Community Engagement & Trust

Community listening is a crucial tenet of improving community engagement, along with asset mapping and collaborating with other local news outlets — all part of the API Inclusion Index cohort’s efforts toward better engaging communities of color.

If we want to advance care in our community storytelling work – which I see as a key role of journalism – we also need to practice self-care. 

Anyone can work toward creating emotional safety anywhere they have agency over the room or in the space. This is a quick look at ways to operationalize emotional safety, whether in-person, virtual, one-time or ongoing.

Care involves the ability to hear, understand and recognize others’ needs and feelings. Centering care, though, goes one step further by taking on the work [...]

How can we center care when examining who gets to select and tell stories, how and where they are told, how stories are heard and responded to?

Exploring questions is one of the best ways to expand our thinking and try on new perspectives. Questions are an act of care, both for our communities, our journalism and ourselves.

The cohort came to the in-person training session with enthusiasm and will to begin to make a change with how they best serve the communities they engage with and report on.

It’s been a busy year for us: we resumed our in-person summits, expanded our training portfolio, revised our look and messaging, and offered numerous grants, products and programs to journalists.

Since June, the cohort has been learning from industry experts about growing trust with communities and creating workflows that support audience listening.

Want to shift your newsroom’s culture around engagement and building trust? Need buy-in for your ideas? Here are five tips for getting started.