The USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism is offering up to five special community engagement grants to 2020 California Fellows. Each grantee will receive $1,000 to $2,000 to support their community engagement efforts, as well as mentoring on engagement strategies over six months. Interested reporters can learn more about the grant program by reading this blog post.

We have piloted these efforts with reporters from all over the country with exciting results. Past projects include: creating a public-facing call-out to learn how poor air quality is affecting the health of a Central Coast community; designing powerful conversations to help a rural community tackle suicide; a collaborative effort between newsrooms and nonprofits in Arizona to prevent infant deaths and injuries in poorly installed car seats; a series of listening strategies to engage teens in a series on sex education; using snail mail to reach and invite new audiences to a forum on the black infant mortality crisis; and a crowdsourcing campaign to incorporate community perspectives about a physician shortage.

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* 1. What is your name?

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* 2. What is your media outlet?

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* 3. What community (affected by the issues of your reporting) will you focus on for your engagement project? Be very specific.

How will this community shape your reporting? Here are some common approaches. 
  • Crowdsourcing stories and information to help you find sources or fill info gaps. Examples: KVPR’s on-air call-out and The Tribune's online form. 
  • Asking and answering questions from the community that guide your reporting. Example: The Desert Sun used a Google Form to source audience questions about homelessness. 
  • Partnering with a community member(s) to co-report a story. Example: Almanac reporter Kate Bradshaw collaborated with high school students to design a questionnaire and interview over 100 community members about neighborhood health. 
  • Inviting a community member(s) to tell their own stories to deepen and contextualize your reporting. Example: ProPublica's Lost Mothers conversations, Capital Public Radio's Storybooth. 
  • Forming an advisory group made of up of community members to shape your journalism. Example: The Peoria Journal Star reader advisory group.
  • Partnering with an artist to help you meet community members. Example: WDET’s Framed.
  • Facilitating a listening session with community members to learn more about your topic and inform the reporting. Example: The Napa Valley Register's community dinner conversations on rising costs of housing. 

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* 4. This is your chance to tell us about your engaged journalism idea. Your approach will need to answer two questions: How will the impacted community meaningfully shape the journalism, and how will the journalism have meaning out in community? 

Tell us how you’ll engage people throughout the lifecycle of your project. How will people participate before you begin reporting, during your reporting process, afterwards and beyond? Who is going to help you do this and what ways might you collaborate? Name those community groups, leaders, and spaces. 

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* 5. We can offer engagement grants of $1,000 to $2,000. Specify how much you are seeking and tell us how you would spend it. Write a sample budget, if you can.

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* 6. How might engagement contribute to the impact of your journalism that it might not have otherwise? Read how reporters Mackenzie Mays and Priska Neely paired community collaborations with reporting to create impact.

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* 7. What commitment can your newsroom and editors make in support of this project? If you’re a freelancer, please summarize any discussions you’ve had with your sponsoring media outlet about what support it can provide.

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* 8. If your newsroom already has an engagement team, how will this grant help you go above and beyond existing programs? 

Thank you. We will announce the recipients of these grants before the Fellowship convenes in March. 

Please click SUMBIT to complete your application.
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