A neighborhood-focused news series is turning up stories of resilience in communities throughout our region—and United Way is a partner in that work.

Issue Media Group launched its On The Ground (OTG) online news series in Kalamazoo and Battle Creek starting in 2018. OTG embeds locally trained journalists in specific neighborhoods to better understand them, the communities at large, and the people who are creating change. Stories appear in Southwest Michigan’s Second Wave.

United Way BCKR helps fund OTG because it aligns with United Way’s commitment to telling the stories of trauma-responsive communities, said Tammy Mills, Associate Director of Marketing & Communications.

“Storytelling is vital to showing the challenges and the progress happening at the regional, community and neighborhood levels,” Mills said. “Our partnership with OTG generates stories that show the unique personalities of each neighborhood, the common links across communities, and how people and organizations—including United Way—work together to create change.”

Mills said it fits with United Way BCKR’s own work to highlight its investments and impact—and takes it one step further by spotlighting the broader needs and progress, and how collaboration solves problems.

Issue Media Group brought local funders together on May 15 to review the OTG efforts in Battle Creek and in the Kalamazoo neighborhoods of Edison, Northside, Eastside, and Vine. Among the examples:

• Battle Creek’s Washington Heights neighborhood tackled the financial burden of buying diapers by connecting low-income families through the Battle Creek Diaper Network.
• Coverage of the ordinance against street-side stopping, standing or parking in Kalamazoo’s Northside—originally an attempt to push back on drug trafficking—showed the undue burden it placed on residents, prompting the city to repeal the rule.
• Fourth-grade students at Washington Writers Academy wrote poems of their love for Kalamazoo’s Edison Neighborhood, prompting a performance at Art Hop and local media coverage.
• OTG recruits and trains neighborhood news correspondents to find and report stories. Correspondents receive a laptop, training in journalism basics, and they are paid the going rate for reporters.

“People are hungry for this,” said Vicky Kettner, OTG’s Neighborhood Engagement Manager. “It’s an opportunity to inspire through a shared experience.”

Debra Mason, a journalism expert who spoke at the gathering, said local news coverage is shifting toward a “public-powered” approach—the model upon which Issue Media Group built On The Ground. Paul Schutt, co-founder of Issue Media Group, said the old journalism model “looks for the most broken person possible” when reporting news; the new model, which Schutt called “solutions journalism,” seeks out people-based stories of resilience.

“We’re excited to be a partner on OTG because it uses journalism to drive intentional impact,” said Mills. “It asks questions that open doors that a community might not know about to address needs. It’s really a unique way to invest our communication resources in telling broad, uplifting stories.”