Building Community Power: A newsroom’s guide to equitable engagement

This step-by-step guide by Alicia Bell and Mike Rispoli can help newsrooms examine their own power and design engagement strategies that don’t perpetuate transactional or extractive relationships with the public. To foster a new future for journalism, it’s crucial for news outlets to share and build power with local communities. Check out the related Gather Lighting Chat and News Voices post.

Practical power sharing: How Might We Create Opportunities for Power Sharing With Communities Through Stories?

This open, community document by P. Kim Bui is intended to present and evaluate different storytelling techniques that demonstrate what power sharing and true audience involvement look like in journalistic organizations. It aims to do so by breaking down barriers between communities and reignites the journalist as listener and convener, helping to heal wounds and build relationships.

The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership

The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership charts a pathway to strengthen and transform our local democracies. Thriving, diverse, equitable communities are possible through deep participation, particularly by communities commonly excluded from democratic voice & power. The stronger our local democracies, the more capacity we can unleash to address our toughest challenges, and the more capable we are of surviving and thriving through economic, ecological, and social crises. Via: Rosa Gonzales on Facilitating Power.

A Manifesto for a People’s Newsroom

The Bureau Local is a people-powered network setting the news agenda and sparking change, from the ground up. Over the past three years we have set out to make sure news is working for everyone and to do so, we’ve been changing the way it’s done. Whether it is austerity or Brexit, health or education, people across the UK experience inequality in their treatment and how their stories are told, if told at all. That’s why we focus our journalism on shining a light on the power, decisions and policies that threaten the public interest of all people across the UK.

5 Lessons About Sharing Power in Journalism Collaborations

In 2020, collaboration in journalism is about way more than sorting through data together or expanding a story’s reach. Now, collaborative journalism means sharing power among journalists, readers and viewers, community partners, scientists, and more — delivering information that centers and addresses people’s voices and needs, together. The pandemic has elevated the need for robust collaborative and local journalism to tackle a story of this size and specificity. But it’s also reinforced the importance of seeding collaborations with equity and respect, recognizing the unequal effects of COVID-19 on our communities.

Measuring People Power In 2020+

In the most exhaustive study of its kind to date, MobLab and 13 other organisations heard from more than 500 social change practitioners and leaders across the global non-profit world. How can organisations measure the depth and value of people’s engagement and participation? What indicators can you use to assess grassroots power building, organising, and volunteer initiatives? Through research, consultations, and a global survey, the resulting report offers a baseline for how organisations are measuring people power today, and reveals where more attention is needed to accurately reflect the power of people coming together for change.