Research reflections on a community-engaged media initiative

“It’s sort of a reverse of the conventional model,” a Green Line staffer explained to me, reflecting on the Green Line’s community-engaged reporting process. We were in a parking lot of a Toronto suburb, waiting for their event focused on pedestrian safety to start. I was there to observe the event, which represented a stage in what The Green Line calls its “Action Journey” theory of change model which seeks to help readers take action or make decisions on issues. These action journeys follow a sequence—starting from more traditional journalism formats (explainers and features) published digitally, to events (which pair community discussions with activities ranging from movie screenings to basketball tournaments), and finally “solutions”—which are often crowd-sourced from participants at their events. 

The Green Line’s pedestrian safety action journey grew out of a collaboration with an initiative called PlazaPOPS that creates seasonal pop-up community spaces within privately owned suburban strip malls in the Greater Toronto Area. In the parking lot where we met, they had installed seating areas with benches, tables, flower boxes, and a stage area where the Green Line would host its event. As a PlazaPOPS organizer explained, their initiative was designed to offer social infrastructure for “people coming together.” “We basically transform these underinvested spaces and we trade parking spaces for people places.” The organizer explained how they selected their locations based on a detailed process of engagement sessions and close attention to the cultural lived experiences of the people who used the spaces: “We don’t just pick any random strip malls and just put installations there. We work with the community, we map the stakeholders, we see who’s out there, we see who wants to learn more.” 

By creating places where diverse groups of residents can engage in conversation and connect, PlazaPOPS is setting out to establish what Communication Infrastructure Theory (CIT) would call “communication assets” or “hot spots”. As a researcher, I was excited to collaborate with Green Line founder Anita Li to follow their action journey and event with PlazaPOPS because it offered an example of an intervention in what CIT calls local storytelling networks—a combination of local media, community organizations, and interpersonal networks that when connected had the potential to circulate common stories of shared community. In this case, a local civic media outlet was collaborating with a community organization in an effort to animate a potential hotspot in what CIT calls the communication action context. I wanted to understand how an effort like this was affecting the local storytelling network. 

Community-engaged accountability reporting 

The spark for the Green Line’s action journey about pedestrian safety came a year prior when they surveyed community members at a PlazaPOPS event. When asked about what issues were affecting their Toronto suburb, pedestrian safety was the top concern. As the reporter noted, usually reporting a story started with a tip and then pursuing a lead, but in this case the survey had given them a topic, “And then I had to figure, okay, what is the story here?” 

To develop the story, the reporter circled back to residents who participated in the survey. They also spent time looking at pedestrian safety data in the neighborhood, rather than centering the piece on the most dangerous intersection in Toronto, or a particularly dramatic accident. The result was a story about an intersection in the neighborhood where three people died and nothing had been done: “Does that intersection exist elsewhere in Toronto? Maybe I don’t know, but I do know this one exists, and I do know that that was an important story to tell.” The Green Line’s engagement-based reporting put community members in the role of assignment editors, and yielded different kinds of accountability journalism focused on their neighborhood: “You’re looking at cases that aren’t the obvious, the ‘most of this’, the ‘most of that.’ …You’re giving yourself certain constraints … sometimes telling the stories of what’s normal is harder, right?” 

Through their action journey process, The Green Line reported and shared a multimedia explainer and feature story that explored pedestrian safety and related planning and political issues. They timed their work to coincide with the seasonal re-opening of PlazaPOPS in the summer of 2024, where they organized the third element of their action journey, a community event.

Convening conversations

On the day of the event, PlazaPOPS and Green Line team members busily set up elements to make a welcoming space to talk about community issues, particularly pedestrian safety. I followed staffers to carry over an impressive amount of Somali food from one of the restaurants in the strip mall so participants could enjoy lunch while watching a video feature they had produced. Organizers put up a tent to give much-needed shade over the stage area where they would hold a conversation with an advocate for the legal rights of cyclists. They also planned to do a “story circle” where residents would be invited to share their personal stories related to pedestrian safety, as well as their ideas for addressing the issue. 

Green Line story circles had multiple goals—to give participants an opportunity to be heard, to give them a chance to connect with other residents who they may seek to follow up with to continue working toward solutions, and to generate community-centered story ideas for journalists to follow up on. The Green Line has written about their approach to story circles, noting not only how it has been practiced in journalism, but also how it has connections to the indigenous practice of “sharing circles.” For their story circle on pedestrian safety, participants shared both personal experiences of close calls they and family members had faced as pedestrians and their frustrations with efforts to improve safety infrastructure. 

This particular story circle was a small event for the Green Line—only 10 people. Li explained that this was the smallest event they had done and that they more often hosted between 40 and 50 people, depending on the kind of venue and focus. She explained that this focus on pedestrian safety in a particular neighborhood was a “niche topic.” At the same time, she noted that there was a critical need for this because it was a suburb where these kinds of convenings were rare. Li noted that this made it particularly valuable for people to feel “heard and seen” and to “come to an understanding that they’re not alone.”

The participants I spoke with expressed an appreciation for this. One participant, a parent who shared their challenges crossing a busy intersection with small children, noted they were particularly grateful to have the event in their suburban area where they had found it challenging to connect with people “who share the same kind of interests and values.” They said the event left them feeling motivated to follow up on civic actions they had discussed like documenting and reporting violations and advocating for safety measures: 

It has propelled me even more forward to take more action on what’s happening here. … I’m really motivated now to go back home and get on my computer and write that email, and tomorrow take those pictures and record when I see something happening.

The participant said they learned about the event from PlazaPOPS and hadn’t heard of the Green Line before the event. This points to the value of collaborations between community groups and local civic media as a way to connect more community members with their local storytelling networks. 

A solutions-oriented cycle

After the event, the final stage in the Green Line’s action journey is sharing “solutions.” Green Line staffers followed up on suggestions and questions raised at the event about issues such as safety challenges when cars were turning right on red lights, and the lack of amenities for pedestrians where the distance between safe crossing spots could be substantial. The Green Line overall integrates solutions journalism (reporting that centers responses to problems) into their coverage. In their action journeys, “solutions” are intended to be service-oriented and actionable—for example,d they included information on how to request a speed bump, report dangerous drivers, or request pedestrian safety improvements. The solutions section of the action journey, as well as takeaways from their event were shared through their website and newsletters. From this the conversation with a relatively small group was extended and amplified to a wider audience. 

Strengthening the local storytelling network?

Observing the Green Line’s collaboration with PlazaPOPS and their pedestrian safety action journey illustrated both the value and the challenges of undertaking this approach to community-engaged media. Building relationships between local media and civic organizations takes time and trust building. Building community awareness and investment in public spaces also takes time and strategic engagement—as it does to gain investment in civic media. What I witnessed at this one community event was one example of what this could look like—one that could be adapted and refined for different aims and contexts. More research would be needed to make claims about whether such efforts have a lasting impact on strengthening ties in the local storytelling network and whether this translates to greater levels of civic participation. But The Green Line’s action journey model of 1) starting with community needs and interests, 2) using that as a jumping off point for community-centered accountability reporting, 3) convening the community to discuss that reporting, and then 4) following up with additional solutions-oriented resources offers promise for connecting residents to local media. Structuring this action journey as a collaboration between local media and a community organization offers promise to strengthen that link in the storytelling network as well. Finally, this particular action journey being tied to the PlazaPOPS site underlines the value of thinking about how civic media can attempt to support community spaces that can make participating in community conversations more accessible, inviting, and inclusive. 

You can find more about The Green Line’s many projects, including a youth journalism project with an engagement outpost and community newsroom, and their work as the first Canadian outlet to host a Documenters Canada project on their website. I also write about them more in a forthcoming chapter for the Routledge Handbook of Alternative and Participatory Journalism. 

References

Ball-Rokeach, S. J., Young-Chul Kim, and Sorin Matei. 2001. “Storytelling Neighborhood: Paths to Belonging in Diverse Urban Environments.” Communication Research 28 (4): 392–428. =

Kim, Yong-Chan, and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach. 2006. "Civic Engagement from a Communication Infrastructure Perspective." Communication Theory 16 (2): 173–97.

Villanueva, G., Broad, G., Gonzalez, C., Ball-Rokeach, S. (2016). Communication asset mapping: An ecological application toward building healthy communities in South Los Angeles. International Journal of Communication 10: 2704-2724.