It’s a bittersweet day for ColorLines. We’re proud to send off our teammate Daisy Hernandez to exciting new adventures, even if we’ll miss her wisdom around these parts every day. Daisy spent six years building ColorLines magazine’s award-winning journalism as a writer, editor and overall strategist for our work here. And she spent the past several months helping to refashion that journalism for the Web. Now she’s ready to write her next life chapter. As she writes in her farewell essay,

I’m not so idealist (at least not yet!) as to think that we can change how we talk about race and what we do about racism overnight or even in this decade, but I do believe that we are now, each of us, a little media outlet unto ourselves. Sharing a story on Facebook about BP dumping its waste in communities of color or about Judge Walker’s ruling on gay marriage might seem like a small act, but really it can be one first step in a larger movement for change.

On that note, I’m planning to update and formally launch my website in the coming months. For a sneak preview, go to daisyhernandez.com. In the meantime, I hope to see you all on Facebook, where I’ll keep sharing news, stories and commentaries that offer more than a sound bite.

That’s sage advice–and precisely the sort we’ll miss having on the team day in and day out. But we can’t wait to watch DaisyHernandez.com take off, see her byline spread far and wide–and continue publishing her insightful essays and reportage here at ColorLines. Go get ’em Daisy!