Integrating Hope in Climate Reporting

What the 9 Millones team learned about community outreach as a Solutions Journalism Climate Beacon

by Camille Padilla Dalmau, founder, 9 Millones

9 Millones hosting a community listening workshop. Photo courtesy of the author.

“We need critical hope the way a fish needs unpolluted water”

— Paulo Freire, “Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed”

In Puerto Rico, climate, colonialism and trauma are inextricably linked. Yes, the 2017 hurricanes were collective traumatic experiences that brought us closer as a nation, yet we continue to face similar experiences because our right to make decisions about our territory is violated every day. This can look like the power going out once or twice a week because our electric grid system has been neglected and rebuilt to perpetuate a dependency on fossil fuels.

The 9 Millones team is not alienated from this trauma. And we believe that journalism that pretends to be separated from it drives narratives of violence and fear that keep us paralyzed.

At 9 Millones, we see information as sunshine that can help nourish the flower of community. We want to share information so that Puerto Ricans and non-Puerto Ricans alike listen to voices in the archipelago and advocate for new public policy that is informed by the needs on the ground.

Yet Puerto Rico’s history and access to information has been systematically suppressed. More and more Puerto Ricans have realized the consequences of colonialism since 2016, when a fiscal oversight board took over the archipelago’s finances, thanks to a bipartisan bill signed into law by President Obama. In May of 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled that a nonprofit news organization couldn’t get access to financial reports, contracts and other communications belonging to members of the board. The members appointed by the President of the U.S. have “sovereign immunity,” according to SCOTUS.

Meanwhile, the local government’s environmental public policy is all paper and no action. Instead of holding people accountable over constructing on protected and ecologically sensitive land, we see we see environmental activists face repression.

In this context of despair, during our time as Climate Beacon leaders, we instead chose hope. We hypothesized that communities with hope-centered narratives are more likely to transform, and that the solutions journalism framework is a tool we can use to engage communities that have been marginalized from mainstream narratives.

Can moving from a problem-focused to a solutions-forward perspective help with community building?

So far, we have learned:

• Community starts with us.
• Let the community define the agenda.
• It is important to measure the quality of relationships.

Camille interviews Yvette Nuñez for Madres de la Tierra series. Photo by Mari Blanca Robles López.

Community starts with us

Communities around Puerto Rico are experiencing and witnessing Post Traumatic Growth — the transformation that follows trauma. Being trauma survivors requires much gentleness, compassion and grace. Sometimes we find ourselves facing self-doubt, having difficulty understanding and expressing our needs. We started this project by creating a safe space for our three main investigators. We went to a family home in the mountains and communed with nature as we got to know one another and develop the project.

We decided on five major agreements:

• We are all leaders. We can hold one another accountable, and there is no one person in charge.
• Consent to documentation is a priority.
• We want to center joy in the process.
• We will be grounded in our intention to foster trust and hope. This means constantly reminding ourselves to value relationships above stories.
• We are rooted in love. This means that we will be kind, respectful and compassionate in our approach to communities. Rather than seeking a “story,” we are seeking understanding.

We started this project wanting to deepen our relationships with communities far away, but we realized that deepening ties within our newsroom is just as important. How will others trust us if there is no trust among members of our team?

Let the community define the agenda

To repair distrust in the media, we have to recognize how the media has harmed communities. We chose to work with the community of Vieques, Puerto Rico, because stories about the island municipality off the east coast of Puerto Rico tend to be problem-focused. We partnered with the Vieques Film and Human Rights Festival to organize a series of workshops and began by creating a space where people shared their perceptions of media coverage. We heard them say things such as “Journalists come with their agenda,” “They talk to the same people” and “They don’t ask the questions we want to answer.” This last comment struck a chord with us. Have we ever asked our audience what questions they want to talk about?

In a later workshop, we talked about the fundamentals of investigating, and the community came up with ideas we can pursue together. It takes internal work, humility and awareness to release the agenda and surrender to the uncertainty of designing with communities. But when you do, you find the stories that are more meaningful.

Camille interviews Anabela Fuentes for Madres de la Tierra series. Photo by Mari Blanca Robles López.

The importance of measuring the quality of relationships

We tend to prioritize quantitative over qualitative data in academia and news organizations. However, we started this project wanting to measure the quality of relationships. Our goal was to move from having relationships with the community in Vieques to having partnerships. We developed qualitative tools to be able to examine the impact our contribution had with our partners. While we designed questionnaires, we realized holding space for dialogues or focus groups with key questions helped us understand the effectiveness of our coverage. We also implemented tools like a hope barometer used before and after interventions (and our own meetings) to see how what we shared affected our levels of hope.

Our time in the Climate Beacon Newsroom Initiative has let us see that, if we want to cover the climate crisis, we need to establish regenerative ethics — ethics that nurture the people we cover who are most vulnerable not only to climate change, but also to the economic and political systems. These are ethics that include community care and that disrupt the extractive systems at the root of the climate crisis.

Thanks to this initiative, we have developed a facilitated experience so other newsrooms can think about how they do community outreach. Reach out to camille@9millones.com if you’re interested in working with us.

Liza Morales and Frances Medina were Climate Beacon Leaders with 9 Millones and contributed a central part of the insights in this piece.