PROJECT:
The Epicenter NYC
Our setting: Jackson Heights, Queens
THE SETTING
To scope out our project, we had to first understand the community we wanted to serve. Jackson Heights is well-known as one of the most diverse communities in the country. Immigrants from Latin American and South-East Asian countries have been settling in the community for decades, creating a vibrant and diverse landscape that serves as a culinary and cultural hub for migrants from all over the world.
Jackson Heights was also, for a period of time, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, with over 11,000 new cases per day in the spring of 2020. Not only did the virus severely impact the health of the residents, but it also ravaged the community's economy, which is primarily comprised of small businesses including restaurants, groceries, jewelers, and more.
Role: Project Manager
Timeline: November 2020 - February 2021
Over the course of four months, I led a team of three classmates in a community engagement project in collaboration with The Epicenter NYC, a newsletter started by Mitra Kalita in July of 2020 to help the Jackson Heights community access relief and resources in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our team was awarded second-place prize in the Reynold Journalism Institute's 2021 Student Innovation Competition, hosted by the Missouri School of Journalism, for our focus on building a dedicated community network that can easily be replicated by any newsroom, no matter the size, location, or available funding.
THE PROJECT
We joined The Epicenter team during the second wave of the pandemic in October 2020. Kalita hoped to leverage her newly-born media venture to experiment with new, creative formats for connecting with her audience. To address the needs of the community and the newsletter, I oversaw my team in the design and launch of a community engagement project focusing on three key goals:
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Develop a communication channel and network with/within our audience – the people of Jackson heights – to better understand the needs of the community
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Strengthen the bonds between local news and community by giving the COVID-19 crisis a face, a name, and an address
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Develop a scalable strategy that can be used by one-man newsrooms and larger – an inexpensive, flexible, and lightweight way for local journalists to better connect with their audiences
We decided to focus our project on profiling small business owners (SBOs) in Jackson Heights using text, photo, and video, and asking them to nominate another SBO in the area to be profiled. This led to a “networked beat” of SBOs in Jackson Heights, Queens using a referral system created organically by our subjects, which was reflective of the diversity of the community and focused on one of the groups hit hardest by the virus.
A network created organically by small business owners
Many of our SBOs were facing severe financial hardship due to loss of day-to-day foot traffic, decreased customers, and declining in revenue in addition to having to keep up with their monthly expenses. This participatory network approach was created with the goal to rebuild the connective tissue in the community after long periods of isolation and financial hardship due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as bring human faces and stories to the headlines and data points being reported.
Manjit Singh of Jackson Diner and Prem Padudez of Hamro Bhim's Cafe in Jackson Heights, Queens
In addition to our profiles, which were published weekly in The Epicenter NYC newsletter, we also created physical posters of each SBO with a QR code leading back to the newsletter in order to establish a physical presence in the neighborhood and drive traffic back to the newsletter.
Portrait profiles in for distribution in print and social
Manjit was interviewed by New York Times about the difficulty of getting registered for a COVID-19 vaccine in New York City
THE IMPACT
I kept in close contact with many of the SBOs we profiled after our interviews. When The Epicenter NYC started a campaign to get essential workers in New York vaccinated for COVID-19, I reached out to Manjit Singh, owner of Jackson Diner. With the help of Mitra and her team, we were able to get Manjit's staff, as well as his entire family, registered and vaccinated. Word of Jackson Diner's vaccinations eventually spread to other restaurants in Jackson Heights, which in turn spread to the taxi cab community in Jackson Heights.
The connections we had made in the community organically created a new chain, which resulted in dozens of essential workers in Jackson Heights getting registered for the vaccine. The vaccinations were an unexpected outcome of our project, but ultimately illustrated the the many different pathways our model could take to benefit by fostering connections within the community.
You can find our competition presentation here.