Pulse Magazine: The practice and importance of community engagement reporting

Pulse Magazine seeks to highlight the process and result of community engagement reporting in communities. This issue focuses on housing insecurity and homelessness in Phoenix at different stages of life. The first community is the Westward Ho, a subsidized housing complex for elderly and individuals with disabilities. My purpose for working with the Westward Ho was to cover the complexities surrounding housing insecurity and homelessness through personal stories. I felt that humanizing housing insecurity would make the topic digestible and relatable, encourage readers to care, and improve mine and my readers’ understandings of a situation seldom reported on and experienced. The second community is the Children First Leadership Academy, a nonprofit K-12 charter school that serves students and families experiencing housing insecurity or homelessness. My purpose for working with the CFLA was to not only cover it as a unique school, but also serve its students through a workshop and donation drive. I quickly learned that unlike other schools, CFLA fills students’ needs both in and out of school and that a simple report wouldn’t do this school justice; therefore, a community engagement reporting project was born. Finally, I checked in with working journalists who implement community engagement reporting into their process to see how it has influenced their outlook on the industry.