Two Temple Students, Connected by Listening Post Philly
“Hi, my name is Elaina and I’m a graduate student at Temple University. I’m taking a course titled ‘Solutions Journalism’ and we are collaborating with WHYY and the Resolve Philly solutions journalism collaboration on a project called Listening Post Philly. Do you mind if I speak with you for a few minutes about this project?”
On Sunday, March 18, I visited Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books on Germantown Avenue in Philadelphia, to encourage individuals to participate in Listening Post Philly. Owner Marc Lamont Hill describes Uncle Bobbie’s as a “community space designed for sharing, learning, laughing, debating, eating and building.” True to this statement, this local hangout and community space generates a high amount of traffic making both Uncle Bobbie’s and the community space next to it an ideal location for the Listening Post Philly project. But what is the Listening Post?
Journalist and Media Developer, Jesse Hardman, founded the Listening Post, in partnership with Internews and WWNO. The first Listening Post project, an innovative community engagement project in New Orleans, launched in 2013 by the Listening Post Collective. On its website, the Listening Post New Orleans project explains how “News and information is an essential resource, just like food, housing, and water.”
The Listening Post New Orleans uses “cell phones, public signs, and roving recording devices to capture and share voices, information, and opinions from around New Orleans” with the goal of creating and expanding conversations around “important local issues” by listening first and then engaging people about “topics that matter most in the city.” They do this by directly asking individuals in the city about topics they find important and want to discuss.
The goal of any Listening Post project is to learn about community member’s thoughts on issues facing their communities within the region. The Listening Post Collective “provides journalists, newsroom leaders, and nonprofits tools and advice to create meaningful conversations with their communities.” They believe that “responsible reporting begins with listening. From there, media outlets and community organizations can create news stories that respond to people’s informational needs, reflect their lives, and enable them to make informed decisions.”
This specific project, Listening Post Philly, focuses on economic realities of the Philadelphia region and the goal is to hear from members of the community about their experiences of times when they faced economic inequality and poverty, as well as how they responded to these challenges.
When I visited Uncle Bobbie’s, I asked individuals to tell me a story about a time in their life when they were worried about money, as well as what changed, or what they would need to change that situation. At first, the thought of approaching complete strangers and asking about a potentially sensitive topic, such as financial insecurity, intimidated me. However, I realized that the only way to overcome that challenge was quite simply, to just do it. I discovered that people wanted to speak with me, they wanted to help me with my project, and they wanted to tell their stories.
One individual’s response, Fatia Kasumu, also a Temple alumnus, resonated with me because of how I closely I could relate to it at this point in my life.
When asked to tell us about a time in her life when she was worried about money, she replied, “a time in my life when I was worried about money was when I was entering college.” When further prompted, I discovered that she was discussing when she earned her graduate degree. Ms. Kasumu stated “I was very worried about how I was going to pay over $20,000 for school.”
As a current graduate student, I could relate to her previous plight. She mentioned how she “did not want to have loans for my graduate education” and I began to wonder what was the bigger trend among graduate students and student loans? Upon conducting some research, I came across an article, written by Allie Bidwell and published on U.S. News, titled “How Much Loan Debt is From Grad Students? More Than You Think,” which outlined how graduate students owe $57,600 on average, 25 percent of graduate students owe nearly $100,000 in student loans, and 1 in 10 graduate students borrow more than $150,000.
Fatia Kasumu’s story is one of many relatable and significant stories told through the Listening Post. By participating in this project, I learned the significance of visiting a community and listening to the community members to learn about what they think is important for the media to report on.
Community participation and engagement is paramount to building trust between the media and the community, especially in a time where, as the Listening Post Collective described on its site, “people have turned increasingly to social media as a news source.” Click bait and fake news dominate social media platforms and has undermined the public’s trust in journalism and public information. But projects such as the Listening Post can help restore the trust that has been lost.
