This multimedia project producer and Civic Reporting Fellowship alum is joining our team to help us build a more sustainable future for community journalism.
By Lucia Anaya
Caroline Olsen (Photo: Max Herman)
Earlier this month, we welcomed the latest addition to our City Bureau team, Caroline Olsen, our first Development Coordinator.
Some of you might remember Caroline: She was part of the spring 2019 cohort of Civic Reporting Fellows and helped produce The Cord, a project that tackled issues of racial inequity in maternal and infant health and told stories of community solutions and resilience.
We’re excited to have Caroline on board and have her flex her storytelling skills to support our institutional fundraising strategy and strengthen our relationships with philanthropic partners.
Here’s a little bit about her.
As a fellow, you got to see a lot of the inner workings of City Bureau. Tell us what you learned and what you most enjoyed about being part of the spring 2019 cohort.
One thing that really stands out to me is this idea that journalists should serve communities rather than just cover them. I loved that so much of the work was thinking about how we can involve community before, during and after. Not only did my team produce stories but we also were able to host a Public Newsroom that connected moms with birth workers and we created a text message line to get feedback on our reporting and share out resources. Getting more people involved and allowing more people to participate in creating a story and building shared resources was really exciting.
What initially drew you to City Bureau? What interested you most about the work?
I’ve always been interested in storytelling work in general and that’s what drew me to study journalism in school. I was particularly interested in photojournalism and video journalism but as I was getting to the end of undergrad and looking at opportunities in the journalism field, I felt like it was pretty limited. I had become more familiar with the extractive nature of traditional journalism and reporting, and I became more interested in work that was closer to community engagement and organizing. That’s what led me to the City Bureau. I saw that what CB was doing was not traditional journalism. They weren’t just popping into communities and getting the story and leaving. They were really trying to build relationships and really focus on the process of reporting and rethinking what journalism could look like.
How do you see your journalism skills helping in your work as a Development Coordinator?
After the fellowship, I realized I wanted to have an opportunity to build with City Bureau in a more long-lasting way. I wanted to learn more about the other programs and how they form a cohesive strategy around rethinking media ecosystems as a whole in Chicago. Development is just another form of storytelling to me. I know I’ll be using a lot of the same skills—researching, talking to people, listening, building relationships and putting that all into a narrative that gets more people on board with how City Bureau is democratizing the tools of journalism. It’s exciting to play a role in making this work sustainable and making sure that we’ll have the resources we need to build healthy community-based information systems.
Tell us a little bit about your relationship to Chicago and what you like most about the city.
I’m from the D.C. suburbs but I came to the Chicago area for college and I stayed afterwards. I have lived in Logan Square, Hyde Park and now Uptown. I’ve been in Uptown for the past two years, so it’s the longest I’ve stayed in a neighborhood in Chicago. I organize with the Asian American community here, which has given this neighborhood a really tight-knit feel that I haven’t always been able to have. I also work with a mutual aid and arts organization, Axis Lab, that’s based in Uptown specifically on Argyle Street, and we’ve been doing a community archival project together. It’s been a really great way to get to know my neighborhood and it just feels like people have each other’s backs here. It’s also a super diverse neighborhood. There’s a rich history of a ton of different immigrant populations coming together here and learning these histories has helped me learn a lot about Chicago in general.
What are you most excited about as you start your role as Development Coordinator?
I’m most excited to learn from the City Bureau community, the other staff here and also anyone who is connected to our programs. The community is what makes City Bureau so strong, and I came back here in this job because I was already in this network. I love how everyone plays a role and how all of us together are imagining better ways to create news and enact the changes that our communities need.
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