Do you live in the Vine Neighborhood?

Do you like to write or aspire to being a writer?

Maybe you are good at observations. 

That’s what you need to be a community correspondent in the Vine Neighborhood.

A class for Vine residents is forming soon. The Community Correspondent Academy is part of the On the Ground project of Southwest Michigan’s Second Wave.

The On the Ground Kalamazoo team will train, equip, and mentor neighborhood contributors. The goal is to tell the previously untold stories that are taking place within your neighborhood and raise up resident voices as an important part of the work.

On the Ground Kalamazoo also sees this as an opportunity to engage residents in a meaningful way while laying the foundation for sustainable relationships between Second Wave and Kalamazoo neighborhoods.

On the Ground Kalamazoo will collaborate with neighborhood partners to select four residents to go through a series of four workshops that will teach the residents the basics of journalism and how to develop full-length feature content for the online publication.

Participants will be compensated for attending each of the workshops taught by Southwest Michigan’s Second Wave Managing Editor Kathy Jennings. 

To ensure that participants have the proper tools they need to do the work they will each receive a new Chromebook. 

They will also be paid for each article that is published in Southwest Michigan’s Second Wave online magazine at the same rate paid to professional journalists.

At the end of the workshop the community contributors will each produce a feature article for the On the Ground program that will be published in Southwest Michigan’s Second Wave. The goal is that after the workshop ends the contributors will continue writing stories for the
publication.

To apply follow this link or contact Southwest Michigan’s Second Wave at 269.366.9001 or send an email here.