PROVIDENCE — One loose thread running through the proposed Press Forward investments in local journalism is the desire to create a new narrative voice that enhances community — recreating what the current legacy media has apparently erased away from our lives.

 

The concern expressed by the funders is about how to counter misinformation and disinformation, in order to build a connectedness around neighborhoods. Of course, the larger question is: how do we accomplish that?

 

When I talk about nurturing the roots of community when doing communications workshops, I often tell the true story about how, when I lived in Montague Center in western Massachusetts, residing in a former worker’s residence built by the Montague Boot and Shoe Co. in 1900, its wood frame built out of chestnut because it was the cheapest wood available as a result of so many chestnut trees having been harvested as a result of the chestnut blight, the fact that a payphone had been installed by the mini-mart store in the town center was big news. Technology was changing the world, even in Montague Center. (Talk about community: I had even been recruited to join the Montague Grange, learning the secret handshakes.)

 

 

News of the payphone’s arrival even infiltrated the early morning conversation between Mr. Graves and Mr. Morris, in which they shouted at each other across Union Street, because they were both hard of hearing. In addition to sharing the daily weather report and the latest Red Sox score, their daily news roundup contained that nugget of important news: the technology of a payphone had finally arrived in Montague Center in the early fall of 1978.

 

Some four decades later, in September of 2018, I retold that story as part of a workshop I was leading at the 2018 Health Equity Summit, entitled: “The Art of Storytelling.” It served as a metaphor for how community interacts with changes in technology.

 

The premise of my workshop at the equity summit was this: “The importance of conversation and convergence, to engage with neighbors and friends at a neighborhood level, to build a sense of connectedness, may require a different kind of storytelling, a different way to define where we feel we belong, and the ability to change the conditions where we are living.”

 

How do we do that? Good question.

 

As the new Press Forward initiative seeks to grow the local news voices in  Rhode Island and other cities and states around the nation, I believe that it will require a different kind of engagement, one that is inclusive, one that promotes not just a safe place to live but a healthy, place-based community, where people feel both heard and seen.

 

“I am a storyteller,” my workshop introduction began. “What does it mean to be a storyteller in the 21st century?” My answer: “I weave a thread of intimacy and intrigue to connect what has happened before us, what is happening now, to what will happen after we are memories.”

 

The crux of my work as a storyteller— and as editor and publisher of ConvergenceRI, a weekly news platform reporting on the convergence of health, science, innovation, research, technology, and community — is the belief that “our personal stories are the most valuable possession we have. Sharing them is what makes us human, to enable us to become both a participant and an observer in our lives.”

 

Dr. Doug Eby, the director of a Native American community health clinic in Alaska, said the most important directions he gives to his medical providers is this: Learn to listen in 10 different ways.

 

That is a lesson that the evolving news platforms seeking investments from Press Forward should consider adopting as part of their reporting endeavors: learn to listen in 10 different ways to your readers.

 

Left out of the conversation 

The major exercise conducted at my workshop at the 2018 Health Equity Summit was this: I asked all the participants to draw a picture of their home where they lived — without using any words. The exercise had first been developed for a communications workshop for legal services lawyers and paralegals in Massachusetts, where they had to draw a picture of where they worked — without using words. 

 

At that workshop, every participant drew roughly the exact same image: long lines of potential clients trying to get legal help. There was no way to get out, no exit, just long lines. Only one illustration was different, drawn by a paralegal, in which people on the street were crying for help, but no one could hear them, because the office was too far away. The exercise proved to be a revelation all for the participants.

 

At the health equity summit workshop, only one person drew their home showing any connection to a neighborhood or a community — a high school senior. The rest of the homes were isolated. In the discussion that followed, what became clear was that there was a distinct disconnect between community and public health.