As part of our latest initiative, the Bay Area Media Collaborative, Renaissance Journalism is convening unique, Bay Area-wide conversations to help journalists and community residents exchange their views about the region’s housing crisis.
The effort will be organized by Spaceship Media, a nonprofit organization founded by two veteran reporters, which encourages respectful and journalism-supported dialogue to bridge divides and build trust between the media and the public.
Renaissance Journalism is launching a new initiative to test an innovative model of collaborative, community news coverage in the San Francisco Bay Area. We hope to encourage journalists and their news organizations to work together to help people understand and address some of the region’s most pressing problems. To start, we’ve chosen the crisis in housing—from the unbridled gentrification of neighborhoods to the displacement of longtime residents and the rising problem of homelessness. Together, these issues profoundly impact the quality, health and character of life in the region.
The scar on Russell Contreras’s cheek comes from his high school days, when he tried to help a white classmate escape a pummeling. His school in Houston, Texas, had been integrated in the 1970s, and one unfortunate byproduct was a campus ritual called “white day”—the day that black and Hispanic kids would randomly pick on white classmates and punch them. Thus, for all its good intentions, school desegregation in Houston had backfired in a sad way. While the campus was integrated, there hadn’t been enough attention paid to how the students learned the larger life lesson of how to live, study and work together.
