Community Listening Project
As part of the Brookline community, you’ve no doubt noticed that over the last few years, the news landscape has shifted. These changes reflect national trends: as local newspapers die out, countless small towns and cities across the country are becoming news deserts. The data from news deserts is clear: they are less democratic, less able to hold public officials accountable and without rigorous local reporting, often vulnerable to systemic abuses of power. At BIG, we are committed to not letting that happen in Brookline.
Over the last year, we’ve been working on a new and important project that will be vital to the Brookline community and to the future of BIG. We’re excited to announce the launch and development of a new community news, information and dialogue platform, which we are calling Civic Brookline.
As we’ve been developing Civic Brookline over the last few months, we’ve been putting our ear to the ground as an organization and hope to gather feedback and hear from you about how BIG can better serve Brookline residents.
To help us develop this new community tool, we have joined in collaboration with Fora.io (previously Cortico.ai), an MIT affiliated non-profit research organization, to spark a community listening project. Their Local Voices Network (LVN) brings people together in recorded small-group conversations around their life experiences.
One thing we strongly believe: communities in Brookline are more connected than they often realize – which is why we hope to transparently share the insights people are giving us. We hope to provide these insights as a public resource to Brookline, through a portal in which other organizations, businesses, Town officials, and any Brookline resident can play with and explore.
This is why we believe it is crucial to co-design this platform together. And the first step in this process is a conversation.
