Alliance Matters
Public Narrative proudly announces the successful launch of Alliance Matters, a groundbreaking initiative that puts the power of storytelling directly into the hands of Chicago's diverse communities. This collaborative effort, supported by the Field Foundation, brought together 14 independent media organizations and content creators who conducted "Temperature Check" projects across the city.
We look to Alliance Matters as a model for local news and storytellers around the country that can be replicated. Programming for Alliance Matters was scheduled to run July - September 2025, with some projects wrapping up in October.
About Alliance Matters
With support from the Field Foundation and insight from CIMA newsrooms and organizations, Alliance Matters was designed to elevate the role of independent media in informing, engaging, and empowering our city’s diverse communities while growing our pool of trained freelancers.
Its robust programming schedule included print, podcasts, partnerships, news, arts, research, video, photography and more. Additional funding came from the Leaders for a New Chicago Award to offer a maximum of fourteen $4,000 micro-grants, including $600 for a freelancer to work with the outlet, as well as marketing and engagement.
The reporting and views expressed are those of the media outlet, and they retain all rights to the content in accordance with the Alliance Matters MOU.
Please join us in congratulating this year’s awardees and learn more about their program and content contributions.
PHOTO: Camilla Forte/Borderless Magazine/Catchlight Local/Report for America
From June and July, Borderless’ team dispatched field canvassers to conduct listening sessions on Chicago’s Southwest Side. During their in-person “temperature check,” field canvassers met with community groups, including Enlace Chicago, Brighton Park Neighborhood Council, and Sanad Food Pantry. They also attended community events to understand the most significant health and environmental challenges facing the community. Based on the listening sessions, their editorial team reported, produced, and edited stories.
Web stories:
Cornered is a multimedia investigative project exploring how Black Chicagoans are navigating converging crises of jobs, housing, and survival. Through immersive, narrative-driven reporting, the project amplifies lived experiences of workers, small business owners, retirees, and community organizers who face unemployment, economic precarity, and political disappointment.
The story was delivered in print, audio, and digital formats, with social media engagement and stock photography used to support outreach. It captures the complexity of resilience while holding institutions accountable for promises that fall short.
Stories:
PHOTO: From September 25, 2025 Edition of Chicago News Weekly
PHOTO: Provided by Cicero Independiente
Event, Together: Rise Beyond Fear.
This event took place in September 2025 in partnership with Cafe Tlahuica and the Berwyn Cicero Rapid Response Network. This event was held at no-cost to participants. It elevated community voices, connected neighbors to one another, and countered harmful narratives about immigrant communities.
The event also built upon our ongoing commitment to community engagement that encourages civic dialogue and strengthens trust between residents and our newsroom.
The event featured a culinary workshop led by local elders from immigrant communities. This hands-on cooking class invited participants to prepare traditional foods, connect through shared experience, and honor cultural heritage.
Cicero has faced a dramatic increase in immigration enforcement (ICE) activity since early 2025. In response, their team invited members of the Berwyn Cicero Rapid Response Network to lead a Know Your Rights discussion. Participants received practical information about their constitutional rights, how to safely report ICE activity, and how to support affected neighbors.
From Cicero Independiente: “[This event] allowed us to bring our community together in a space rooted in joy and culture to share stories, access critical resources, and strengthen our collective voice.”
Article, “White and Undocumented. How Chicago’s Polish community respond (or not) to threats of deportation and president’s Trump anti-immigrant agenda”
While many Latino immigrant communities in Chicago for decades fight for immigration reform and more recently, actively oppose president Trump's anti-immigrant agenda, most of the Polish immigrant community – including undocumented individuals – sits quietly, watching from afar at what will happen, and even appear to support the anti-immigrant movement. You won’t see them at rallies for immigration reform, anti-ICE protests, or know-your-rights events. Why is that?
Stories:
PHOTO: From September 25, 2025 Edition of Chicago News Weekly
Graphic provided by E3 Radio
Event, The Podcast Salon
E3 Radio, in partnership with Reparations Media, hosted the August edition of our Podcast Salon—an immersive, community-centered listening experience celebrating the transformative
power of Black storytelling. The event spotlighted three compelling podcasts created by Black storytellers whose work centers the lives, legacies, and visions of Black communities. By pairing intimate silent headphone listening with guided conversation, the Podcast Salon fostered healing, dialogue, and community connection.
This was more than just a listening session, the event, in partnership with Reparations Media, was a deeply meaningful and necessary space where we connected the creators behind Change Agents, Our Ancestors Were Messy, and Weight For It with an audience that truly sees and values their work.
Link to Event Description
Enchúfate, LLC
La Villita: In Community Through Chaos began as a project involving the creation of a radio program and a zine. As our environment changed, with violence and fear invading our communities by immigration enforcement, our lives and the project changed.
We feel the fear our neighbors are experiencing. We feel the desperation, angst and sadness of those hiding in their homes. We see the effects as the once lively streets of La Villita are now shrouded in silence and mourning. It is terrifying and traumatizing.
However, we are also witness to a strong and supportive community of allies who have risen up to fight back, to resist and challenge this inhumane treatment. We hope this project continues so we can continue documenting all the stories yet unheard.
Stories:
PHOTO: From September 25, 2025 Edition of Chicago News Weekly
Cover, print edition of Inside Publications’ August 27 issue.
Inside Publications (Skyline, Inside-Booster, News-Star)
Homeless on Chicago’s North Side: Warm Welcome or Cold Shoulder?
Chicago’s Department of Housing announced in February it would spend at least $5.5 million, as part of a more than $14 million project, to convert the Diplomat Hotel, located at 5230 N. Lincoln Ave., into a non-congregant shelter to be named, “The Haven.” Along with exploring The Haven’s story, Inside Publications (Skyline, Inside-Booster, News-Star) reporter Jane Lawicki reached out to the City’s relevant departments, nearby residents, local shelters, and homeless individuals to learn more about the unhoused on Chicago’s North Side. The result were three articles and a photo essay focused on:
Plans and costs of transitioning the Diplomat Hotel into The Haven
What the North Side’s unhoused find difficult with existing shelters, challenges to public spaces due to homeless camps, and the benefits of non-congregant shelters
How redevelopment aggravates homelessness. A photo essay on our North Side’s unhoused neighbors.
The August 27 issues can be accessed on Inside Publications’ website.
Lumpen Radio and South Side Weekly (Collaboration)
The Memory Project is a hybrid radio and print series featuring the voices of longtime Chicagoans.
The Memory Project explores Chicago’s past, present, and future through an ongoing collection of oral histories and narratives with longtime Chicago residents. As the first collaboration between Lumpen
Radio and South Side Weekly, the series was designed to uplift community stories that often go
unheard, with a focus on multigenerational memory, place, and transformation.
Participants and hosts co-produced one-hour interviews featuring neighborhood knowledge-bearers and cultural figures. All episodes are broadcasted on Lumpen Radio, archived on Mixcloud, and are being transcribed for publication in an upcoming edition of South Side Weekly.
All episodes of The Memory Project are available on WLPN 105.5 FM and archived on Mixcloud.
Graphic by Lumpen Radio & South Side Weekly
Article, “Temperature Check on the Westside with Lawndale Christian Health Center CEO Dr. James Brooks”
Article, “Checking the temperature of the West Side environment with State Rep. La Shawn K. Ford”
The Temperature Check project gave North Lawndale Community News a chance to ask community residents from different backgrounds and perspectives on the what they thought the conditions of the Westside of Chicago are currently. In that process having our project being part of a larger alliance, CIMA, gave it a greater basis of importance.
Hearing the voices of diversity from seniors in the community, CEOs, to high school sports coaches gave way to also doing more of our community voices.
Link to view article online.
Print Article, “Temperature Check on the Westside with Lawndale Christian Health Center CEO Dr. James Brooks”
Image from Newsletter Article
Survey, Chicago’s Black Visual Artists Speak: A Pulse Check on Creativity and Community Pigment International’s latest artist survey, Temperature Check, done in partnership with and a grant from Public Narrative, reveals both the persistence and passion of Chicago’s Black visual arts community, even amid shifting cultural and economic tides.
Artists, collectors, and supporters shared firsthand reflections on the realities shaping their creative lives.
This snapshot underscores a vibrant but under-supported ecosystem—one sustained by community, creativity, and conviction. Chicago’s Black visual artists remain steadfast, redefining resilience through every brushstroke and idea.
Link to Newsletter Article
Survey, “Chicagoland Freelance Ecosystem Temperature Check”
The project involved developing and distributing two surveys to collect data on the content creation needs of Alliance Matters organizations and the needs of freelancers in the Chicago area. The surveys were developed and distributed in August 2025, with a presentation of the data report planned for September 2025
This project focuses on building community, which is one of the core pillars of Reparations Media. The needs of our freelancer and media organization networks must be reframed into quantifiable data with actionable steps to bridge the divide between what media organizations say they want and need from freelancers and equitable pay and support freelancers require from these media producers. Through the data, we learned that the broader media production ecosystem includes divergent industries such as medicine and technology, who are looking for journalists and media savvy creatives to produce well-researched materials with wide use and appeal.
Image of survey presentation by Reparations Media
Image by Respair Production & Media
Podcast, Quantum Entanglements
A new podcast from AirGo and Respair, about community fighting back against being poisoned, pushed out, and policed by a proposed new Quantum computer on the Southside of Chicago.
Over the four decades since the US Steel South Works steel mill shut its doors, the land it sat on has remained undeveloped as the surrounding communities heal from the physical, environmental, economic, and social wounds left behind by this industrial behemoth.
Now, a coalition of public and private power players from all levels of government and different sectors of industry is preparing to break ground on a "Quantum Campus"–a multi-billion dollar sprawling facility of next-generation technology and surveillance that could both release poisonous contamination and dismantle digital privacy around the globe.
As the next industrial revolution descends on a community still reeling from the destruction of deindustrialization, we talk with organizers and neighbors living alongside the site about how they're building power, demanding answers, making sense of the area’s history, and fighting for the ability to determine the future of their neighborhoods, livelihoods, and relationships to the land on which they live.
Third Coast Review, LLC
Series, The Art of Survival
Third Coast Review published a four-part series titled The Art of Survival about how small and
medium-size arts organizations in Chicago are managing post-Covid and during this difficult
period of government funding cuts and content restrictions and censorship.
Article Links:
Image of survey presentation by Reparations Media