We’re highlighting some of the work our City Bureau community produced to keep us all informed and together through the highs and lows of a difficult year.

By Lucia Anaya

2020 has been a difficult year, and it feels strange to look back to the last 12 months to find highlights. But in many ways, that’s what City Bureau’s community did all year—find bright spots amid the gloom, tell stories of resilience and use our collective power to keep each other informed and connected.

While much of our programming here at City Bureau went remote, we continued to expand our work (welcoming our Civic Reporting Residents and Fall 2020 fellows, and launching Cleveland Documenters) and our team (hiring our first Director of Growth Strategy, Director of Marketing and Communications and Documenters Program Manager). We even celebrated our 5th anniversary, capping it off with our virtual celebration, Soapbox 2020.

As this year draws to a close we’re looking back at some of our program and organizational highlights that feature the work of City Bureau fellows, residents, Documenters and Public Newsroom hosts. Their work helped us stay informed and stay together through the highs and lows of a year we’ll surely never forget.

What does Black wealth look like in Chicago?

Mural of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable in Kenwood. (Photo: Davon Clark)

In January, we published our Black Chi Wealth series. The series looked beyond a deficit lens, broadening our definition of what wealth can mean. Our Civic Reporting Fellows profiled people who are building, creating and passing along wealth in their own ways, utilizing social media to explore the nuance around Black wealth.

Check the series out here.

Metrics to match our mission

Last year we embarked on a process to define what impact means for a people-centered, community news lab. In February, we published our learnings and our framework for measuring impact, focusing on how relationships and information can create new forms of civic engagement. You can read more about our approach here, including our process and ways we can begin to reimagine impact.

An expanding Documenters network

Not only has the Documenters network grown beyond Chicago, expanding to Detroit and Cleveland, with programs inspired by ours underway and in development in Fresno and Omaha, we launched our webchat series this year to connect civic-minded Documenters across the country. The webchats allow Documenters to give and get skills and experience on any topic. Some topics included Imagining a Sci-Fi future (For City Government), Juvenile Justice Policy (and Reform), and Finding Family & Tracking Genealogy Using Free Online Resources.

COVID Resource Finder

In April, in an effort to address the inequity of information and news in this city around COVID-19, we created the Chicago COVID Resource Finder, a data bank of over 1,300 neighborhood, city, country and state resources that can be filtered so people can easily find what they need.

We built this tool after seeing dozens of resources spring up, from mutual aid networks on the city’s South and West Sides to mobilization efforts designed to check in on seniors, yet too often lost in the deluge of news, tweets and Slack messages. We surveyed dozens of community groups, service organizations and public officials and in-depth conversations with local partners and worked with translators who helped us translate the tool into 12 languages.

Where Banks Don’t Lend

Last year a team of City Bureau reporters started digging into a huge dataset, looking at almost a decade worth of home loans in Chicago. The racial discrepancies were stark. Private lending companies and banks, which are the largest investors in neighborhoods (dwarfing money coming from state, local and national governments) are showering money on majority-white neighborhoods while Black and Latinx neighborhoods get a tiny trickle. The result? Homes don’t sell, properties sit vacant and families who want to invest in a neighborhood can’t.

To tackle this complicated issue we partnered with WBEZ's Race, Class and Communities desk and published a series in June this year to present a holistic view of this story. The stories included, Home Loans in Chicago: One Dollar To White Neighborhoods, 12 Cents To Black, How The Green Line, A Pink House And 12 Cents Changed How I See My City, and ‘One Small Project At A Time’.

We also held a Public Newsroom that helped us answer the question: How do we make informed decisions about banking that reflect our values and advance racial equity? You can read what we learned here.

Mutual aid in the time of COVID

Karizma Blackburn (left) and Iris Haastrup co-organized the South Side Grocery Pickup in Bronzeville. (Photo: Alex Arriaga/City Bureau)

This summer, when Lightfoot shuttered Chicago Public Schools’ free meal program for a day, Black and brown Chicagoans stepped up to the plate to make sure everybody ate—while holding space for revolution and joy. Our reporters visited five people-powered, no-questions-asked food distribution sites, learning how food has become part of a national uprising against police brutality and state violence.

Later that summer, we invited some of these organizers to our Public Newsroom, where they provided insight into what it takes to start and maintain a mutual aid project in our neighborhoods. You can read what we learned here.

Chicago housing and eviction crisis

A makeshift brickwall reads “cancel eviction” outside of The Richard J. Daley Center where Chicago’s eviction courts are held. (Photo: Justin Agrelo)

Led by our Civic Reporting Resident Justin Agrelo, our fellows on the housing beat continue to report on COVID-19’s impact on the growing housing and eviction crisis, and how communities are responding. Their reporting has included a guide to Chicago renter rights, explainer of the Just Cause for Eviction law and resident stories of loss, displacement, resilience and hope during the COVID-19 pandemic.

You can read more of their stories here.

Maslow's Pyramid, Fake News and the Future of Journalism

In October, cofounder and Executive Editorial Director Bettina Chang took the stage at TEDx Wrigleyville to give a talk focused on an important question: How do we make media that deserves people’s trust? If we’re going to make journalism that deserves trust, she argued, we need to reframe the way journalism is made. We need a way to prioritize news that serves people who need it most.

You can watch the TEDx talk or read the full script to learn how Maslow’s hierarchy of information needs is helping us build a new way forward here.

2020 local election coverage + interactive precinct maps

Led by Civic Reporting Resident Alex Arriaga and with a focus on civic participation among Chicago’s immigrant communities, our fellows on the election beat reported on topics such as the rights to language access at the polls, the question over citywide broadband access and social services on the line in the vote over the Illinois tax amendment. They ensured their reporting was reaching the right audiences, in the right language, by collaborating with local translators who helped get their reporting to Spanish, Chinese and Arabic speakers.

With the help of our web developer, Pat Sier, we also published the ever-popular 2020 Illinois General Election precinct maps, which allow you to explore data on how every precinct in Illinois voted on the U.S. President, US. Senate and the Illinois tax amendment. You can check out the updated maps here.

Tracking the 2021 Chicago City Budget

With a $1.2 billion deficit and growing calls to defund the police, the Chicago city budget was a heated topic that our fellows on the budget beat covered thoroughly. They published explainers, reported on ways Chicago residents could engage in budget discussions and informed us on how our aldermen voted on the 2021 budget.

Chicago Documenters also took part in the coverage, covering every budget hearing and hosting the first #ChiCouncilBingo on Twitter to track the final vote, which ultimately passed with 29 of the 50 aldermen voting yes.

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