Why a new civic and social infrastructure is needed to equip Cleveland residents to hold local government accountable
And how Cleveland Documenters are building it.
Since Cleveland Documenters first began documenting local government meetings in Cleveland back in November 2020, I have been describing our work (to anyone who asked) in this way:
Cleveland Documenters trains and pays Cleveland residents to document local government meetings with notes and Twitter threads. We then make those documents available to the public via our website Documenters.org to create a new public record.
Just over a year later, that’s still accurate. However, with now nearly 300 Cleveland Documenters trained, 344 local government meetings documented, 60 gatherings held, and lots of fresh learning, our work has coalesced around a collection of intentional practices, principles, and approaches that go beyond that two sentence explanation.
As a 2022 John S. Knight Community Impact Fellow at Stanford University, I am using my fellowship year to do something builders of small, new, locally focused news and information organizations rarely get to do: take the time to review and codify what we’ve learned, and use that to innovate and experiment in ways that meet our capacity and our community’s needs. That the JSK Fellowship and Stanford have afforded me the time and resources to do this, while also allowing me to continue doing Documenters work here in Cleveland is rarer still. (Full disclosure: it is rare, but not rare for us. Cleveland Documenters’ Rachel Dissell was a 2021 JSK Community Impact Fellow).
Here’s a little of how we’ve come to think about our work in the past year.
A new civic and social infrastructure
Our goal is to build a diverse community to collaboratively make civic information more accessible to all Cleveland residents, and to create civic information tools that allow residents to participate more fully in local government, and better hold local government accountable. Cleveland Documenters are working together to build new civic and social infrastructure in the city of Cleveland — a new civic information system to strengthen local democracy.
We focus on civic information because that’s where we see the need. Cleveland residents are often disengaged from local government, and don’t feel they have the information they need to participate. You can see this in the findings of a recent poll of “low propensity voters” in Cleveland, commissioned by Cleveland VOTES and Policy Matters Ohio. 86% of respondents said they cared about the results of November’s mayoral election. But, only 21% knew their ward’s city council member. Analysis of the poll results revealed that these residents care about their communities, don’t trust local officials to make changes, and that the main barrier to voting was a lack of information.
Cleveland Documenters’ community of practice
Our approach to creating this civic infrastructure is informed by the approaches and practices of our parent organizations: the “don’t just engage, equip” ethos of City Bureau, and the community network building practices of Neighborhood Connections and the Neighbor Up network. We equip residents to generate power, provide on-ramps to participating more fully in civic life, and hold space to build a network of relationships that make our entire community stronger.
In the last year, Cleveland Documenters has coalesced around a few practices. Practices when repeated become habits. Habits when repeated become culture. Here are a few of those practices:
- Move at the pace of community, not at the pace of news. We are led by our Documenters’ interests, curiosity and needs, not by news cycle deadlines.
- Flip the traditional news/civic information dynamic. Instead of civic information as a residual of news, we start with providing civic information and tools. Reporting flows from gathering and distributing that information, led by Documenters’ curiosity.
- Hold and nurture accessible, informal spaces where everyone has a voice, power is shared, and residents are able to step into civic life in a way that feels safe, fun, and productive.
- Be a learning community, with space for every one of us to learn from each other, to grow, and build power.
- Define every interaction as a collaboration with people, not just as a service for people.
- Provide an easy on ramp for civic life and skill building, while also providing and connecting people with opportunities to go deeper.
Some examples of what these practices have lead to in just the last year:
- We hold monthly virtual gatherings and informal virtual office hours to allow Documenters to connect and share what we’ve learned. We also use these spaces to iteratively collaborate and shape our special projects.
- We encourage Documenters to tell us what questions they are left with after covering a meeting. We then follow-up on those questions, which occasionally leads to reporting. For example, our Twitter series, “#CLEDocsAnswers.”
- Before the COVID vaccines were available, Documenters expressed concern and curiosity about Clevelanders views on the vaccines. We worked with Documenters to develop an interview survey on vaccine views, and turned that into a special assignment. On that assignment, Documenters spoke with 40 Clevelanders about their views on COVID and the vaccines. We then turned the survey responses into our “Voices on the Vaccine” series, published in The Cleveland Observer.
- While covering Cleveland City Council, Documenters frequently asked why so many ordinances were “emergency ordinances”, and why council suspended their own rules so frequently. We dug into those questions in our story, “The Pace of Passage: How Quickly City Council Makes Laws and What That Means for Clevelanders,” published in The Cleveland Observer. That reporting was also informed by a special assignment where Documenters interviewed Cleveland residents about access to local government.
- The city of Cleveland surveyed residents on how they would spend the $511 million in ARPA funding coming to the city. But, the city only provided a thin analysis of the results. We filed a public records request for the results, and built a database with a team of Documenters. That database was used in reporting by The Land and other local news outlets. Also, a Documenter who covered a number of city council ARPA discussions used that knowledge to write her own ARPA story for The Land.
Civic information & Cleveland’s news ecosystem
While traditional local news has long been a source for civic information, providing civic information isn’t necessarily a primary function of local news. Instead, civic information is more of a residue or a subfunction of news. As you read local news stories, you glean information about what that board does, where this council meets, and what its processes are.
The loss of local reporters and reporting in Cleveland over the last few decades, has meant an even greater reduction of access to civic information that is crucial for residents to participate in local democracy. A 2019 analysis of Cleveland’s news ecosystem by the Knight and Cleveland foundations found that only 11% of reporting in Northeast Ohio was local, original, and answered a “critical information need.”
In addition, the city itself has undergone drastic changes in the last 50 years, changing the way Cleveland residents meet, interact, and exchange knowledge and information, in ways we haven’t even begun to measure. These interactions, and the relationships they spawn, are the base level components that make up the city’s civic and social infrastructure.
As with roads and bridges, or the electrical grid, if a city’s infrastructure no longer meets the needs of its residents, then a new infrastructure must be created to meet those needs. That’s what Cleveland Documenters is trying to do by training residents to understand and document local government, and by building community based around the exchange of what we all learn in the process.
Fresh Learning
When we began Cleveland Documenters in 2020, we thought we might have to convince folks that documenting local government meetings was interesting work. We did not. They were hungry for it.
Our nearly 300 Documenters are a diverse, multi-generational group of folks from every ZIP code in the city, and a number from surrounding communities. They are not just freelancers or substitutes for reporters. They aren’t just filling gaps. They are creating new civic information systems for the kind of city they want to live in. Our role is to equip them for that work.
For the remainder of my JSK Fellowship I plan to focus on innovation and experimentation, focused primarily around two questions:
- How can we better equip Documenters to equip others in their own networks?
- How can we better hold space for Documenters to connect, share, collaborate, and build community?
More personally, I am also exploring the answers to this question: what do I need to be prepared to be part of the team leading this organization into the future?
I am so grateful for the opportunity and resources to even formulate these questions, let alone being able to attempt to answer them.
I’ll let you know how it’s going in my next Medium post.
Further reading:
- “Journalism is a public good. Let the public make it” by City Bureau co-founder Darryl Holliday, Columbia Journalism Review
- “Don’t Just Engage, Equip” by Darryl Holliday
- Neighbor Up practices.
- “Introducing City Bureau’s Community Engagement Guidelines” by City Bureau co-founder Andrea Faye Hart
- “Building Community in Place: Limitations and Promise” by Bill Traynor of Trusted Space Partners
