Emily J. Hynds believes everyone should do whatever they can, big or small, to make their community a better place.

That’s why in 2020, while the country was roiled by the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and protests for racial justice, Hynds, 40, began watching Houston City Council meetings and taking notes on the proceedings. It was budget season, and activists were scrutinizing increases to the Houston Police Department budget.

The council meetings, however, are held in the middle of the work day, with public comment sessions on Tuesday afternoons and the agenda-driven business portion beginning at 9 a.m. Wednesdays.

“There seemed to be a lot of people who were interested in this, and they have to work at this time,” says Hynds, a freelance writer and artist who lives in south Houston. “It went over really well, and I enjoyed it, so I thought this was something I could do regularly.”

Hynds posted her first iteration of “Emily Takes Notes” to her Instagram page. What started as a pet project while stuck at home since has grown a following of several thousand people and is used by City Hall insiders to follow the minutiae of council meetings. The notes have served as a springboard for Hynds to launch other initiatives, including making her notes available in Spanish, a podcast where the notes are dictated, and a voter guide for local elections. 

Hynds now hopes to build out her archive from past meetings, allowing the public to access the notes for their own research. 

Making City Council accessible is at the heart of Hynds’ work because she finds the daytime meetings to be so inaccessible to working people. 

“It’s awful, and that’s one reason why I feel really committed to keep doing it,” Hynds says.

Hynds was born and raised in Houston’s Alief neighborhood and never left the city. She studied theater at the University of Houston, graduating in 2007. Since then, she has done a little bit of everything, including freelance writing, communications consulting work and maintaining the pet-sitting side gig she started in college. With a group of friends, she also has run a monthly storytellers series called “Grown-up Storytime” since 2007.

“I like to tell people I’m allergic to having one job,” Hynds says with a laugh. 

It is Hynds’ background in theater that best equipped her to follow and translate City Council meetings for the public. In the summers of 2007 and 2008, Hynds worked as an assistant director for the Houston Shakespeare Festival. During show runs, the director would dictate notes for Hynds to write down then pass on to the actors in the play. 

“It’s exactly the same vibe because Shakespeare is so dense and weird and the language is foreign,” Hynds says. “That feels the same as City Council language.”

Her note-taking process is meticulous. Hynds usually watches the Wednesday morning council meetings on a laptop from her bed or living room couch, taking all of her notes by hand in a black and white composition notebook.

The published notes largely are straightforward, but include some limited commentary. When council approved $200 million on Nov. 20 for Southwest Airlines to build a new concourse at Hobby International Airport, funds the city says will be recoverable upon completion in 2027, Hynds wrote “Hey Siri, make note to follow up in 2027 on reimbursement.”

The notes are the star of the show, though, rendered in simple black type on a white background with no pictures or fancy fonts to distract from the information on the webpage. 

After the meetings end, Hynds takes a quick break before transferring her notes into digital slides to post on Instagram and her website. She then has a small team of volunteer proofreaders review the notes for typos. In the evening, she records the Emily Takes Notes podcast and sends it off to a different volunteer to edit and post. 

By Thursday morning, the proofreading team returns the notes to Hynds and she posts them online. In total, it takes Hynds about 10 hours each week to produce the notes. 

The comments under each post are made up of a mixture of interest groups, politicians and everyday Houstonians like Hynds. They debate the latest council action described in the notes, call on elected officials to respond to their needs and thank Hynds repeatedly for her work. 

In all of Hynds’ pet projects and work, she tries to keep a sense of community at the center. She does accept tips for her notes online, but she has made little to no money from her efforts.

She has built a network of volunteers with various skills and expertise to help her, including one friend who built a website that automatically transcribes council meetings and posts them online, allowing Hynds to quickly ensure her notes are accurate. 

“I think it’s inherently a theater thing, as well,” Hynds says. “If you are a theater person, it’s such a communal experience, no matter what type of theater you’re doing.”

For that reason, Hynds described her notes as a labor of love for the city. Houston has many natural disasters, poor urban planning and oppressively hot summers, making it “kind of a shitty place to live, but it’s also my home.”

“I either can’t wait to leave, and I also can’t imagine leaving,” Hynds says. “It’s such a complicated relationship to live here.”

Hynds has no plans to move or stop taking notes, for the time being. She also has no plans to expand, preferring to keep her focus on her community of Houston. 

“It feels very grounding and effective and concrete to get involved in local politics because they’re talking about the things that literally affect me every day.”

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