Bridging Social Journalism and Community Organizing
What I learned after six months of covering East Harlem’s anti-displacement movement
East Harlem has been my home since I hopped off a plane at age five, landing in a cold, shadowy city that looked nothing like the low, steel-roofed tropical town I grew up in. My story is not unique in East Harlem — many of us reached this neighborhood from the Caribbean. Motivated to settle here because of the affordable rent and residual cultural homogeneity. East Harlem is after all el barrio, an historic and hard-fought identity longtime residents want to hold on to.
Naturally, I assumed proximity to an issue would mean that I was in the best position to cover it. I was wrong. Gentrification and its predecessor, displacement, are unraveling the fabric of East Harlem’s racial and cultural communities. Not only have I witnessed this displacement, I’ve experienced it. I grew on 98 Street and Lexington Avenue, a block that didn’t have the CVS, Taco Bell or endoscopy center it currently hosts. When our rents increased as lush Carnegie Hill extended further north, my mom moved us further uptown. I work at Daniel’s Music Foundation, a music center for people with disabilities that sits under the former site of the social security office that welcomed me to this country.
Experiencing displacement in East Harlem and reporting on it are two different things. The goal of social journalism is in bridging the gap between communities, namely underreported and marginalized communities, and journalists — journalists who often feel too comfortable reporting from their desks.
Last year, I embarked on an academic and prospectively professional career in journalism, becoming part of the CUNY School of Journalism’s second wave of social journalists. Coming from a background in cultural anthropology and history, I hoped to leave behind the esoteric world of academia, in favor of community-driven journalism. Finally, a field where your work gets published!
Well, not always.
What lured me to social journalism is its focus in communities. Reporting for communities, collaborating and building within the expressed goals of the people most impacted by your reporting.
It’s easy to feel ‘in-the-know’ when you’re connected to other journalists on Twitter, or in a classroom filled with fellow reporters, but the best way to learn about a community, and to accordingly, figure out how to best cover their stories, is to engage with that community. It took me some time to arrive at this community I’ve long been a part of, but once I decided to report for and not on East Harlem, I had a lot of work to do.
The first East Harlem event I attended as a reporter was Union Settlement’s 24th annual ‘Ethnic Festival.’ The May 21 festival, located on 104 Street between Third and Second Avenue, hosted 50 vendors, a bouncy castle and a rock-climbing wall. At the festival, I met three students from the Desis Lab at Parsons School of Design. The Desis Lab partnered design students from Parsons with Union Settlement, a settlement house and community-service organization based in East Harlem. Basically, through the Lab, Parsons students worked with local residents to redesign Union Settlement’s 104 Street community garden.
This is community engagement in practice.
Instead of redesigning a community garden without community approval, students from the Desis Lab surveyed, collaborated with and ultimately served Union Settlement residents.
Not long after the ‘Ethnic Festival,’ I came across another East Harlem community group surveying the neighborhood with a service-orientated goal in mind. The Church of the Living Hope’s Listening Project aimed to collect the “thoughts” of East Harlem residents and retell those stories back to the neighborhood. Over the course of five weeks last summer, a handful of local high school students and myself asked East Harlem residents what their hopes and fears were for the neighborhood.
The responses varied.
Some residents fear being pushed out as rents increase, some are worried about gang violence and over-policing. Over 400 East Harlem residents participated in the Listening Project, some offering brief proclamations (“Stop gentrification!”), others shared personal memories of the neighborhood. I found a kindred spirit in a local woman who described moving to East Harlem from Trinidad when she was a child, and who now fears being displaced from her rent-controlled apartment.
Throughout the year, it was essential to me that my reporting reflected East Harlem and not myself, which meant listening to as many people as possible. In August, I co-chaired a rally with Community Voices Heard. The aim of what became CVH’s ‘Public Land for Public Good’ rally was to educate local residents about a square of public land the city will soon sell to housing developers. For decades, 111 Street and Park Avenue has been a baseball field with four adjacent community gardens.
Getting East Harlem engaged with the ‘Public Good’ meant robocalls, door-knocking, handing out flyers, and reaching out to other community organizations, like Picture the Homeless and New York Communities for Change.
Nearby residents who didn’t participate in the rally, instead preferring to watch from afar, came up to me afterwards and told me more needed to be done to stop the development of the baseball field and gardens. I didn’t know what to tell them.
Following the rally, I spent the fall listening to more East Harlem residents and going to a ton of local events. I went to a senior citizen summit at the Silberman School of Social Work. I went to Community Board 11 meetings and public forums. I went uninvited to an invite-only convening on displacement and equitable development, hosted by NYU. More forums. I spoke to neighbors about gentrification as we waited for an M102 bus on the day of the NYC Marathon — that bus never came.
Over and over again, East Harlem residents told me more needed to be done. Something to halt gentrification, displacement, rezoning, income inequality, excessive police surveillance, and everything else plaguing the neighborhood we belong to.
“As journalists, we often write about a social problem, then let other institutions, like government, worry about the solutions.” — Susan Benesch, The Rise of Solutions Journalism
The need to do more brings to mind solutions journalism, or shifting the aim of reporting on solving or covering solvable social problems. Gentrification is too complex an issue for any one journalist to solve, but, if put into the hands of an informed and organized community, there is potential for legitimate change.
Social journalism is distinctly collaborative and community centered. Naturally, I have a lot of my own solutions for gentrification and displacement, and if I were terrible enough, I would have spent 2016 preaching to a community already accustomed to hearing their voices silenced.
My suggestion to fellow journalists: step back and stop quantifying communities into databases of sources and contacts. Return people’s calls. Go to the community forum even if it’s destined to be uneventful. Consider the emotional weight communities carry daily, and worry less about your deadlines.
Listen to everyone. Even the guy with an insane Citi Bike conspiracy theory that sounds too sinister to be real.
Take notes. Get numbers. Make your presence known.
New Harlem World covers stories related, but not limited to displacement, gentrification, and social unrest in Upper Manhattan and the South Bronx. You can follow Martika Ornella on Twitter @martikaornella, or email her at martika.wilson@journalism.cuny.edu.
