I hid from the cold in the Chase bank on the corner, pretending I needed cash.

“April, I really want to say good riddance to 2015 with you at Slo ‘Mo but I might hop back in an Uber home,” I texted.

“Oh, I feel you. But just wait, I promise I’m almost there. It will be fun to dance this year off.”

If April can brave this then I have no excuse. Plus it’s the queer party in Chicago, Slo Mo’, and it’s their first New Year’s bash.

April retrieved me from Chase and we made our way to the Chicago Athletic Association, a Venetian Gothic tower of a building on Michigan Avenue. It was an exclusive men’s club from 1893 to 1972. Tonight the queers were taking over.

At some point in the evening we managed to secure prime selfie real estate in front of the wall-sized mirror in the bathroom.

“Let’s get a photo.” April said as grabbed my hand. April adjusted her silk white floor length dress and looked directly into the mirror. I fixed my phoenix-colored bob, pretended to do a little dance and looked down at the floor.

“It’s perfect.”

We danced until it was 2016 plus a couple of hours. As we made our exit, April was stopped by some friends. I was looking at the ornate wood ceiling when I realized there was one person not talking to April. They were looking at me.

“I’m C.”

“I’m Andrea.”

Shit, another C. Maybe this one will redeem the name.

“I like how you sparkle.”

“Oh yeah I think the glitter is coming off the dress.”

“I wasn’t talking about the dress.”

“Oh.”

This C felt safe.

I wondered if my body was ready.

“Me missing Brother Mike like something heavy, my heart just wasn’t ready”- No Name

A Saturn return first occurs around 28. Saturn doles out the toughest love because:

“Wherever you find Saturn in your birth chart you are unlikely to be like, ‘That’s chill. That’s easy for me. Everything is nice here,’ even if you have a lovely, happy, well-adjusted Saturn. Saturn is work. Saturn has to do with the lessons we learn over time. Saturn requires effort. Saturn requires patience, and Saturn loves to hand you your ass.” (from Jessica Lanyadoo)

No wonder 28 and the end of 2014 nearly took me out.

Five days after my birthday I opened my phone to a text from Jamila “Hey, is Brother Mike OK?”

Me: “I think so, we were supposed to get dinner last night but I forgot to text. Why?”

Jamila: “People are saying he’s not OK.”

Me: “What do you mean? What is not OK?”

I call him three times. I text him five times.

Jamila: “They’re saying he died.”

Elizabeth carried me out of my office, a closet in the corner of the high school with little heat. I don’t remember how I got home or what the December air felt like. I remember sitting across from Jamila in mostly silence for three hours, an untouched sandwich and a million questions between us.

By the time I crashed on my bed the only thing that I could fixate on, the only thing that revived my body to red, hot anger, was to write the most hateful email to the person who had violated my body. Our situationship ended, according to me, a few weeks prior.

“I am angry at so many things. A great man who was a dear friend is gone and a piece of shit like you still breathes”

I never sent it. I never deleted it either. I turned it into a cry for help exchanged with the queer femmes in my life.

“I didn’t share my happiness with him, he doesn’t deserve my anger.”

A month later my mother called to tell me my grandfather, Big Al whom we called papa or she called pop, had died. I knew my papa when he’d mostly gotten sober and transformed into a doting elder. I only saw flashes of what pre-dated me as he got older. When the dementia began to rewind his mind, the cruelty returned.

When his neighbor called the police to do a wellness check on him, he’d said he had no children so the state took him and his house. We found him in a home, softer and confused.

I asked the bus driver to stop and let me out in the middle of the street please.

“Ma, are you all right? I’ll try to get there as soon as I can.”

“I just hope he’s in a better place now.”

“But Ma, how are you doing?”

I wondered what forgiveness feels like after you die.

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine”- Patti Smith

When 2015 started, I took a vow: no more poets, no more cis penis. Then I clawed (mostly crawled) my way out. I didn’t do it alone.

It is observed that “when wild elephant females reunite after a separation, they greet each other with great ceremony.” This reunion includes tears followed by pissing and shitting out of delight.

This sounds familiar.

I hope I never forget how my wild elephants gathered all around me. How all the shit turned to joy.

Blessed be Marissa for making her dad fly me to New York so we could see Patt Smith’s birthday show, for the key necklace engraved with “strength” and the hershey kisses at my doorstep because “it was all the gas station had.”

Blessed be the lesbian-owned shelter, Felines and Canines, for giving me my pocket rocket pit Studs.

Blessed be Kate who mirrored back my “h(e)art, and the enormity of it, and reminded me“the holes happen, . . and how, amidst all this, life keeps popping up wherever you turn around” with a poem.

Blessed be Lisa who moved back home to Chicago just in time.

Blessed be the students and strangers who gifted me a rosary, rose quartz and smoky quartz.

Blessed be the floor to ceiling windows of my Nola Darling meets Sarah Jessica Parker-era solo apartment.

Blessed be the nurse who took the time to apply lidocaine before inserting the catheter for my monthly bladder installations.

Blessed be Betty who tattooed lilacs and peonies on my hands because my grandmother grew them.

I wondered what would grow from all that was poured into me.

“We’re so glad you have come back
Every living lion will lay in your lap” — Cat Power

Tomorrow is the 8th anniversary of Mike’s death. Today I sit across from Mia over zoom as we debrief the second year of our transformative justice training. As our conversation comes to a close Mia asks “So, what do you think — what roles do you want to be called into for 2023?”

“I think I could run the accountability support team for the harmer.”

“I could see that.”

A month later I made it to my fifth consecutive Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA) meeting in Nashville. We read a section on ACA bottoms in the Red Book, the program’s fellowship text written anonymously, collectively and published in 2006. A paragraph on page 68 turned out to be the missing piece of a puzzle I thought I’d finished. After taking turns reading, attendees (aka fellow travelers) can take 3–4 minutes to share.

“I’ll share. I’m Andrea.”

“Hi, Andrea.”

“I am really sitting with this line ‘the level of pain that adult children can tolerate without admitting they have hit a bottom is astonishing. . . we have learned to endure a colossal amounts of abuse. . .’ because I realize what I shared last week as a bottom wasn’t the first one. I’m realizing that the first, big bottom I can remember happened around 2014/2015. . .”

ACA bottoms are described as a “soul wound” with meaning. When we hit bottom we may obsess over a person or behavior instead of feeling the pain. Embracing the bottom means we “give up, ask for help and accept the help offered.”

What a basic bitch queer for having a bottom at the start of my Saturn return.

I wonder if Saturn helped write the Big Red Book.

Dear Adriana,

Can we have a moment for the ending of Thelma and Louise? Indulge me in recounting the film’s last 90 seconds, the final exchange between our beloved femme Thelma and slightly butch Louise.

“OK, Let’s not get caught.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Let’s keep going.”

“What do you mean?”

“Go!”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, hit it.”

They kiss. Louise guns the car.

Harvey Keitel foolishly runs after them and is engulfed in the sand kicked up from the tires of their 1966 Thunderbird.

Just before they hit the jump, Louise extends her right hand and Thelma grabs it with her left. Holding tight, their interlocked hands rise up into one fist as they take flight.

No one can stop them.

The scene is so brief, so queer. The scene embodies us. When I rewatch it, all I can think is how lucky am I to have my very own Louise?

From the depths of my gut to the top of my heart, I have been blessed by your small hands of love.

Hold, Make

The fist that Thelma and Louise make reminds me of back roads in Minnesota, when we hit a patch of black ice. We were heading home from delivering wood and resources to Standing Rock, a detour we took after visiting Paisley Park. You turned an already epic A Team birthday road trip into one with even more purpose because Standing Rock was just “another 7 hours away” from Minneapolis.

The sun had barely fully risen as the white SUV we rented skidded around. I didn’t say anything. I just grabbed your hand. I knew that was all I needed. When the car came to a stop, you released your breath. I hadn’t realized you were scared. I don’t remember letting go of your hand, but I do remember laughing.

Someone recently asked me what I ate growing up, as in what meals did my mother make for me. For a lot of reasons I can’t quite access those memories or they just don’t exist. At some point she stopped cooking and at another there was just not a lot of food.

You know this. It’s why you didn’t judge me when I, at over 30, asked if I could learn how to really cook from you. It felt like recovering something to make memories that’d stick. It felt kin to us spending Christmas Eve at Miller’s Pub, tucked in a dark wood booth while Sinatra blared over the bar.

I would saddle up to your counter and just watch you make flautas, italian wedding soup or pulled pork. I was your faithful sous chef, ready to cut or pull anything from the pantry. It felt so cheated to spend our last meal together in Chicago eating Portillo’s hot dogs in a parking lot, at least six feet apart. I remember when I first moved to Nashville sending you pics of the meals I was making, like a proud student.

Point, Extend

I love watching the transformation of Louise and Thelma’s friendship. They take every curve thrown at them to deepen their relationship, to become their truest selves. They don’t always make the best decisions. But they don’t judge each other for it.

Remember when you brought a stick of dynamite (unlit) to the party and we danced around it in circles? Or when we slept on the floor of Wi Spa in Los Angeles to save money on a hotel?

Before we became best friends and neighbors twice, you were my boss. I was so excited when you hired me to be Radio Arte’s youth media instructor. Did you know it was the reason I quit my editor job and moved back into the city?

You verbally wagged your finger at me for wearing a sleeveless shirt to the job interview once I was your supervisee. You did this again when it turned out essential student paperwork hadn’t been completed and was about to be overdue. I sat at a desk and diligently completed it all while you observed from your office.

The finger pointing softened when I needed it, especially during mild medical emergencies.

You were the first person I thought to call when I stabbed my left hand with a tiny, orange knife.

“Adri. . .”

“What’s going on?”

“I was cleaning out the brownies Chris made with a knife and my hand slipped. . .I accidentally stabbed my other hand. I feel so stupid. I didn’t want break-up brownies in the fridge.”

I hadn’t cried or really felt it until I said it aloud to you.

“I’ll be right there.”

I miss living around the corner from you.

Push, Pull

Did you know director Ridley Scott was going to have Louise push Thelma out of the car before they went over the cliff? A push to save her life. You have always been so good at those gentle or not-so-gentle nudges.

You hounded me for almost two years to start running with you. Somehow the year I finally conceded, you also convinced me to run the Chicago marathon. I’ll never forget when we ran the 20 miler during training. I had never run that far before.

“You’re a pegasus, you are flying.”

We picked the salt off of each other’s skin as we sat on the hot summer curb, eating celebratory hamburgers from Ken-Tone’s Drive-In.

I am grateful that you gently asked me to attend an Adult Child of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families (ACA) meeting with you. I didn’t hesitate to go, but I did need more time to find my own path with it.

When you drove through Nashville on your way to El Paso you taught me how to fly again. It’s like what Bette Middler sings in “Wind Beneath My Wings” except I think our flapping is more rooted in mutuality. Don’t get me wrong, Beaches is still a queer femme-ship classic, but it’s not quite our story. We’re more like two Bonnies, no Clyde.

“I’m taking you to your first pole class.”

“I’m down, I hope I don’t fall.”

There is something so freeing about 7-inch heels, a metal pole and enough skin to stick. You knew this.

I still can’t quite hit a circus climb. But I know when I try it, you’ll be there to help push up my hips or clap either way.

Love, forever,

Andrea

“Money doesn’t talk, it swears.” Bob Dylan, It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)

“The solution is to become your own loving parent.” Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families (The Solution)

“Jesus hung out with the poor people and the prostitutes not the wealthy or politicians, so what does that tell you? The first will be the last, baby.” Maryann Faye Hart (Mama)

Thanks for reading Andrea’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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I

I was trying to let my knees swallow me. But then my feet slipped off the car seat, exposing my ears. My neck snapped back up to stare outside the window at the sharp red Cub Foods sign against the gray sky.

“How am I going to pay for this?” my mother wailed into her hands, into the grocery list. In later years, we will peruse the aisles and I’ll ask her “Is this on the list?”

At this moment I wanted to collapse into myself, to let gravity take over. I wondered how my twin sister was doing in the backseat. I wondered why I was born first.

I knew the list was too long. I hadn’t gotten my period. I hadn’t kissed anyone. I hated math. But my gut knew the list was too long.

My mother tilted her head toward the sky. “Ma, I need you to help me, please.” My grandmother had been dead for about five years.

According to the Pew Research Center, mothers are the “primary models for religious faith in many households.” Is that why my spirit is wrapped up in the blood of the women in my family — what they endured and what they passed on from it? While I’ve learned how to deadhead some of what’s been embedded within me, these lessons shaped how I made meaning, found belonging and loved myself.

A fierce Sicilian, possibly five-foot Zelda Rubinstein lookalike, my grandmother had survived early losses of siblings, children, organs but never her dignity against my then-abusive grandfather. We called her Nani. My mother was convinced that her father, a recovering alcoholic and hustler, sent my grandmother to an early grave. Despite all she had been through she passed peacefully in her recliner at 74. She’d just returned from the movie theater where she saw Cool Runnings.

Nani’s death sent my mother to Al-Anon and eventually got her to divorce her own abusive spouse. I remember my mother screaming at my father after Nani’s funeral about wanting out. We sat in the same silver Mazda MPV van then, only now I’ve taken over shotgun and my mother’s the driver. We call the van Big Bertha.

I look over at my mother and she has now reached the state of her crying where no sound comes from her body. Her mouth widens, silently screaming like a ghost.

And suddenly I realize that I’ve accidentally intercepted my mother’s prayer to my grandmother. Everything goes quiet except for my Nani’s voice saying to me “it’s OK, you don’t have to know.” Her words wash over me, dissolving the tightness in my chest.

“I’m 12!” I shouted, snapping myself back to the present. I mouth: “I’m not supposed to know, yet.” Yet as in, Maybe one day I can figure this out. Maybe I misheard Nani.

My mother has found her words again.

“They’re going to take you away from me.”

“Who’s they?”

People who suffer from borderline personality disorder “experience a distortion of their perceptions or beliefs rather than a distinct break with reality,” according to Harvard Health Publishing. We didn’t have those words back then, just each other.

“C’mon mama. We have to get something.” I put one hand on her shoulder, the other pulled open the car door.

II

“I can’t believe we’re leaving before the priest does.” I say half jokingly as my mother rushes us quietly out the back of the church. I needed the laugh to sweeten whatever was brewing inside of me, triggered by the empty pink envelope my mother had placed in the collection basket.

“Why did you put anything in the basket?”

“Because I want them to know we were here. I want to be counted.” The significance of this statement went over my hormonal teen brain.

Our mighty little trio jumped into Bertha but instead of taking a left toward home, we turned right toward the church’s food pantry. We pull up and the woman who leads CCD stands near the door smiling.

“I’m not going in, I don’t feel well.”

“That’s fine, you should lay down in the back. Come on Jen.”

I crawled to the back of Bertha, over her dusty purple-gray seats and lay down. I started tracing Bertha’s ceiling with my feet. According to a 2021 Curbside Classic’s review “the [Mazda] MPV was a tough and durable thing.” It says nothing about how soft her ceilings were.

Whatever was happening in my body earlier comes to a boil. Maybe I am sick? I become overwhelmed with what I think is anger but what I now recognize as deep-seated shame. I have to do something with it. I’d be of age for a worker’s permit soon, I thought.

“Being overwhelmed by shame and then thinking you have to fix things or save people are also common trauma responses.” Erica says so smoothly across the zoom screen as he kicks off our second year of transformative justice training. In my adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families meetings we call this having an “overdeveloped sense of responsibility.”

I’m now 36 but Erica’s words transport me back to Bertha. I unmute myself.

“Well, shit.”

III

It was about a couple months after my college graduation and supposedly The Great Recession was over. I was cleaning out my old apartment and wondering why on earth we’d painted the combined living-dining room highlighter yellow and where the hell my roommate was when I overheard the NPR reporter announce: “Obama’s ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program is coming to an end four months sooner than anticipated due to extraordinary demand.”

President Obama’s Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS), informally known as Cash for Clunkers, was a “post-recession stimulus program” intended to “shift expenditures by households.” Framed as a green economics policy, it was really just a continued bail out of the automotive industry. Not to be confused with the bank bail out.

What the hell is “post-recession” when you’re always scraping by?

People traded in their old cars for cash to put down on a new one. Bertha had just turned 21. She had outlasted my parent’s marriage.

I put the roller down, ignored the white paint on my hands and knocked over photos in pursuit of my cell phone.

“Ma, you got to go soon to get rid of Bertha, they’re going to run out of money and cars to give people.” I don’t even think I said hello.

“Oh no. Ok, I’ll tell Jen. We were going to go tomorrow,” my mom said in a half whisper.

“No Ma, you have to do it today. Please. That car is too old and you’ve sunk more money in it than it’s worth, more money than you have.”

“Ok, we’ll go.” She paused long enough for an unspoken “I’m scared” to linger in the air and hung up.

I pulled up Twin in my phone, texted her and they were on their way. I looked in the mirror. I somehow managed to get white paint in my overgrown faux hawk.

After Cash for Clunkers ended the White House reported that “many of the CARS sales went to the kinds of thrifty people who can afford to buy a new car but normally wait until the old one is thoroughly worn out.” What a fool I was thinking this could help (save) us. Bertha was on her last legs. My mother used Payday Loan stores or whatever I could send to stretch her paycheck. She played the lottery as her daily prayer. She still does.

I looked down at the photos that were spilled over onto the floor. I stared at the one of me, my twin and my mama smiling under a Northwestern University sign on my graduation day. I remember telling her not to wear purple. She showed up in shades of lilac and violet from head to toe so “no one could say she didn’t belong there.”

A few hours later I’m covered in speckles of white and my phone is buzzing.

“We did it! Traded in Bertha for a Honda Fit. Now there are two men in my life who’ve done something for me — Jesus and Obama.”

“Amen, Mama. I love you.”

Maryann Faye Hart is a devout Catholic rooted in Dorothy Day principles and is a founding parishioner of St. John the Evangelist in Streamwood, Illinois. Maryann, my mother, loves to share how the first services of the church were held in a not always weather-suitable circus tent and beams with pride when she recounts how her blue-collar family donated a van to that church once it became fully realized as a worship space. My mother is a woman who in the late 1960s fought for other female students to be able to wear pants in her high school while campaigning for Bobby Kennedy for president just before dropping out to support her family. She wouldn’t obtain her GED for another 30 years when she was finally divorcing my father after an almost two-decade abusive marriage. Throughout her life St. John has been a stabilizing force and a safe space — where she could escape the stigma of being a poor child with an abusive father and later being a poor, divorced mother against an economic system that has no intention of seeing her thrive. While my childhood mimicked much of my mother’s, by 18 I had chosen a different path with the intention of breaking cycles of abuse and financial instability. But the convictions I developed within the church and the values I express through my life’s work are rooted in my mother’s expression of her faith and relationship with her church. They have played a significant role in especially shaping my understanding of economic injustice and propelled me to fight patriarchal civic structures.

At 12, while my parents were going through their divorce, I began to assume more responsibilities around the household. My mother didn’t have a job while being married to my father: he had forced her to quit her well-paying job at Mary Kay cosmetics once she was pregnant with their second child, my older brother. The job she has today as a bus driver for the local school district is because I had brought a flyer home in the 6th grade. It didn’t require a high school diploma and my mom was in the process of getting her GED. I would also attempt to advise my mother on bills, eventually offering to empty my and my twin sister’s small savings accounts to pay for the retainer of my mother’s divorce lawyer. Initially these things felt good because I was helping, but my limitations as a kid quickly became apparent. Whenever we’d stay after church to get groceries from the food pantry I began resenting my mother, blaming her entirely for us being poor. Eventually when I was of-age to obtain a worker’s permit I started financially providing for our family. Gradually the stigma of being financially indigent and the fear of losing my twin sister and me to my dad, who was more economically stable, had brought up a lot of historic trauma for my mother. Trauma that she eventually started taking out more and more on us, since my older siblings moved out or were kicked out of our house.

I now, at 33, have a lot of sympathy for my mother and my younger self when I reflect on this time of our relationship, but at the time I chose to escape my home life by clinging to the bootstrap theory and throwing myself into school. And to my 18-year-old self it had seemingly worked — I received a full-ride to attend Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Ironically the distance I put between me and my family while at an elite school like Northwestern allowed me to understand systems of oppression, to give my mother grace. This perspective was an essential counterweight to the classism baked into much of Medill’s curriculum, and it made me a better journalist. It set me on a hybrid activist, reporter path that was especially apparent while I was reporting on the abuse of unaccompanied migrant Zimbabwean children at the South African border. And by the time in 2012 when we had to ask the church for financial support for my mother’s hospital bed while she faced a critical cancer scare, my resentment had evolved into anger towards a capitalistic system that sets women like my mother up to fail, to be perpetually devalued. Having sympathy for my mother’s pain and how she expresses it has allowed me to be an effective mediator within the workplace and within political organizing spaces. I can also now see how despite circumstances, my mother has never lost her commitment to demanding a government that serves all people regardless of class, like her church does. While she was writing thank you letters to St. John for her hospital bed, she was writing and calling her U.S. Senator Dick Durbin to support forgiving student loan debt so people like my twin sister could go back to school to finish. In this way, my mother has helped me to better understand civic resilience and what our democracy should look like. In this way my mother embodies what French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville highlighted about organized religion in “Democracy in America”. Religion is separate from the state because it can be one of many critical mirrors to address when government falls short of being a democracy that serves everyone. My mother is a testament to the communities that can be fostered by religious institutions and reminds me of the critical role those communities can have in the public sphere. This is why at their best, churches foster a brave space for civic engagement. They are a place where parishioners can be cared for one week and caring the next because they are dedicated to self-reconciliation. You are expected to show up unfinished.

As a child I would slink into the pew, embarrassed because I knew the envelope my mother placed into the offering basket had no money in it. But on the drive home she’d remind me — in a way that also felt like she was reassuring herself — that these slips were how the church knew she was an active parishioner, how we were counted. I thought of those empty pastel envelopes when I graduated from Northwestern in 2009. My mother showed up in almost head-to-toe Wildcat purple to celebrate the first (and still only) family member finishing college, exclaiming “No one can tell us we don’t belong here.” This is how my mother has showed up to church for much of her 69-years on this planet. But it isn’t just about being counted, it’s about being seen. Being seen despite being poor or not getting your GED until 50. I’ve only recently begun to really understand how critical public brave spaces of affirmation like churches or libraries are for the sake of our democracy, for community accountability. I gave a keynote presentation on this as it relates to the media at a European Journalism Centre News Summit in October 2018, but what I’ve come to realize is just how important it is to give people public, brave spaces that aren’t tied to their livelihoods. I’ve also learned that being seen and heard is the first step to fostering a community that can hold each other accountable in the fight for equity, that can unlearn together.

My mother not only feels like a valued member of the St. John’s community because she is counted, but also because she can hold them accountable. She doesn’t feel silenced when critiquing her church’s sentiment toward homosexuality or transgender folks. When I came out to my other and taught her about my partners being many expressions of the gender spectrum, she responded: “Jesus didn’t tell people how to be, he just said don’t kill anybody.” But because her church and the larger Catholic apparatus haven’t done the internal work of re-evaluating the ways it perpetuates patriarchy they don’t fully hear my mother, and frankly, women altogether. I want to understand how church leaders, can better share power with ALL of their constituents. I believe this practice will allow religious spaces to deliver on their democratic potential while also building resilience against the violence of the religious right.

Every fight I’ve witnessed my mother have, especially when I’ve seen her show up despite feeling like she wasn’t enough, has shaped how I show up for justice every day. It’s why whenever I am publishing work or asked to speak at a conference I make sure my full name is used — Andrea Faye Hart. Hart is my father’s last name, but Faye is hers. Faye is my grandmother’s name. And I refuse to let women be erased in their newsrooms, in their classrooms and most certainly not their churches.

Last March I wrote how City Bureau was (and still is) mapping out ways to grow with integrity. Since then our team has been identifying organizational resources and practices we could employ internally.

In the last year I’ve learned so much, but an especially galvanizing moment was a workshop I co-hosted with Open News’ Erika Owens during the 2018 Allied Media Conference where we heard from dozens of practitioners who want to better the orgs they’ve inherited or the ones they’re creating. Participants kept echoing the need to eradicate a false sense of urgency that has led to unrealistic deadlines or trying to do too many things (hello, capitalism rearing its head in work that’s meant to be an antidote).

All these conversations helped me articulate two key things: I was burning out doing something I loved. And we’ve outgrown some of the initial methods we used to produce the Public Newsroom. So we’re going to embrace these growing pains as a moment to take a healthy creative reset. Because if we want City Bureau to be an organization that functions fluidly like a human, not rigidly like a machine, what’s more humane than taking time to learn or taking a break?

So we’re hitting pause on the Public Newsroom for a month and a half — from June 13 through July 25 — to identify lessons learned, evaluate what needs improvement as well as explore ways we can grow to better serve and work with our community. Our decision to take a break from weekly workshops fits into the commitments we outlined when trying to grow with integrity, especially to support staff wellness and promote internal learning and a positive work environment. Instead we’re going to focus on deepening the relationships we have built over the past 111 workshops and identifying new ones.

While we won’t be hosting PNs around the city, Ellie Mejía (the PN co-pilot) and I will be meeting with stakeholders in neighborhoods across the city to inform our next steps. We want to take time to identify month-long themes for the Public Newsroom (like we tested with our #LocalNewsContract series) and understand how to better share the materials that get generated during our workshops.

We’ll also check in with our PN partners at 14 East, Mississippi Today and Énois to hear what they’ve been learning. And, as mentioned last June, we’ll be rolling out a PN toolkit for more folks to replicate this workshop series for their communities. We’ll also have updates on our 2019 Public Newsroom Curator application.

We’ll be back August 1 to kick off a series co-designed with Chicago United for Equity around aldermanic accountability and evaluating the first 100 days of our new City Council in wards around the city.

Support City Bureau’s free and open programming around Public Newsrooms by donating or becoming a City Bureau Press Club member today.

Public Newsroom Update: We’re Taking a Break was originally published in City Bureau on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On March 21 the City Bureau community will be celebrating its 100th Public Newsroom. For nearly every Thursday in the past few years we’ve discussed, debated and deconstructed some of the most pressing issues in our city. We’ve had more than 200 hosts, who’ve helped us facilitate 200+ hours of conversations, with thousands of attendees wanting to build a community newsroom that looks like and respects them.

• RSVP NOW: Join us for our 100th Public Newsroom party

We launched the crowdfunding campaign to create our Public Newsroom in August 2016 because we believed (and still do) that “journalism works better when the people affected by media coverage play a role in creating it.” As a result, our weekly workshop series has become a generative, brave space rooted in popular education principles — where everyone, especially local reporters, can unlearn the harmful historic practices of traditional news- and information-gathering. That’s translated into reporters (including our own reporting fellows) doing more listening than talking. In addition to diagnosing what hasn’t worked, this ever-growing community has been collectively designing ways to humanize local news. It’s a beautiful, evolving dynamic articulated by one of our youngest Documenters (I believe she’s 16 now) — “it’s a place where the power is in the question holder, not in the presenter.”

We’ve come a long way since our first Public Newsroom with Eve Ewing on accountable, community reporting. And we’re not the only media outlet who’s benefited from these conversations — we’ve seen many folks in the Chicago media landscape (and beyond) take steps in reimagining local news. To celebrate our 100th workshop, I wanted to pull three of the big commitments we made during our launch campaign three years ago, highlight ways we’ve approached these goals and where we still have room to grow.

We wanted the Public Newsroom to be a space where “we’re opening opportunities for everyone to play a direct role in local journalism.”

• This has translated into workshops where community residents can help shift reporting frameworks to make them more equitable. Some highlights have included reimagining crime reporting with local journalists and organizers during our 69th workshop in July 2018 as well as unpacking how to cover reproductive rights and abortion during our 38th Public Newsroom in October 2017 with Rewire.News’ Senior Producer Jenn Stanley. Eventually we hope to better document and compile these kinds of workshops to form an alternative, community-centered style guide for local news and information practitioners.
• This has also meant skills-sharing workshops where attendees take a direct role in reporting, like our 21st and 29th workshops featuring The CivicLab founder Tom Tresser. In July 2017 Tresser came in to unpack data from the city’s notorious Tax Increment Financing program , then returned with a City Bureau Documenters training in September 2017 to show everyday residents how to analyze the city’s annual TIF report. You can see the results here. This was one of the first times we revisited a conversation to share findings, which has become a valuable new practice that we are continuing today.

We wanted the Public Newsroom to “build communication and trust between journalists and readers”

• During our 17th Public Newsroom we hosted local artist Tonika Johnson to talk about “who tells the story of Englewood,” her hometown neighborhood. We loved Johnson’s perspective on community storytelling so much that she became our first photojournalism fellow, where she was able to more fully develop her “Folded Map” project. We are grateful that Johnson trusted us to help nurture her project in the early stages and for her continued influence within our fellowship program.

And our “long-term vision is a local media ecosystem that is open to all, capable of holding official power accountable, and can strengthen the bonds within communities.”

• To kick off 2019 we hosted a series of election-related Public Newsroom, including our 96th workshop hosted in Azucar, an ice cream shop in Little Village with the community group El Foro Del Pueblo. This event, hosted mostly in Spanish, was an opportunity for 22nd Ward residents to understand the power of alderpeople and how to hold them accountable outside of the voting booth. This workshop was also significant because over the last few years we’ve hosted more Public Newsrooms outside of our beloved homebase in Build Coffee at the request of our community.

And some things we didn’t quite anticipate when we kicked off this program but I wanted to note — the Public Newsroom has been a space to honor our history and cultural memory. We’ve been honored to feature folks like civic rights activist Timuel Black (who also celebrated a 100th birthday this year) and Young Lords founder Jose Cha-Cha Jimenez as part of our first-ever curator series.

Additionally, the Public Newsroom is spreading beyond City Bureau. We’ve found mission-aligned partners locally like DePaul’s 14 East Magazine, around the country with Mississippi Today and Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, as well as globally with Énois in São Paulo, who’ve been remixing the Public Newsroom to serve their communities. (Stay tuned for a PN toolkit being released later this year!)

So what’s up for our next 100 Public Newsrooms? That’s where you come in! We’ve always loved our community’s input — tell us what topics or hosts you’d like to see. What resources would you like us to share from these workshops? And how? If you have suggestions please shoot me an email at andrea@citybureau.org. And most importantly, we hope you join us March 21 at 6 p.m. for a celebratory dance party featuring local TV show Chic-A-Go-Go and musical act Joseph Chilliams.

Support City Bureau’s free and open Public Newsrooms becoming a City Bureau Press Club member today.

Celebrating 100 Public Newsrooms was originally published in City Bureau on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Public Newsroom just turned two years old, and to celebrate, we’re launching something special this November. Nearly all of next month’s workshops (except for a special People Powered Publishing 2018 pre-conference session on November 14 with Free Press) have been designed by our first-ever guest curators Rayshauna Gray and Daniel Kay Hertz. We are proud the Public Newsroom is an open, free, brave space where participants can discuss, deconstruct and debate some of the most pressing issues in Chicago. And what could be more open than handing over the reins to two incredible local authors?

Born and raised in Roseland, Gray is currently living in Cambridge where she’s completing a book about the “last 200 years of U.S. history through seven generations of women in her family” to be out on Belt Publishing in Fall 2019. Hertz, who grew up in Chicago, Madison and Evanston, released his book The Battle of Lincoln Park earlier this month.

For their curated workshops, Gray and Hertz wanted to discuss the theme “How Do We Memorialize Chicago?” Together they’ll examine what, how and why we think about the city’s past, present, and future. Presenters selected by Gray and Hertz will explore the ways we build narratives and monuments — physical or otherwise — out of people, events and memories.

So what’s in store? We’re still confirming the full line-up but here’s a short rundown of each week:

• The City We Inherit: On November 1, Hertz will kick off the series with Young Lords Founder José Cha-Cha Jiménez. Jiménez will speak about the history of that group’s work and his efforts to document the history of Young Lords Organization and Puerto Ricans in Lincoln Park.
• The City We Inhabit: On November 8, Gray will lead a workshop with Black Owned Chicago founder Tanikia Carpenter to talk about reconciling the city’s history with our present as a Black millennial.
• The City We Impart: On November 29, Hertz and Gray will close out the series with a discussion featuring youth activists and organizers leading local campaigns.

We’re honored to have Hertz and Gray as our inaugural guest curators. Stay tuned for how you can apply to become a Public Newsroom Guest Curator in 2019! And please note, this is a paid opportunity.

Want to pitch a Public Newsroom workshop? Email andrea@citybureau.org.

Support the brave space at City Bureau’s Public Newsroom by becoming a Press Club member. Your full-year membership value will be matched (doubled!) thanks to the News Match program.

Introducing: Our First Public Newsroom Guest Curators was originally published in City Bureau on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

During the past year and a half, we’ve hosted nearly 70 Public Newsroom workshops featuring incredible local artists, organizers and journalists as hosts and more than 1,200 wonderfully inquisitive attendees. Every Thursday night we at City Bureau are reminded just how hungry folks are for an open, brave space to learn and exchange ideas about the city where they live.

Now this concept is spreading to other parts of Chicago — as well as the Mississippi Delta. In May we helped Mississippi Today reporters set up their first event in Cleveland. After a packed workshop at the 20th Allied Media Conference in Detroit where we helped attendees create their own Public Newsroom plans, we thought it’d be the perfect time to highlight these collaborations and share more.

So what is the Public Newsroom and why do we have them?

Every Thursday we gather journalists and the public to discuss local issues and share resources and knowledge to foster better local reporting. The Public Newsroom is free and open for anyone to attend, and anybody can propose to host a session, because we know reporters aren’t the only ones who have a stake in using media to create a stronger democracy. (You can see a full list of our past workshops here.)

We started out wanting to demystify and reimagine the reporting process, and while that’s happening, we ended up generating something so much richer. We’ve created a weekly gathering space for people who want to use public education to disrupt and repair problematic systems like the structures that perpetuate white supremacy or problematic local news coverage. Photographer and community organizer Tonika Johnson embodied this with her May 2017 session, “Who tells the story of Englewood?” Johnson, who went on to become a City Bureau reporting fellow, had attendees talk through the negative stereotypes of Englewood and what accountable community storytelling would look like for the South Side neighborhood she calls home.

Johnson structured the evening to be interactive for a diverse audience with varying relationships to her work — something we require of all our presenters. This is an essential framework for the Public Newsroom: It’s not a lecture about a solution or project, but a space for feedback. It’s where, as one attendee noted, “the power lies in the person asking the question, not the one presenting.” And since the Public Newsroom is central to our community engagement approach, it isn’t tied to reporting projects. It’s our way of committing to community accountability all the time, not just on deadline or on a publishing date.

We take great pride in the Public Newsroom being a space where the learning field is leveled. It’s why the program’s origin was intentionally egalitarian: We launched with a Kickstarter in 2016 that attracted 662 donors from around the globe, whom we asked to limit their contributions to $10 each. Then, we began seeing the beautiful, generative community that developed around this weekly event, and we saw how valuable it could be to our friends and partners at local news outlets — and their communities — elsewhere. In late 2017, we began preaching this idea far and wide, starting with a 2017 People-Powered Publishing Conference clinic I co-hosted with Darryl Holliday.

Where has the Public Newsroom been replicated?

Our first two Public Newsroom collaborations have been with DePaul University’s student magazine 14 East and the nonprofit news organization Mississippi Today. Editorial leaders of 14 East magazine, Megan Stringer, Ally Pruitt and Marissa Nelson, have hosted three workshops this year as a way to have an “open dialogue” with their fellow students.

“We want to know what’s happening in our community that we should be writing about, and how the magazine has handled sensitive coverage,” Stringer told City Bureau. They kicked off their Public Newsroom in January with Bushra Amiwala, a DePaul freshman from suburban Skokie, Illinois, who ran for 13th District Cook County Commissioner.

In the Mississippi Delta, reporter Aallyah Wright saw a similar opportunity as the 14 East staff. “I just want to do this so we can form stronger relationships with folks in the community and see what’s going on,” said Wright.

This year I worked with Wright and her Delta colleague Kelsey Davis to design their first Public Newsroom on education reporting in the area. After 52 years of litigation, schools in Cleveland, Mississippi (one of the major towns in the Delta), were ordered to desegregate. And while national media paid attention to the ruling, it was up to local outlets like Mississippi Today to carry the story forward, according to Wright and Davis. As a result the duo started the series “Behind the Headlines” in Fall 2017 to document students’ experiences, and this work was on display during their first Public Newsroom. (Shout out to former Center for Investigative Reporting folks Cole Goins and Joaquin Alvarado for sparking this partnership in January 2017 — more on that another time.)

As you can imagine, this is a sensitive topic and people in the Delta often feel that media has misrepresented them or only pays attention when something bad happens, Wright and Davis told us. This sentiment echoes what we’ve heard from South and West Side residents in Chicago.

“When you hear about the Delta you hear a lot of folks say, ‘no one cares about it,’ or it gets painted in dire straits. I see it as our job to show people why folks should care and to understand what that looks like in our reporting,” Davis said.

Through our pre-planning we identified how the Public Newsroom could allow Wright and Davis to build consistent, stronger relationships with their community to unpack sensitive issues like school integration as well as teacher shortages in the area. What’s more, getting at the core of this model and how to facilitate it helped Wright and Davis think on their feet when hosting their first workshop last month. More on those lessons learned in a future post!

So, what’s next for the Public Newsroom?

Neither DePaul’s nor Mississippi Today’s Public Newsrooms look exactly like ours. They reflect the needs of each outlet’s audience and we’re excited to see them unfold.

For folks at City Bureau, both collaborations are reminders of the incredible value of fostering transparent, accountable dialogue on a regular basis, especially during this moment of distrust for media and when local news outlets are fewer and far between. Working with mission-aligned outlets allows us to further move the needle on local news.

We’re still exploring what other collaborations around the Public Newsroom are possible. We’re also designing a toolkit to better support folks trying to remix this model for their own organizations. We posed this question in Detroit this weekend and want to also share it here — what would it look like to build a network of folks interested in replicating the Public Newsrooms to reimagine community engagement in local news where they live?

Stay tuned for more updates on our #PublicNewsroom toolkit. Want to pitch a workshop in Chicago or start your own #PublicNewsroom? Drop a line to andrea@citybureau.org.

Support free and open workshops at City Bureau’s Public Newsroom by becoming a Press Club member today.

Want to Steal the Public Newsroom? Here’s Why You Should—and How was originally published in City Bureau on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
is Change.”
— Octavia Butler

Money scares the shit out of me. I get anxiety and my heart jumps every time I check my bank account. I take forever to call any utility when needing to clarify a bill. I am forever ready for circumstance to rear its head and come crashing down in the form of some familial emergency.

These anxieties are leftovers from growing up poorer and being raised mostly by a single mother who got her GED at 50.

But the truth is I’ve managed to work my way up the socioeconomic ladder (though I cannot say the same for the rest of my family). The truth is I now pay my bills on time. The truth is it’s much easier for me to help pay my family’s now than at 16.

I say this to give context as to why today’s announcement of City Bureau(a journalism lab I co-founded) being awarded $1 million is a big fucking deal. I am slowly letting it sink in that our community can stabilize to not just survive but thrive. This moment is a win built off the shoulders of incredible work only a city like Chicago can produce. And I know that these moments can often get swept up in “hero narratives” i.e. “check out these four scrappy kids in the Midwest changing journalism”. But the CB squad is anti-hero.

So I’m taking a page from Bob Dylan’s acceptance speeches and Chance’s “Coloring Book” credits (I’m a midwest gal after all) to turn this moment into an opportunity to give thanks. This is my attempt to connect the dots of the incredible community that I feel so lucky to call my chosen family. I am especially in awe of how you work on self-healing in the hopes of unlearning to build better i.e. your humanity. I am grateful for how you’ve picked me up while I process my own. Together it feels like we are a million Davids who have the audacity to reimagine this city in the face of a million Goliaths. (disclaimer: I’m Catholic. I’m also queer. I’ll do that math myself.)

You all make me feel ready for whatever battle is next. In a mildly chronological order:

• Maryann Faye Hart, Linda Hart and Jennifer Hart (aka my mama, my big sister and my twin) because women (and femmes) rule everything around me. You are my anchors and the faces I look for whenever I’ve been terrified on a stage. Thank you for laughing in the face of circumstance.

• Lisa See Kim because since 14 you have taught me to tilt the world on its head to shake out new meaning and new possibilities when I’ve felt defeated. Thank you for showing me the beauty in slowing down and throwing structure out the window.
• Douglas Foster because you’ve been pushing me since I was 18 — including almost pushing me out of your class because you’ve always known what I was capable of well before I did. Thank you for being a refuge for me at Northwestern.
• Brother Mike Hawkins because you embodied what it meant to lead in love while also calling for revolution. Thank you for never taking center stage away from the young folks you mentored. They’re soaring now. I miss you everyday.
• Adriana Díaz because you brought me back into teaching when you hired me at Radio Arte. Our morning runs make both this world and imagining new ones feel possible. Thank you for being unflinching when fighting for femmes and our inner-child.

• Vanessa Sanchez because you lead with such grace and entrust your instructors with such creative freedom. Thank you for making Yollocalli a space of joy for young folks (and instructors) when so often nonprofits are encouraged to create work that only reflects trauma. You’re Super Woman and an incredible mama.
• Miguel “Kane” Aguilar because you never stop creating new ways to manifest justice through hustling. Thank you for showing me how to navigate spaces without ever losing myself. You are a good man and father.
• Every student, I’ve ever had because teens are humbling and will forever remind you that you ain’t shit. Thanks for teaching me how to communicate better.
• RJ Eldridge because you’re the reason I’m on Twitter and still writing. Thank you for loving me enough to tell me when I’ve outgrown something and it’s time to move on.

• Melissa Bryan because you put me in places that I didn’t realize I belonged in, like the Hive Chicago Learning Network or Mozfest, and you helped me focus lofty ideas into actual lesson plans. Thank you for showing me what it means to be a leader who grows other leaders.
• Daniel X. O’Neil because you listen to the people, you do the work and you try again day after day. Thank you believing in me and keeping me grounded.
• Laurenellen McCann because you stood at the top of the civic tech hubub and told them to build with as well as move at the speed of inclusion. Thank you for giving me a front row seat as you manifest that message with so much intention. It’s a privilege. Let’s queer the world.
• Sophia Nahli Allison because I am so grateful for not only how you see this world for what it is but what it could be AND you share that vision publicly. Thank you for creating a beautiful portrait of the Real Chi Youth program that I continue to treasure. (oh and you introduced me to Darryl)
• Rae Chardonnay Taylor because I feel so lucky to fumble through creating organizations that are attempting to embody transformative justice. Thank you for loving Chicago with such honesty.
• My City Bureau family because it is an incredible feeling to stand with each of you like Care Bears fearlessly shining our lights. Thank you for being brave, trusting the process and keeping community at the center.

There are and will be so many more humans to add to this list. From the bottom of my heart I thank you all. Let’s keep honoring our people while they’re here and saying their names when they’re gone.

Love,

A

PS Because there had to be a Dylan-esque ramble in terms of non-human things that are significant — shoutout to Medill for awarding me a full-ride because I was poor and smart (hey remember all those studies about white women benefiting the most from affirmative action — it me.) And special shoutout to Chicago’s queer community for imagining binary-less worlds into a beautiful reality.

This year City Bureau will launch a pilot project of its Documenters program in Detroit with public radio station WDET thanks to a grant from Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan. Momentum around Documenters, our youngest program, grew significantly in 2017: It was awarded $50,000 in June to develop a public meetings calendar, the network expanded to more than 300 folks from more than 55 neighborhoods and we hosted our first Summit to gather feedback on our progress. By offering free, accessible trainings at libraries and other public spaces around the city, we’ve cultivated an intergenerational space for anyone who cares about where they live and wants to improve how the public is informed. It’s become a community of people who, though critical of traditional civic and media practices, are hungry for meaningful ways to empower their neighborhoods.

As we reflect on how City Bureau’s Documenters program has evolved since it started in September 2016, we wanted to take a moment to explain its origins. We believe open, intentional collaboration can lead to some of the best solutions for local media, and Documenters is a prime example of that. We also believe in honoring our roots.

But instead of just giving you highlights from the past year and a half, we sat down with our original partners, with whom we are proud to still work, to better tell the story. This narrative is living proof of what it means to work in community when reimagining civics and media.

Documenters, Pre-City Bureau

The original Documenters Program was created by Daniel X. O'Neil and Kyla Williams at the Smart Chicago Collaborative, a civic-technology funder collaborative founded in 2011 by the City of Chicago, the MacArthur Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust. Smart Chicago used technology to address access, skill and data needs across pressing citywide issues. (In December, it merged with sister organization City Digital to form the City Tech Collaborative.)

In 2014, Smart Chicago was planning a two-day data conference, the Chicago School of Data project, and wanted to ensure it would be accessible to all. “[We wanted] to offer a different conference experience for those who couldn’t be present or just weren’t connecting to our organization,” Williams, former interim executive director of Smart Chicago, said. “We talked about, how do we document this conference in such a way that provides a unique information-sharing opportunity for and by regular people?”

From there, Smart Chicago recruited 42 storytellers (videographers, photographers, writers, etc.) from across the city’s 77 neighborhoods to record and document the two-day conference that featured technologists and civic agents. And instead of recruiting people as volunteers, Williams led the charge to ensure these individuals were paid for their work.

“I told Dan that we needed to honor these people and their position in the civic tech ecosystem,” Williams said. “We wanted them to be paid at a market rate.” (A book about the conference featuring Documenters’ work was published last November and is available for purchase here and for free online viewing here.)

For O’Neil, the initiative was significant because it aligned with his work pre-Smart Chicago, including co-founding the neighborhood discussion and informal news site EveryBlock. He considers it his life’s work to ensure there are records left behind about how regular people live their lives and interact within their communities.

“I spent the first 12 years of my life in Pittsburgh, where every library begins with the word ‘Carnegie.’ I spent summers in the shocking air-conditioned goodness of the library. I loved the microfiche machines — special contraptions for reviewing documents. I looked up newspapers, but the thing that got me the most was that the stories were in situ — it included all of the advertisements, weather reports, and errata — a true document of what people looked at on any given day,” he said.

This ethos informed the early days of the Documenters program. Following the first test run, Smart Chicago sought to integrate Documenters more fully into its organization. “We became part of a Knight Foundation cohort representing a diverse set of approaches to expanding community information and increasing community engagement,” O’Neil said. That cohort featured some of the country’s leading local media reformers, including Molly de Aguiar (now of the News Integrity Initiative) and Joshua Stearns (now of Democracy Fund). During meetups, members would discuss ways to improve news and information. “That cohort helped Kyla and I figure out what we valued, and for us that was working with regular people rather than experts and technologists,” he said. It also solidified Knight — who co-supported City Bureau’s iteration via the Protoype Fund this year — as the program’s biggest champion.

Ch-ch-changes

In April 2016, O’Neil (who was my mentor for the 2016 Voqal Fellowship and is now a City Bureau board member) granted City Bureau $5,000 and invited us to remix their Documenters program as a way to cover the report released by Chicago’s Police Accountability Task Force, which convened after protests rocked the city following the release of a video showing a Chicago police officer killing teenager Laquan McDonald. City Bureau hired and trained mentees from our youth media partners to document the Task Force’s public hearings and then recruited Documenters to annotate parts of the lengthy, wonky report with historical context, legal documents and news reports. The final product, dubbed the Task Force Tracker, allowed anybody to weigh in via the Genius annotation tool. We kept experimenting with the Documenters idea by more consistently sending note-takers to police board meetings.

When O’Neil left Smart Chicago in May 2016, the organization began a year of strategic planning, according to Williams. Meanwhile, we at City Bureau expanded our version of Documenters program in September 2016 with a series of orientations and new assignments, attending meetings about the Obama Library happening in our own backyard, Woodlawn. These processes, though independent of each other, came to the same conclusion. In early 2017, Williams and Smart Chicago transitioned the Documenters program and its members to be housed solely under City Bureau.

“One of the lessons that emerged from our strategy sessions was that we realized we should’ve spun out Documenters into the community two years before it launched, since we were more of a convener and less of a direct-service [organization],” Williams said. “And for us it became obvious that City Bureau, who is on the ground in a way that we aren’t consistently, was our sister in information-needs specialists and could take on this program.

“I think it was the natural progression,” she added. “It would’ve been different if we went with some traditional outlet that didn’t touch community. But we knew, with City Bureau, these Documenters were going to be nurtured or have skills or appropriate leadership.”

So, now what?

Since then we’ve been recruiting hundreds more participants (anyone can apply!) and integrated the program into every facet of our organization. We’ve designed a series of six skills trainings, hosted dozens of workshops and covered roughly 753 hours of meetings.

The legacy of our collaborative origin with Smart Chicago continues. We are reimagining the program with new partners, like the Planning Coalition, a South Shore-based nonprofit reviving block clubs on the South Side. Along with Planning Coalition’s Executive Director Val Free, we trained their constituents to become Documenters and, in turn, they are using this knowledge to design better ways to share information in their neighborhoods. We’ve also partnered with ProPublica Illinois and many more to experiment with the powerful possibilities of this network of engaged citizens. We’re also planning a special project with the Resident Association of Greater Englewood—but more on that in a future blog.

The beauty of Documenters is its simplicity — anyone can start a similar program elsewhere. We often wonder what it would mean to replicate it beyond Chicago with mission-aligned partners. City Bureau prides itself on authentic placemaking through contextualized civic media, so how could this happen in another city, like Detroit? Or a rural town? The demand is there — we’ve heard from various journalism or journalism-adjacent organizations that are feeling the same local news pains across the country.

Whatever the next steps for Documenters are locally, in Detroit or beyond, we know it will be done in community: because that’s an essential part of making media better at democracy, as well as for it.

Support the City Bureau Documenters program by becoming a City Bureau Press Club member today.

How Did City Bureau’s Documenters Program Get Started? was originally published in City Bureau on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.