In our recent webinar, Building the Hub, we explored how community knowledge acts as critical infrastructure. This session features insights and lessons from Suzanne Wertman, project manager of the Coastal Journalism Hub, and J’vanete Skiba, executive director of the Resiliency Task Force of New Hanover County, who share their experience in connecting community voices, public health, and local journalism. Below is a summary of the core practices we discussed, which you can use to identify your own community’s activation points.

Communities know far more about themselves than appears in news stories, government reports, or institutional data.

That knowledge lives in neighborhoods, libraries, schools, churches, health clinics, local businesses, and around kitchen tables. The challenge is not a lack of information. It is the lack of a durable structure where different forms of knowledge can come together, challenge one another, and become part of public life.

The Coastal Journalism Hub is the prototype for this structure. We did not organize it as another coalition or advisory committee. We organized it as an intervention in the local information system. The hub serves as a place where journalists, residents, public health practitioners, researchers, artists, and community organizations come together before public narratives harden and before reporting priorities are set.

Watch the Webinar

–> Watch the webinar on YouTube

To activate the hub, we created a field guide. This field guide grows out of several years of organizing, reporting, and collaboration in New Hanover County. The practices described here emerged through trial and error, not theory. They are offered as tools for communities that want to strengthen local journalism by bringing community knowledge into the public conversation earlier, more consistently, and with greater depth.

Practice 1

Organize Relationships Before Organizations

Don’t begin by announcing a coalition.

Begin by meeting people.

Meet a journalist.

Meet a librarian.

Meet a neighborhood leader.

Meet someone working in public health.

Meet someone who knows the history of the place.

At the end of every conversation, ask one question:

Who else should we be talking with?

That single question built the Coastal Journalism Hub.

Practice 2

Change Who Gets to Define the Questions

Most reporting begins after an institution identifies an issue.

A Hub begins earlier.

It asks:

What are people noticing before anyone has written a press release?

What are community organizations hearing before a trend appears in public data?

What questions are residents already asking?

Changing who frames the questions changes journalism. It also changes how communities understand themselves.

Practice 3

Convene Before You Coordinate

Invite six people to breakfast.

Listen.

Meet again.

Build structure when people discover it’s needed.

Trust grows through repeated conversations.

Practice 4

Treat Community Knowledge as Infrastructure

Community knowledge is often dismissed as anecdotal because it is distributed. No single resident sees the whole picture. But when many lived experiences begin pointing in the same direction, those experiences become another way of understanding community conditions. They do not replace reporting, research, or public data. They help explain them.

It is a form of evidence that becomes more powerful when placed alongside reporting, research, and public data.

Journalists contribute reporting and verification.

Researchers contribute analysis.

Public agencies contribute data.

Residents contribute experience, history, relationships, and observations that no institution routinely collects.

Healthy community information systems need all of these forms of knowledge working together.

Your First Assignment

Choose one issue your community cannot solve alone.

Draw three circles.

People already working on the issue.

People who connect different groups.

People who are missing from the conversation.

Then ask yourself:

What is the smallest gathering that could bring some of these people together?

Not a conference.

Not a summit.

Just a conversation.

What Success Looks Like

You are not trying to create another nonprofit.

You are not trying to build another committee.

You are building a practice.

Over time, people who normally work in separate worlds begin learning together.

Journalists develop deeper sources and stronger reporting.

Community organizations gain a broader understanding of local issues.

Residents see their knowledge reflected in public conversations.

Public institutions gain a fuller picture of community life.

Relationships deepen.

Trust grows.

The network becomes part of the community’s information infrastructure.

Begin

You do not need permission to begin.

You do not need a grant to start a conversation.

You do not need every organization at the table.

Start with one conversation.

Then ask:

Who else should we be talking with?

For more examples of this work in action, view our webinar, “Neighborhood to Newsroom,” where we discuss how these strategies were applied to bridge the gap between local neighborhoods and newsrooms.