In 2021, reporter Jessica Meszaros started collaborating with a local group to get the voices of farmworkers on how climate change is affecting them. She told us about how the project evolved and how they brought the work back to the community.

Since the summer of 2021, Blue Ridge Public Radio in Asheville, North Carolina has been working to connect with younger audiences in the region. BPR’s Director of Content Catherine Komp told us how their work came together and what’s coming next.

In a series of essays by and for Spanish speakers, they’ve been able to share stories that reflect the heart of the Latinx community in Northern Illinois. News Director Jenna Dooley tells us how the project came together and how it fits with the rest of their Spanish language initiatives.

When legislation started passing in Oklahoma that impacted students, the team at KOSU noticed that they hadn’t actually heard from those students. They set out to get their perspective, and the project has grown into an ongoing series that will extend through the 2022 midterm elections. They told us how the stories came together and what they’ve learned so far.

The team at WNIJ in northern Illinois has been addressing information needs for its Spanish speaking audience through a new digital community called Hola. Using its grant from America Amplified, WNIJ has been able to hire folks to help translate its content into Spanish. Northern Public Radio’s News Director Jenna Dooley shares these insights into her station’s work.

For hundreds of years, Filipinos have made their marks in communities across Alaska but have largely been excluded from its history — and especially in news media. KTOO is changing that.

Decibel is the community-led journalism project at Austin PBS in Texas. The team has set out to amplify diverse voices through listening sessions and in-depth reporting that addresses communities information needs. Most recently, Decibel released its Del Valle Resource Guide after spending nearly a year in the community. Decibel’s Executive Editor Samantha Guzman explains how her team worked to address this community’s information needs.

Music is at the heart of the city of New Orleans, and now it’s at the heart of their public radio station’s engagement strategy, too. Inspired by the podcast Song Exploder, producer Alana Schreiber is bringing musicians into the studio to break down one of their songs. She told us how that process has made her a better listener and how she envisions the city’s music scene as a gateway to building a stronger relationship with between WWNO and the community.

We talked to energy and environment reporter Rachel McDevitt about how she used the texting platform Subtext to crowdsource questions for her recent story: Driving an EV in Pennsylvania: range anxiety, charging and maintenance.

For the past few months, Tampa’s WUSF Public Media has been partnering with local Black media groups to better serve the Black community in the Tampa Bay area. Multimedia reporter Daylina Miller shares how the station built these partnerships, how they’ve worked and what they hope to do together moving forward.

For the past few months, Kentucky-based reporter Katie Myers has been covering labor movements in Appalachia, culminating in a three-part series focused on West Virginia. She told us about how this reporting came together, and how she hopes to use what she learned in the process to tell stories in Eastern Kentucky.

Since late last year, Adam Rayes at KUNC in Greeley, Colorado has been working to reach people in eastern part of his state. We asked Adam to tell us how he built trust among ranchers who are facing dwindling water supply in this rural community, and how his engagement informed the three-part series he wrapped in January.

Sarah Alvarez started in civil rights law before becoming a senior producer and reporter for Michigan Radio, the Ann Arbor-based NPR affiliate. Believing that journalism is a service that should be responsive to the needs of all, Alvarez wanted to find a way to fill the information and accountability gaps in communities where those things are needed the most, typically low-income neighborhoods.

Public radio stations produce a ton of local content on a wide range of platforms: news features, digital stories, videos, talk shows, newscasts, announcer breaks, promos. But it’s difficult to actually listen and read in real time to evaluate how well we are serving communities. News directors and other managers may carve out time to evaluate the work, but we really need more diverse observations to continually improve.

Ed Mahon, now with Spotlight PA, was a legislative reporter for WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a partner station of America Amplified. His 2020 community engagement work centered around being embedded in Erie, a city in the northwest corner of the state.

Cara Williams Fry has been the Chief Content Officer at WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, since 2010. WITF has a unique and successful culture of community engagement journalism.

Ariel Worthy, a reporter for WESA in Pittsburgh, spent 2020 as one of StateImpact Pennsylvania’s embedded journalists as part of the America Amplified initiative.

Brittani Howell is the community engagement specialist for Side Effects Public Media. She leads various community engagement efforts, from texting exchanges to hosting events. She shared this workflow with us.

Celia Llopis-Jepsen is a reporter for the Kansas News Service, covering health issues from a consumer perspective, as well as state education policy. She previously worked at the Taipei Times and Topeka Capital-Journal, and brings in-depth experience covering schools.

Jeff Young is the managing editor of Ohio Valley ReSource. He is an award-winning journalist and has reported from Appalachian coalfields, Capitol Hill, and New England’s coast, among other places. His book, “Appalachian Fall: Dispatches from Coal Country on What's Ailing America,” was released in August 2020.