher and executive director for High Country News. Email him at greg.hanscom@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the April 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “At HCN she found a job – and a community.”
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
