How does a community honor its past while making space to grow its future?

We’re excited to catch you up on the News Ambassadors program and highlight the amazing work done by our partners. If you care about strengthening communities and better supporting democracy, help us by following us on Instagram or Linkedin, donating or forwarding this newsletter to a friend. 

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📻One big story (though two lenses) 📻

This month we're highlighting two radio PVAMU student radio pieces with different approaches to the urgent need for more housing, a topic that’s top of mind for many communities across the country. Like many other colleges nationwide, Prairie View A & M has been working to address high demand for campus beds, especially since a fairly large share of PVAMU students prefer to live on-campus — including upperclassmen. Far more juniors and seniors apply for campus housing than get spaces, forcing hundreds to find off campus accommodations and join the ranks of reluctant commuters who rely on limited bus service or scramble to find limited parking spots. 

The context: Prairie View A & M University, known among students for academic excellence, strong local traditions and a tight-knit sense of community, lies an hour northwest of rapidly sprawling Houston, Texas. The rural HBCU’s campus was built on the land of a former slave plantation called Alta Visa. To the north, the campus abuts a local burial ground of the Wyatt Chapel Community Cemetery, thought to be the resting place for more than 100 formerly enslaved people and their descendants from Alta Vista and another nearby plantation. Many are buried in unmarked graves.

Local stakeholders are in discussions about creating a more visually robust historical remembrance site. Various PVAMU departments are leading ongoing efforts to identify and preserve these unmarked graves and honor those buried there, including via the Digital PV Panther Project, the History Department and oral history and other work through the Ruth J. Simmons Race and Justice Center. Also playing a role are direct descendants of those buried in Wyatt Chapel.

PVAMU's campus covers 1400 acres of land, so there are many areas not near the burial ground, and PVAMU has built new residence halls in other parts of the campus (including in 2014, 2017 and 2020). 

Why we like these pieces: Both student reporters were able to focus on solutions while acknowledging very real and nuanced challenges that lack a quick fix, even as these stories personally affected them and their peers. We also love that these stories were shaped in part by talking to local community members themselves about what issues matter most to them, and learning housing was a top concern shared by many.

Update : Yesterday, November 13, Texas A & M’s Board of Regents approved $12 million to begin designing a new residence hall at Prairie View A&M University. The project is expected to add 950 more beds.

Listen to the two housing solutions stories below:

🎙️Hear reporter Zjorey Ross’s solutions-inspired piece on campus housing and parking challenges and the efforts to properly preserve nearby burial grounds starting at 8:18 on this episode of HBCU Pulse.

🎙️Hear reporter Lafayette Franklin’s piece on the housing crisis in Prairie View, starting at 9:07 on this episode of HBCU Pulse.

Both pieces aired this fall on HBCU Pulse Sirius XM Channel and were reported in Professor Tony Clomax’s audio reporting and production class, part of our spring 2025 News Ambassadors cohort.

Our Depolarization trainings continue this fall - with an upcoming free training for public media journalists!

Our Depolarization strategies trainings, focused on the Complicating the Narratives method, continue to keep us busy this fall. We’re especially loving the feedback coming in from our post-training evaluations, like the two comments above. Among our recent cohorts: a journalism class at Temple University in Philadelphia, student media reporters at Prairie View A & M University in rural Texas and both northern and southern California cohorts of Coro Fellows who are applying the strategies to work in multiple fields.

We’re also doing a training for Public Media Journalists Association’s Opening Doors Fellows on November 19th. Public Media Journalists - this training is free and open to all public media journalists. If that’s you, register HERE by logging into your PMJA account!

News Ambassadors ✨Resource Spotlight✨ 

We’ve got two cool resources for newsrooms and community journalism folks that caught our attention this month, so let’s dive in!

STORY CIRCLES: Deep Listening and Bridge Building on Issues that Matter

We’re drawn to the Story Circles guide and concept because it aligns well with the Complicating the Narratives framework, the focus of the Depolarization Reporting Strategies training we do for newsrooms and schools. Community engagement champion (and friend of News Ambassadors!) jesikah maria ross recently shared this guide from her archives, and newsrooms exploring bridging on locally contentious issues should especially check it out! It’d be a good companion resource to the 7 Steps of Dialogue Journalism method from Spaceship Media we’ve shared before.

This guide is especially geared to a public radio context, coming out of a year-long project with Capitol Public Radio, Sacramento's NPR affiliate station, where they partnered with community groups to invite people with different experiences and perspectives on a locally important topic to hear each others’ stories and envision a path forward. 

“This guide covers how to host a Story Circle so that you can cultivate listening and bridge-building in your neighborhood, organization, or community. It’s designed for people with some background in organizing and facilitating events. And while it focuses on housing, the Story Circle process can be used to bring people together to explore any issue or aspiration.”

A quick note on the author: If you haven’t yet met jesikah maria ross, you may be familiar with her work. She's the innovator behind the Participatory Journalism Handbook, Take Care/Make Care (from the Care Collaboratory within what’s now News Futures) and loads of other local newsrooms and civic engagement resources. You can learn more about what she’s up to these days on LinkedIn.

Some cool additional resources worth checking out: 

Journalism Support Exchange is Live (BETA mode): 

Check out the new Journalism Support Exchange resource/website brought to you by Darryl Holliday and the Commoner Company with support from Press Forward.  It’s a helpful clearinghouse on resources and support to help US-based local newsrooms build stronger news and information ecosystems. 

A Map of Student Newspapers Across the U.S.

Check out this map of student newspapers compiled by University of Vermont’s Center for Community News and Barbara Allen (formerly of Poynter).  It shows all the student newspapers in the US! (Is your student newsroom not included? Fill out the form to add yours!)

Community News Roles: A framework for how people keep their communities informed. Also worth exploring this month: Journalism + Design’s recently created framework visualizing the different roles community members play in their local community information ecosystems, many of which exist outside of (or overlap with) those of traditional journalism.  Among the roles are documenting, inquiring, sense-making, enabling, facilitating, amplifying and commenting.

Upcoming Events/Opportunities

Attention Public Media Journalists: We’re doing a training for Public Media Journalists Association on November 19th that is free and open for you to attend! »Register HERE via your PMJA account«

College Journalism professors: Apply for $1000 support to launch or grow your news-academic partnership. Center for Community News (CCN) Champions are leaders who want to create or grow a news/academic partnership, helping college students cover local communities. CCN’s program supports those leaders through a $1,000 monetary award and one year of coaching and mentoring. It also connects them to peer leaders in this growing field. »Apply here by December 12!«

Budding Journalists: The New York Times is now accepting applications for the 2026-2027 New York Times Fellowship. Check out their careers website.

Looking for a job in journalism?  Check out the November Journalism jobs from Rebecca Aguilar’s Calling All Journalists list! 

Reynold’s Journalism Institute (RJI) is partnering with El Colectivo 506 (a solutions-focused news outlet in Costa Rica) to build a free, publicly available training tool to help journalists to turn news pitches into solutions stories! The tool, available in English, Spanish and Portuguese, will be trained in the four solutions journalism pillars to give personalized feedback on pitches. It will also help guide journalists towards additional training resources depending on their needs. Read more here.

A look ahead at Journalism conferences coming up in 2026!
As 2025 comes to a close, make time to browse the many journalism conferences already planned for 2026, curated by Journalism.WTF.  If you are planning a conference that isn’t yet listed, there’s a link on the site to add yours!

That’s all we have for you this month, folks. We’ll see you next month!