Research reflections on a community-engaged media initiative

A year after a new stream of Afghan refugees began entering the U.S. following the Taliban regime’s takeover in 2021, I was sitting in a focus group discussion in Northeast Philadelphia. One of the participants expressed a concern shaded with resentment about new Afghan refugees coming into their neighborhood. As they continued, it became clear that their perspective was shaped assumptions that people they had seen panhandling were Afghan when they very likely were not, and a lack of awareness of how the resettlement process worked. 

While reflecting on the information gap among the broader community that this exchange highlighted, my attention turned to how Afghan newcomers would have to navigate potential misunderstandings along with their own information needs. Around this time, I met Tahera Rahmani, an Afghan journalist and new refugee herself. We began to discuss the challenges her fellow community members faced accessing information, and decided to conduct additional research to better understand the community’s needs. We teamed up with another Klein faculty member, Dr. Wazhmah Osman, who herself came from Afghanistan with her family during an earlier wave of refugees (and whom I first met when I was working in Kabul with BBC Media Action). 

We conducted a series of focus groups in April of 2023, from which we learned how participants were connecting with each other and piecing together information resources through their interpersonal networks, especially WhatsApp groups. Participants’ experiences varied by factors such as their English language skills, professional backgrounds, and gender and family dynamics. Very few were connected to sources of local Philadelphia-area news or to non-Afghan community members. As one participant explained, “I am living here but all my thoughts are with Afghanistan.” Many also shared concerns related to navigating daily life in Philadelphia, mental health, and perceptions of safety. For example, one participant shared: “I have lost my confidence here compared to Afghanistan. There, I had my job. I had a Master’s degree. But here I am not that person anymore. Here, I am just a wife who is keeping her children, and is all the time in the house.” Another participant joked, “Whenever we hear shooting, it feels like our own hometown, Kabul.”

Tahera was eager to respond to what we were learning and to explore how we could help her community. After more discussions with community members and resettlement service providers, we mapped out a plan for what would become the Philly-Afghan Info Hub. The pilot project included a WhatsApp group and Facebook page that regularly shared resources related to education, career, health, community activities, and recreation. Tahera also organized community events, including “community joy days” where resources were shared alongside family activities, music, and food. For example, we crowd-sourced and distributed a ‘resources and recipes’ guide which featured not only a list of resources in Dari and English, but also recipes community members shared that reminded them of home. Tahera also organized volunteer-led English language conversation circles for women. The hope was for the project to address the gap between the time resettlement agencies stopped working with community members (generally 3 months after arrival) and the time they were able to feel solidly oriented and thriving in their new communities.

After the Philly-Afghan Info Hub had been going on for about a year, we collaborated again on a new series of focus groups. Our goal with this research was to gain some practical feedback on project activities, and to explore research questions related to how a community-centered civic information project could respond to the needs and assets of a community going through resettlement. We wanted to understand how people’s goals for orienting themselves in their new communities and connecting to both fellow Afghans and non-Afghans shifted over time. We also wanted to understand how working to serve community needs might require adapting traditional understandings of journalistic practices. 

What we learned has takeaways for the Philly-Afghan Info Hub, for other groups working to assist communities going through resettlement, and for journalism practitioners more broadly. For the project, Tahera learned about issues community members were concerned about. Some centered needs at the base of the idea of a hierarchy of information needs—things like navigating immigration status and finding better jobs. But participants who had by this time been in the country a little longer also expressed needs related to connection and belonging—like sustaining a sense of Afghan cultural identity among younger generations, or getting to know Afghans who had come to the U.S. in earlier waves of immigration (who presumably would be able to share valuable context and resources with comparative newcomers). 

What may be notable for other projects and journalists, is how Tahera’s centering questions around ‘what does my community want and need,’ led her to undertake work that looks different from conventional journalism formats. For example, instead of just writing articles about the U.S. administration’s new restrictions on immigration and refugee resettlement, Tahera organized a Q&A session with an immigration attorney, and connected participants with the attorney for free follow-up consultations. Similarly, rather than writing articles about challenges new refugees face, she has organized activities like hosting an event for women and children for the Persian holiday of Yalda. In this way the Philly-Afghan Info Hub has taken an approach to circulating information that goes beyond traditional journalistic articles, though Tahera hopes to begin circulating community news stories as well in coming months—including stories done in collaboration with community members. 

One of Tahera’s main takeaways from this project regarding her approach to civic information and media has been to put more emphasis on engaged journalism practices like soliciting community input: “The result of your work will be more effective when you listen more to your audience.” She noted that coming to U.S., she was forced to rebuild relationships of trust with her community of fellow Afghans in Philadelphia. “I need to focus on my communication, relationships with the community members to have them trust in me,” she explained. 

As the community continues to face shifting issues and threats, this listening and adaptation will continue to be critical. In recent months, Tahera has been working to make the Philly-Afghan Info Hub an ongoing project—working with the Tiny News Collective as a fiscal sponsor, and gaining partial funding for its work through the end of 2025 from Independence Public Media Foundation. Going forward, as researchers, we will continue to follow the work of the Philly-Afghan Info Hub, and the many open questions it explores. This includes what is the natural life cycle of a project serving communities going through resettlement—particularly when the needs of communities do not follow a linear progression due to hostile and unstable political and policy environments. And circling back to the Philadelphia communities hosting these and other refugee communities, there remain many lingering questions related to how a project like this can collaborate with others to develop bridging social capital. While these questions may be most directly relevant for a project like the Philly-Afghan Info Hub, variations on them present challenging considerations for any civic information and media initiative seeking to engage and connect diverse multiethnic audiences in vulnerable times.