Building and Sustaining the WordPress Community Through Mentorship — Post Status Draft 123

Mentor someone. Today! Don't wait. Start today! Talk to people. Connect with them. Go on Twitter. Just 15 minutes a day. Tell them why this community is great. Make them want to join!

Nyasha Green

For Nyasha Green, a healthy tech community prioritizes mentoring. She credits her mentors with helping her find her place in WordPress. How well does your part of the WordPress ecosystem support mentorship? Can we make mentoring a key way people contribute to WordPress's future?

In this episode of Post Status Draft, Nyasha Green joins Dan Knauss to tell her story about joining the WordPress community relatively recently. Ny is a Software Developer at Howard Development and Consulting as well as the Editorial Director for MasterWP. Ny credits Ken Elliot and Shambi Broome as mentors who got her into WordPress. Together they're getting two new WordPress Meetups up and running in Columbia, SC and Charlotte, NC.

Picking up on one of Kim Lipari‘s comments last week (“We're not a small village anymore.” A Conversation with Kim Lipari — Post Status Draft 121), Nyasha shares her thoughts on the ways the WordPress community can better embrace growth and change by enlarging its circles of leadership, innovation, and talent. For Ny, a culture that prioritizes mentoring relationships is essential. She sees value in paid internships at WordPress companies, intentional programming at Meetups and WordCamps, and the continued use of travel scholarships to welcome new people to an increasingly inclusive WordPress community.

Finally, we also talk about dealing with grief, loss, and emotional health in tech, how social media hurts and helps, and resources like Big Orange Heart that are there for you when you're all out of spoons.

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🔗 Mentioned in the show:

• Ken Elliot (Twitter)
• Shambi Broome (Twitter)
• “We're not a small village anymore.” A Conversation with Kim Lipari — Post Status Draft 121
• Howard Development and Consulting
• Supporting Underrepresented Speakers at WCUS
• Sponsor Inclusion in Tech (Winstina Hughes)
• Underrepresented in Tech
• Big Orange Heart and #spoonies
• Spoon Theory
• There's even a Spoonie Wapuu…of course.

🐦 You can follow Nyasha and Dan on Twitter:

• Nyasha Green (Twitter)
• Dan Knauss (Twitter)
• Post Status (Twitter)