This proud Chicagoan, storyteller and Civic Reporting Fellowship alum is joining our team to help us cultivate a vibrant Chicago Documenters community.
By Caroline Olsen
Natalie Frazier (Photo: Sebastián Hidalgo)
Last week, we welcomed Natalie Frazier to City Bureau as our new Documenters Community Coordinator.
You may already know Natalie if you followed The Housing Cliff series that dove deep into the COVID-19 pandemic’s impacts on the growing housing and eviction crisis and how communities responded. She’s also written a couple of profiles for the How a Community Heals series, uplifting the work of Chicagoans invested in community care, mutual aid and healing in the wake of the pandemic and historic uprisings.
Natalie is bringing her background as an educator, filmmaker and writer to help us grow the Documenters community and equip more Chicagoans with the tools they need to influence change in their own neighborhoods.
Here’s more about Natalie.
Tell us a bit more about your background and what initially drew you to City Bureau.
I'm from the Austin community, and living and going to school there, I was always aware of the inequity in Chicago and on the West Side specifically. It’s often a hard thing to explain to non-Chicagoans not only how segregated the city is, but just how different one's life trajectory can be, whether it's your life expectancy or your access to fresh produce or how hot your neighborhood is because of how many trees are planted. So, I think for that reason, I've always wanted to work in the community sector of whatever industry I'm in, and I've always been committed to how I can make our lives better as Black people in the city, specifically Black people on the West Side. And I see journalism as a tool for that. That's what led me to City Bureau, this organization that is not preoccupied with giving a voice to people, but instead amplifying the voice they already have, giving them tools to engage with their government and keeping the power in the community.
You first joined City Bureau as part of the fall 2020 Civic Reporting Fellowship and worked on a team covering the housing crisis. Tell me more about that experience and what you enjoyed most.
The most rewarding experience from that was rummaging through public records, finding out who was being illegally evicted and then writing handwritten letters to them. The responses we got back were mind blowing. So many people didn't know they were being evicted and had no idea how to proceed. And so in this act of telling their stories, in this act of documenting, we were also doing a service and informing folks of their rights. We created the City Bureau survival guide, giving them numbers that they could call and tools to interact with their city government and systems. So that was the best part. It wasn't the articles published or the things I learned about nut graphs, it was really that service piece.
The fellowship was also a really good introduction to City Bureau's mission, which is all about equipping regular people with tools so that they can be more civically engaged and create change. I feel like we created change, and that made the work so much more meaningful. Especially during the pandemic and the uprisings, you had all kinds of things going on in the city, but the work still felt important and useful. And I was very proud to be a part of it.
What are you most looking forward to in this new role as Documenters Community Coordinator?
I'm excited to be part of an effort to expand the Documenters program to people who City Bureau isn't reaching right now, or who City Bureau is reaching but not yet engaging. Also, just cultivating community is going to be great, thinking about how we're going to reach each other, thinking about new community agreements, norms and ways to connect with each other. And it’s just going to be super fun to start talking to people and figuring out their stories, what they need from the Documenters program, what they like about it and why they’re here in the first place. It’s a simple thing but I’m just super excited to start talking to Documenters and building community with them.
Tell me more about your relationship with Chicago.
I have a really deep connection to Chicago. I love the city. I love the rich history. We’re a place that’s kind of the underdog, which I think is a really cool spirit embodied in my own personal work—this grittiness, this toughness, this willingness to not shy away from the issues. Chicago is a perfect example of people who are fighting every day to live better lives, people who don't give up, especially the West Side of Chicago where I'm from and where I live now. I live in a food desert, and I watch people giving out food, providing food for each other weekly. So that's just a beautiful thing to see. The self-determination and how, aside from city government, there are so many things that Chicagoans are doing for each other. It takes a community, it takes a village and I think Chicago is a really good example of that.
If you’d like to reach out to Natalie to talk about Documenters or City Bureau, she’d love to hear from you! Email her at natalie@citybureau.org.
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