MPR Community Engagement: Community Learning Exchange and Youth Media Makers

As a media organization with a public service mission, MPR needs to reflect the needs, faces and voices of the various communities of our state - not just those people who historically listened to us ' and be a resource for all Minnesotans.

The two proposed MPR Community Engagement projects are designed to help MPR better serve BIPOC audiences by building MPR's cultural fluency to serve new audiences authentically and also allowing us to support the development of the next generation of diverse media artists.

MPR's Community Engagement projects include:

' Community Learning Exchange:
This project includes two key convening series gathered by MPR to build relationship and inform content, with the intent of fostering connection and exchange within the communities we serve, and allowing community members to share what matters to them with us and each other to inform content within MPR News NorthStar Journey/North Star Journey Live. This work will grow cultural competency within both MPR and the broader community we serve.

The two series include: 1) Story Circles: story sharing spaces facilitated by MPR. Participants invited from across the state (metro and greater MN) to share together in a facilitated story circle on a specific topic,and 2) Roundtables: a series of roundtable community conversations that engage both Minnesota reporters and targeted cultural groups. Story circles will occur 6 times a year. Roundtables will occur in person and in collaboration with community partners and media makers quarterly.

Story Circles and Roundtables will recruit participants from greater Minnesota and the Twin Cities that have unique narratives to share that can only be found in their communities. We will work with the MPR Network Station managers to recruit from Greater Minnesota, community organizations and community media (Indigenous radio stations, LPFM radio stations and community radio stations).

These community conversations will work towards both improving the cultural competency of reporters, and supporting the understanding of how reporters and media play a role in creating and reinforcing problematic stereotypes and biases. An overarching goal of these events is to foster more accurate and appropriate representations of cultural groups in Minnesota.

' Youth Media Makers (aka Radio Camp): Youth Media Makers is a project for high school students volunteering, working, or mentoring by BIPOC community media groups, including LPFM stations. Up to 12 students each year will participate in a week-long summer media experiencein collaboration with ThreeSixty Journalism a program at the University of St. Thomas with a mission to develop BIPOC journalists of color, as well as at least one other community media partner. We will also partner with BIPOC Influencers and organizations in the metro and Greater Minnesota to recruit students statewide with a goal of having a mix of students. The content created by the participants will be shared on mpr.org and partner community media platforms such as radio, print and digital.

The central goals of the Youth Media Makers project are to: 1) Support youth in telling stories and reporting on their communities and the issues that matter to them and their peers and 2) Meaningfully contribute to exposing young media makers to journalism process, content creation and storytelling.

Together MPR's Community Engagement projects seek to build trust and authentically serve new, diverse audiences, particularly BIPOC Minnesotans, and to highlight absent narratives ' stories about and for their communities and the issues that matter to them. In order to serve all Minnesotans, we need to reflect their voices, concerns and needs through our programming.