Standout solutions journalism of 2020
By: Sara Catania
Tags: Equity, Solutions Journalism, Democracy, Best Of 2020, Covid 19

Photo by Will Cioci, courtesy of Wisconsin Watch

In a year of worsts, we’re celebrating reporting on responses to the year’s biggest challenges

It can be hard, when so much is wrong, to look for what’s going right.

At the end of this exceptionally challenging, exhausting year, we can either wallow in the worst or seek out what’s working and, little by little, find a path forward.

In recent months I myself have wallowed.

The simple act of compiling this list has lifted me from those depths.

Photo by Will Cioci, courtesy of Wisconsin Watch

You, too, can find inspiration in the thirteen stories below, selected by the team at the Solutions Journalism Network. They’re all solutions-focused stories that examine responses to the three thorny issues that dominated in 2020: COVID-19, racial justice and challenges to democracy.

There are far more excellent examples of solutions journalism in 2020 than we’re able to include here — these thirteen stories represent less than one percent of this year’s 2,800 additions to our Story Tracker (a record high).

There’s also a high degree of subjectivity in our selections. Not one of the responses in these stories is perfect. In fact, all are highly imperfect, as can be expected because they’re tackling complex social challenges.

But like the rest of the 10,000-plus stories in the Tracker, each includes the four components of solutions journalism:

a response to a problem and how that response came about

and how that response came about evidence of impact (not just good intentions)

(not just good intentions) a clear-eyed account of the limitations of the response (because when it comes to social problems there will never be a perfect solution)

of the response (because when it comes to social problems there will never be a perfect solution) and insights — lessons learned that could help others apply this response elsewhere.

We further narrowed the field by focusing on stories where the responses are either led by communities or created in close partnership with them. These stories also emphasize insights that can inspire others grappling with similar challenges, suggesting a path that can help them respond, too.

Photo by Will Cioci, courtesy of Wisconsin Watch

One final note: For more than half of the stories below, there was no direct contact between the Solutions Journalism Network and the reporter and news outlet where the story appeared. (We’ve noted the instances where SJN provided support.)

That, along with the record number of entries in this year’s Tracker, suggests to us that the solutions journalism approach — reporting on responses to social problems in deep and compelling ways — is gaining traction far beyond our bounds.

COVID-19

In this New York Times story and KQED podcast with host Devin Katayama, UC Berkeley Journalism School students Meiying Wu and Alyson Stamos show why San Francisco’s Chinatown was one of the first communities in the U.S. to take COVID-19 seriously, and how early efforts to educate residents about the virus and ways to stay safe kept it at bay.

Key to that success were the efforts made by Chinese Hospital, an acute care facility in the heart of Chinatown; the Chinese-language press; and “deeply engaged neighborhood institutions, all of whom were imprinted with memories of earlier infectious disease outbreaks, as well as deep links to front-line health workers in China.”

Many in the community had family members who experienced an earlier outbreak of SARS in China, which inclined them to heed public health advice from local leaders.

When Washington Post reporter Robert Samuels traveled to Wisconsin last spring, it was still so early in the pandemic that the reality of its disproportionate impact on communities of color was just emerging.

His story does double duty, documenting the disturbing surge of COVID-19 in Milwaukee’s Black neighborhoods and the home-made ways in which residents were filling the void of slow civic response by mobilizing ad hoc food pantries, handing out flyers about where to find necessities and mailing postcards to inform their neighbors about how to stay safe.

During this panel, Samuels explains his deliberate choice to center the story not on a sense of passive helplessness, but on agency within the community. He also notes that the DIY solutions he reports on, while laudable, also expose deeper systemic problems.

Like Samuel’s story (above), this engaging interactive digital comic also focuses on how communities stepped up to address an institutional void. In this instance, in three favelas in São Paulo, Brazil.

Created by Priscila Pacheco, Alexander de Maio, Cecilia Marins and Alessandra de Maio, the multi-part experience was published on Outriders, an interactive storytelling platform based in Poland.

In the face of government indifference to high rates of COVID-19 infection, community members launched a series of actions aimed at street-level education and engagement.

The story unfolds in a series of illustrations accompanied by easily navigated music and video clips, as well as maps and clickable photos.

Among the many creative responses are a series of public health messages recorded by visual artists and hip hop and country music stars, and a raucous, roving, open-top truck that blasted safety rap as it crawled through the streets, handing out free masks and exhorting residents to stay home. This story was supported with a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network.

Reporting for Religion News, Aysha Khan examines how Sikhs in the United States adapted their long tradition of volunteer-run community kitchens to the needs of the pandemic.

Even as the demand intensified, widespread bans on gatherings and restrictions on prepared food service disrupted their traditional practice of serving free, vegetarian meals to all visitors.

In New Jersey’s Ramapo Mountains, members of a nearby gurdwara, or Sikh house of worship, worked with the Ramapough Lenape Tribe to cultivate a nine-acre farm, donating labor as well as compost, seeds, plants, supplies and equipment.

Through the farm, one leader of the tribe’s Turtle Clan said, the tribe has had a chance to rebuild its self-reliance. Harvesting healthy food, she said, is also helping the tribe heal “spiritually and from the multigenerational emotional trauma in this community.” This story was supported with a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network.

In its ongoing series Pandemic Pass or Fail: Solutions for Education Equity, Austin TV station KXAN and its parent company Nexstar have led the way in incorporating solutions journalism into local TV news, logging dozens of stores from across the state and the country.

This commitment is exemplified In Standing in the gap: Grassroots efforts to tackle inequities in education, an extended report by Chris Nelson, Josh Hinkle, Laney Valian, Catenya McHenry and Ben Friberg.

The responses featured in the report demonstrate, as Hinkle put it, that “learning during the pandemic differs for each district, school and student.”

One rural school district, where 40 percent of students were without internet when the pandemic hit, shifted $600,000 away from other needs to build its own internet infrastructure and buy laptops for students, ensuring that every child has access to education.

From this story and the others in the series, a larger picture of possibility emerges, one tempered by the reality of the ongoing demands of the pandemic. “COVID is a marathon,” the head of a drop-out prevention program says. “We have to continue to support our families in need in special and intensive ways.” This story was supported with a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network.

Racial Justice

Earlier this year, as protestors for racial justice took to the streets in cities across America, a phalanx of commercial district board-ups quickly followed.

Photo by Will Cioci, courtesy of Wisconsin Watch

This photo essay by Will Cioci, an intern at Wisconsin Watch and co-editor in chief of the Daily Cardinal at University of Wisconsin-Madison, captures a city-funded response in Madison that within two weeks transformed these plywood dead zones into an outdoor gallery of more than 100 murals.

The project featured the work of artists affected by racial violence and injustice, and the effect was an outpouring of creativity, passion and storytelling that celebrated the Black community.

Though the result was transitory — when the stores re-opened the murals came down — the simplicity and beauty of this example of supplanting a negative response with a positive one lives on.

For the BBC’s People Fixing the World podcast (and in an accompanying text piece), Daniel Gordon reports on the New Orleans Police Department’s effort to curb police brutality by training officers to intervene before their partners transgress.

The approach emerged from the research of a scholar and Holocaust survivor who believes that instilling police with an “active bystander” mindset can transform cop culture.

As one trainer puts it, “every officer in the United States has practiced how to be in a gun fight at the Academy. And they practice that so it’s muscle memory.

“But almost no police officer in the United States has that muscle memory for active bystander-ship. They have never practiced in the academy how to tell a colleague to get their knee off their neck.”

In the four years since the training started in New Orleans, negative community interactions with police have declined and public perception of the force has improved, albeit incrementally.

Will the effort be sustained? One community advocate observed, “this is only going to be as powerful and meaningful and productive as the officers and the department are willing to make it.”

What does it take to sustain a commitment to police reform? Writer and historian Jelani Cobb tackles that question in this Frontline documentary. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Cobb revisits Newark, New Jersey, where four years earlier he’d reported on the city’s police reform pledge.

Back then, the mayor had begun re-training the police force, reworked standards for handling police misconduct and advocated body cameras and civilian oversight of the police department.

The good news is that progress has been made. Public trust has edged up and violence is down, with more use of community-based prevention.

But the mayor, who is Black, told Cobb: “The real crazy thing is, even if you defund the police, that’s not going to stop people murdering us, or make people see us as human beings. The police represent a larger system, that they’re enforcing these people’s values. Every institution in America has the values that the police department has in America. The police just got guns.”

Cobb’s larger conclusion is clear: Improved policing is a step in the right direction, but it won’t eradicate systemic racism.

This story’s misleading headline notwithstanding, Alexis Okeowo reports for the New Yorker that many anti-violence groups want to coexist with the police, albeit with dramatically downsized departments that no longer use tactics that stymie community mediation. The story focuses on a network of anti-violence nonprofits that are reducing the role of police and cutting crime in New York City communities.

In the past three years, Okeowo reports, this community management system, or C.M.S., “has contributed to a fifteen-per-cent decline in shootings in the seventeen precincts with the highest levels of violence in the city, according to the Mayor’s Office to Prevent Gun Violence. Today, more than fifty nonprofits conduct C.M.S. work in twenty-two neighborhoods across New York. Funded by the city, their total budget is $37.4 million, and they employ a hundred and fifty full-time employees and two hundred seasonal ones. In early June, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he plans to increase C.M.S. spending by ten million dollars, hire additional workers, and expand programs.”

Democracy

Christian Science Monitor staff writer Christa Case Bryant delves into what the U.S. can learn from Estonia, which emerged as an expert in cyber security and secure online voting after suffering the world’s first politically motivated cyberattack against a nation in 2007.

Bryant argues that the most important lessons for countries looking to protect themselves from Russian interference may not be technical at all. “They lie in a way of thinking,” she writes, “an urgency and unity of purpose that impel coordination across diverse sectors.”

Key takeaways include “putting the topic high on the political agenda, establishing a clear division of responsibilities, and creating a multi-stakeholder model of security that involves not only the government but also the private sector, academia, and civil society.” This story was supported with a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network.

Nadia Lopez reports for the Fresno Bee that after decades of underrepresentation, “Latinos now hold a majority on the city council, a significant share of the state Legislature and nearly half of all local elected positions in Fresno County — a change some say is due to increased voter participation and a transition to district elections that made it easier for first-time candidates to win office.”

By itself, the change to district elections wasn’t a panacea, but in this analysis, the Bee shows that it has had a clear impact. Some groups are still underrepresented, like the Hmong, who make up about five percent of the city’s population.

But in Fresno, where Latinos make up 40 percent of the population, representation now goes well beyond tokenism and likely is fueling broader participation in the political system as a whole.

“If someone doesn’t see that voting makes a difference to them and their families, then there’s less interest in participating,” one local politician observed. This story was supported with a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network.

At the Salt Lake Tribune, reporter Zak Podmore, a fellow with Report For America, examines a successful effort to increase voter turnout on the Navajo Nation.

Even as Utah is held up as a national model for voting by mail, that approach has failed to meet the needs of many Navajo Nation voters, who live in remote homesites that can lack electricity, internet access and even a physical address.

In 2018, under a voting rights settlement with the Navajo Nation, San Juan County, which has a plurality of Native American residents, began providing a range of in-person services, including early voting days and access to translators. Voter turnout increased by ten percent.

The pandemic tested this model, leading voting officials to increase both the number of early voting days and polling places. They also accelerated culturally sensitive voter-awareness efforts and incorporated voter registration into the offerings at sites set up for food distribution and COVID-19 testing. As one community liaison put it: “We just want them to have their voice be heard.” This story was supported with a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network.

After the November election, Anoa Changa broke down the Georgia flip — as much a win for Democracy as any political party — for Truthout. She explores the deep roots of the shift, tracing the ways in which civic engagement organizers have decreased the gap between Republicans and Democrats in Georgia over many years by increasing voter participation and leveraging shifting state demographics.

Building on that foundation, Stacey Abrams was a prime mover in more recent efforts to increase civic participation among Black and Asian American communities, focusing on outreach to previously disenfranchised voters and recruitment of new voters.

On the ground, that meant working directly with communities that had previously been overlooked, finding organizers who spoke those residents’ first language and connecting with communities on issues relevant to them. Changa relays a report from a Korean organizer who surveyed people to learn about their voting plans, and if they did not plan on voting, to understand why.

“Being able to have conversations like this,” she wrote, “in the language people feel most comfortable speaking, enabled organizers to address why people might not vote, and address uncertainty about the process.”