What happens when ideas flow both ways

"We have our own assumptions on what people want and need,” said Rafael Olavarria of Factchequeado, a Spanish-language fact-checking outlet that serves Latino communities across the United States. “And then when we actually talk to them, we get new ideas."

I was talking with Rafael and his colleague Ana María Carrano about Solutions Journalism Network's Advancing Democracy fellowship, of which they were a part. I had on my Solutions Insights Lab hat, trying to uncover insights from the newsrooms involved. The idea of the fellowship is to support journalists covering democracy. But like Rafael and Ana María, many found that the experience also strengthened their own democratic processes.

Factchequeado’s project for the fellowship was something they’d never done before, and that they were bit nervous about trying: In collaboration with El Toque, a publication focused on Cuban-American readers, they set up at a busy café in Miami and started asking Spanish-speaking patrons what they wanted from political candidates and from the news outlets covering them. Some people had signed up to participate, and Ana María also approached strangers at neighboring tables with sticky notes and surveys.

She offered patrons vouchers for free cafe goodies as a thank you, thinking that she’d have to entice people to take the time. To her surprise, some participants declined the vouchers. They just wanted to talk.

What they said surprised her, too. Olavarria and Carrano had assumed that an immigrant community would mostly want to talk about immigration. That was there, but people were just as eager to discuss health insurance, the cost of housing, and the opacity of local government. People wanted to understand where their tax money was going. They wanted politicians to talk about their street, not Washington. One participant filled out his survey and then joined the next table's conversation, too.

El Toque told Factchequedo that their findings have already changed the way they approach democracy coverage. And it’s especially useful for a national organization like Factchequedo to plug into the hyperlocal in this way. “Working 100% remote, it's like you're working with your own ideas,” Ana María said.

There's an odd strain of discomfort among some journalists when it comes to talking to people beyond the established framework of interviewing sources for a story. What passes for engagement is a comments section or an ask to rate a story. Journalists report on communities, not with them, and the directional assumption is that information flows from journalists to readers. A similar dynamic sometimes operates in the world of social change: some nonprofits exist to deliver their solution to communities, not to work with communities to solve their own problems in their own way.

But as the Advancing Democracy fellows learned, when you open the flow of ideas in the other direction, your presuppositions collapse, and your work becomes much more relevant to the people you most want to serve.

— Rollo Romig

Two new Lab publications...

This month the Lab is delighted to announce the publication of two new pieces that emerged from our field research in Ethiopia with the Livelihood Impact Fund:

• An op-ed for Devex that I co-wrote with Abigail Steinberg of LIF, pegged to the World Health Assembly. We argue that near-vision glasses are not a niche eye-care intervention but a gateway into primary care. When community health workers are equipped to screen for presbyopia and distribute glasses, people who had never sought care start showing up and can then be screened for hypertension, diabetes, and other conditions.
• An Ethiopia playbook on the Eyeglasses Initiative website, which details how Ethiopia has embedded this approach into its national network of community health workers, and what other countries can learn from the model.

...and two Lab events next week

• Solutions Insights Lab will be at the Bold Ideas for Brighter Futures conference on youth mental health in Cape Town, South Africa, next week. On Monday morning, May 18, Ambika Samarthya-Howard, the Lab's managing director, will be speaking at the session Care for Carers: A Global Priority. If you'll be in Cape Town, you can sign up for the session here. (And please take a look at the Lab's ongoing work on youth mental health worldwide!)
• During the World Health Assembly in Geneva, the Lab will be showing our new video about the eyeglasses project in Ethiopia. The screening is at noon CET on Thursday, May 21st, at Devex Impact House, followed immediately by a discussion that includes Abigail Steinberg.

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Three Ways to Approach Listening to Communities

"We stopped seeing the public as just the audience. They are very much collaborators." — Hugo Balta, Latino News Network

"When people are heard and feel they're being listened to and cared for, they are more likely to be involved in the community on all different levels." — Brittany Harlow, VNN

"We’re not coming in as saviors. We're coming in as coworkers." — Keri Mitchell, Dallas Free Press