Engaging The Future of Civilization Through Solutions Journalism
The role of journalism in community engagement is significant in developing and maintaining an aware public. The role of solutions journalism can carry this communication into more advanced development by creating a two-way street on the communication highway through the addition of community engagement.
Community engagement is not advocacy but rather is a platform for demonstrating pathways to empowerment that can be chosen, not chosen or altered, according to the will of the community itself. An informed community is one that’s been offered the opportunity to be made aware. Legitimate information enables mental preparedness that allows for readiness regarding informed decision making. Engaging the community means providing its members with the opportunity to hear about what most concerns them.
As a solutions journalist you can not only provide facts of project plans re agency budgets, proposals, ordinances, new construction, demolitions, federal projects, environmental issues, education statistics, etc., you can also take an eye to how the community’s issues and the plans of relevant agencies and entities will support or oppose those issues. In presenting the two existing sides publicly and in ways that the community can access, the solutions journalist can serve the public good by presenting possible solutions to any conflicts of interest by reporting on actual examples of solutions that have worked for other communities faced with similar situations. This can serve, at the community’s behest, as a footprint on how to proceed forward in a logical way with the right timing, cognizant of the needed steps and sounding the right tone for the most successful outcome possible.
An essential component of solutions journalism is that of careful listening and development of community trust. The example of listening in Philadelphia resulted in The Reentry Project, an important resource for incarcerated persons to become successfully reintegrated into the communities from which they’ve been separated. It also serves to acclimate these citizens into the developments and workings of the present times and connect them with access to acquire necessary skills for survival and progress.
Jesse Hardman, an international media developer, journalist and educator, developed a community engagement media project called the Listening Post after speaking with radio station manager Joe Orozco. Orozco’s station serves the Apache tribe in Hoopa Valley located in northern California. Hardman came to realize that the isolation, extreme poverty, oppressive conditions of living under a conquering society and lack of access to information were conditions right in his home country’s own backyard.
Hardman explained, “There are millions of Americans who lack access to basic resources, including information that might improve their situations. The West is also seeing an explosion of diversity and a growing income gap. A lot of people are connected, even arguably over-connected to information networks, but many communities are still left out of the conversation.”
Solutions journalism considers regular journalistic reporting as step one of its mission. Step two includes scouring the world for news of communities living with the facts and which have sought solutions to conditions considered as problematic. Solutions journalism takes note of these models of workable responses to the problems being reported in other communities. Step three involves reporting on the solutions or remedies that have been found to work in under similar conditions for communities now being examined and reported on, along with ideas for how the community might try any of them to bring resolution to what is now occurring in their community.
What is now needed are more journalists to take up this field of solutions journalism so that as many communities as possible can benefit from the timely reporting and community engagement that can lead to resolutions and forward progress to the kind of communities and functioning that will yield sustainable first-world communities for everyone.
