Collective Wisdom: Engaging neighborhoods

Neighborhoods are about more than just geography or the abstract shapes and names you see on a map. They represent a living history and shared social fabric — environments that thrive with human connection, intentional collaboration and care.

Journalism can only benefit from more thoughtful engagement and coverage of neighborhoods by hearing directly from the communities they serve. Many are leading such approaches — Block Club Chicago, Pittsburgh’s Public Source and Boyle Heights Beat among them.

Local news can also learn from organizations outside of traditional media that are already working on the ground level everyday. To bring those insights closer to local newsrooms’ experiments, we asked five leaders with community engagement experience outside of news about the opportunities they see for local media to build trust or belonging, from using physical spaces like libraries and community gardens to digital platforms that support shared experiences.

Which approaches can be effective for encouraging action around practical solutions? And what can news leaders learn about engagement from other mission-driven initiatives?

These insights come from thought leaders and local organizations connected to recent API Local News Summits, which explored ideas on embracing local identity and history to create value, the conditions for local civic discourse across generations, and how to collaborate with community members to steward a shared local information ecosystem together.

We hope this shared wisdom will inspire you to look within your own neighborhoods to discover, imagine and structure opportunities for meaningful connection in your communities.

In 2026, API will dive deeper into how news organizations can better engage with community members and build a sense of belonging, including on the neighborhood level. Learn more about API’s 2026 Local News Summits here.

Reporting that builds community: A blueprint for neighborhood engagement

By Seth Kaplan
Author of “Fragile Neighborhoods”

Newsrooms seeking to deepen neighborhood-centric engagement should begin by investing in place — treating neighborhoods not simply as geographic beats but as living civic ecosystems. Strong local coverage starts with understanding how identity, history, institutions and shared norms shape daily life. Our country’s growing fragility often stems less from material hardship than from weakened relationships and thinning institutions at the neighborhood level; journalism can help illuminate and repair those gaps.

A genuine neighborhood lens requires reporters to spend time on the ground: walking the streets, mapping local assets, listening to residents and identifying the connective tissue that holds a community together. Coverage should highlight both challenges and local successes, elevating stories of collective problem-solving and resilience. Newsrooms can function as conveners, creating spaces — physical or virtual — where neighbors come together to exchange information, discuss solutions and build trust.

Engagement could also expand beyond traditional reporting. Hosting forums, collaborating with community institutions, partnering with hyperlocal leaders and co-creating content with residents all help strengthen the local social infrastructure. Journalism becomes not only a source of information but a contributor to the social health of neighborhoods.

By committing to place-based investment, relationship-building and community-centered practices, news organizations can produce more meaningful coverage, deepen public trust and positively influence the neighborhoods they serve.

Libraries offer natural place-based convening — and partnerships

By Shamichael Hallman
Director of civic health and economic opportunity, Urban Libraries Council

A 2023 Leadership Brief from the Urban Libraries Council, Libraries as Cornerstones of Democracy, introduced a Declaration of Democracy for Public Libraries and reaffirmed something many of us already knew: libraries play a vital role in bringing people together locally for meaningful civic engagement.

Across North America, libraries have been showing what this looks like on the ground:

• At the Poudre River Public Library District, the Northern Colorado Deliberative Journalism Project, created with the CSU Center for Public Deliberation and the Coloradoan, worked to boost local news and civic engagement by facilitating public opinion forums.
• At the Kansas City Public Library, Java with a Journalist offered a simple but powerful approach to rebuilding trust. By creating a relaxed atmosphere where community members and reporters with the Kansas City Star could sit together, share stories and surface concerns, the library helped nurture the kind of relationships that make local news feel more human and more accessible.
• And at the Baltimore County Public Library, the Two Truths and a Lie workshop series, developed with Truth in Common, helped adults and teens sharpen their media literacy skills. Participants learned how to evaluate sources, recognize AI-generated content and better understand their local news ecosystem.

When I think about how local news organizations and journalists can strengthen their community connections, these stories stand out. They show that when journalists, media organizations and libraries work together, communities gain better access to trusted information, stronger media literacy and spaces where people feel informed, included and connected.

Community gardens — an invitation to grow together

By Linda Appel Lipsius
CEO, Denver Urban Gardens

Three critical elements of inclusion and belonging are: being invited, being needed, and having a structured way to engage.

1. In order for someone to “join,” there are a million social barriers to overcome. Therefore, the invitation, the container, or the recruitment process lets this happen in a way that is less intimidating, formless, and … potentially socially dangerous. Simplified, the chances of rejection — one of the most basic human fears — are significantly reduced with an invitation.
2. Being needed involves not just entering a space or a group, but truly being part of it. Contributing. Feeling that if you didn’t show up, things might fall apart, or, at least, not thrive, in the way they would when you’re there.
3. A structured way to engage  dictates expectations, group norms, roles, responsibilities, and purpose, reducing the possibility of misunderstanding and misaligned expectations.

Community gardens offer all of these elements, which is why they are such powerful catalysts for inclusion and belonging. As we say at Denver Urban Gardens, community gardens are critical infrastructure for thriving cities because they cultivate food, community and climate resilience.

In neighborhoods where community gardens exist, there is a safe, neutral, apolitical space where people work together to undertake the most fundamental of tasks — growing food and digging in the soil — shoulder to shoulder. Furthermore, anyone from any background, socioeconomic status, age or skill level can participate and contribute.

These elements aren’t exclusive to community gardening — you can see them at play in other community infrastructure efforts, including local news and information.

The extra element of connection to place, connection to the soil and connection to the earth that community gardens provide is the icing on the cake.

The Conversation Desk: Why dialogue is again part of the story

By Corey Chao
Managing director, Public Spaces Incubator

For the first decade or so of online news, commenting on articles was a bit of a sideshow. At first, it was exciting to hear from readers so directly. But even then, moderation required a lot of resources. Commenters — rarely representative — could get out of hand quickly. And ultimately, these features felt like a distraction from the “real” action: reporting and publishing news. So when social media arrived, offloading conversation felt pragmatic.

But in that shift we broke something fundamental. These unregulated, ad-driven platforms didn’t just take our comment sections — they severed the connective tissue between journalism and public sensemaking. We became content factories while creators built the relationships and platforms optimized for outrage. Now we face budget cuts and aging audiences while younger people forge deep connections with voices that prioritize dialogue over monologue.

Luckily, neighborhood and public-spirited media organizations are strong candidates to rebuild a conversational practice — something we’ve been doing in the Public Spaces Incubator. As we’ve co-created better conversational tools, we’ve learned two key shifts are needed:

• The basic comment box at the bottom of the page is ubiquitous, yet deeply limits what’s possible. You wouldn’t start a hard public meeting without a structure, why expect something different online? New tools and approaches to facilitation lead to productive public conversation, belonging and trust.
• Move beyond passive moderation to “stewardship,” where journalists actively facilitate healthy discussion that fuels future reporting. Conversation is a part of a content strategy, and part of making our work relevant.

Tools towards Belonging: Leveraging tech to spend more time in community

By Deborah Tien
Cofounder, Relational Tech Project

What does it mean to feel like you belong in a neighborhood? I am struck by the word itself: Belonging. To be longing.

In other words: To feel safe enough in a space that you can surface your deep longings for how you’d like your neighborhood to be — and to feel brave enough to shape your neighborhood to meet those longings.

At the Relational Tech Project, we explore how increased access to software development tools can help us shape our neighborhoods. And I wonder how this may apply to local news media, too.

With tools like generative AI, we need less money and time to build tech. Less money means we can build more personalized, ‘small is beautiful’ tech without the pressures of scaling to millions of users to make ends meet. Less time means we can spend more of our energy in the messiness that is community building and inevitable conflicts.

The relational tech approach means truly caring for and being accountable to each of our neighbors. This is a huge shift away from building tech in a far-off corporate setting for aggregated ‘user personas.’ I am curious if local news media is experiencing a similar shift, and what your experiments are like.

Here’s a few examples of relational tech experiments:

• J., an artist and journalist in her 70s, uses an AI-generated group texting tool to message her neighbors about upcoming events like a conversation with local government officials about the nearby park’s walk audit and the ‘Crullers on the Corner’ neighborhood gathering in Milwaukee, Wis.
• Glenn, a former media startup founder, is working with local alt-weeklies like the Oakland Review of Books and Coyote Media in Oakland, Calif., on shared tools and data infrastructure that support trusted local publishers in curating their own community event calendars.
• Arpan, passionate about climate justice and education, works with the Library Newsroom Project to help neighbors in Sunset Park, Brooklyn conduct their own neighborhood inquiries to make a local newspaper. For instance, one woman asked why a local rec center was under construction for so long and when it would open again. Her Library Newsrooms Project affiliation gave her the confidence to call multiple offices across the city until the Parks Department contacted her directly to provide an update.

How can local news media offer opportunities for people to feel both safe and brave in their neighborhoods? At the Relational Tech Project, our dream is that millions of people are building what they need, where they live, with their neighbors. We can only build towards that world if we journey alongside civic institutions like local news media outlets who have cultivated a deep foundation of trust with their neighbors over time.