My Experience as a Community Reporter
by Beanica Tripoli
This blog was written by guest writer Beanica Tripoli as part of our place-based organising work and community reporting project in Brent.
As a Politics & International Relations master’s student who has always been passionate about social justice, it has been a privilege to work as a Brent Community Reporter with the Equality Trust. I’ve loved collaborating with people from a variety of backgrounds, especially when our ideas end up converging from completely different angles.
Our training proved to be a great exercise on determining how we wanted to conduct our investigation on the lived experiences of inequality in Brent. We wanted our research questions to begin with what made our storytellers happy, rather than focusing only on the problems they faced. So, when we drafted our interview questions, we began with:
“What do you love about Brent?”
We found that people could be more comfortable voicing their issues when we framed things more positively. To understand what our storytellers envisioned for the future, we asked, “How can positive changes to your life and the lives of others be made in Brent?”
I also had the chance to reconnect with friends and delve deeper into their experiences as my storytellers. I captured some nostalgic accounts of how Brent used to be, and a lot of frustration over how it is now.
After compiling our interviews, it was time to identify repeated ideas to create key themes. We cut out transcripts of our interviews and physically sorted them into categories, like a cut-and-paste game of thematic analysis. It was interesting to debate how different experiences could all fit into overarching themes…
Why is “placemaking” a threat
to existing community spaces?
Do issues with public transport come under
themes of ‘local government’ or ‘mobility’?
Who can benefit from
the work we are doing?
What emotions are being
conveyed by our storytellers?
The last phase of our project has been a major collaborative effort to finalise the outcome we want from our research and the impact we want to leave on Brent. We agreed that a film would be the perfect outlet to showcase our storytellers’ narratives in a way that gives this project a continuous legacy.
Together we were able to shoot B-roll in our local area. I even got in front of the camera to play tennis for the first time, and I’ve also had the opportunity to help edit our film. I’ve learned so much from taking part in this project.
Nuggets of wisdom I’ve gained from my experience so far…
Overall, I’ve had a lot of fun, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to make a positive impact on my community. I’m excited for us to premiere our film this September and see where it takes us. My hopes for the future of this project this would be to share the film as far and wide as possible, increasing awareness and engagement with our storytellers’ voices, and maybe even extending this project to other boroughs in London!
“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
Audre Lorde, 1984 ‘Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches’
