It is clear today, and it was clear last week and last year: if we the people of the Americas want to preserve our democracies, repair those that are injured, and reclaim those we have lost, one of the many steps we must take is to find better ways to share what’s working to improve people’s lives.
We have to share this information among communities that rarely have time to get in touch with each other. Among socioeconomic groups that don’t talk very often. Across borders. Across regions. Across imaginary divisions we’ve maintained for years that no longer make sense.
No one country is a beacon or a city on a hill. People in every country are living well, and people in every country are suffering. We all have failures and successes to share, hard-won knowledge that can benefit others. As our friends at the Solutions Journalism Network like to say, “all learn, all teach.”
This work has always been important and undervalued. It is more urgent now than ever before. And from our vantage point at El Colectivo, a small newsroom in a small country at the center of the Americas, we can see so clearly that our region has as great a need and opportunity for this as any on the planet. We have so much to learn and so much to teach, if we can level the playing field and listen.
In some parts of the world, the Americas are presented to schoolchildren as two continents, north and south. In others, including Costa Rica, we’re taught that America is one single continent.
This is the time to embrace that second definition. We need each other.
Across our region, in places experiencing economic growth AND places ravaged by poverty, people of all kinds have figured out ways to address the dire human needs that drive so many election outcomes. As solutions journalists, we see it every day.
Under governments that address climate change AND under governments that deny it, communities have amassed tremendous knowledge about how to adapt to climate-related threats and disasters.
In countries that protect reproductive freedoms AND in countries that deny them, doctors and clinics and grassroots organizations have learned lessons about what keeps women safe.
In fully functioning democracies AND under authoritarian regimes, journalists have learned how to survive—and those in exile have so much to teach those whose threats are new or changing.
As misinformation rises everywhere, people are coming up with so many ways to combat it. Regional, national, or hyper-local. Simple and practical, or innovative and technology-driven. Their creative minds are building media and apps and lesson plans and communities that rebuild our relationship with the news, reconnect us with quality information, and educate us about how to distinguish fact from fiction.
On all of these topics and many others, we need to share these ideas and join forces.
Great minds think alike, but they don’t always communicate.It’s more urgent now than ever before that we do.
There are many ways that this can happen. We believe that solutions journalism—the rigorous investigation of responses to our problems, focused on what can be learned, strengthened, and scaled—is an essential part of that recipe.
We’re a Costa Rican media organization: journalist-owned, community-based, and woman-powered. We’ve spent four years studying what works in our own country. We’re now doing the same across our region through reporting grants and trainings. And we always have our eyes trained further afield as well, looking for good ideas studied by journalists elsewhere and asking, “Why not this?”
All of our content is independent, bilingual, and FREE, thanks to our donors and partners.
If you’re already tuned into solutions journalism, we’d love to join your regular rotation. If not, we invite you to try us out. (And since we’re part of a vibrant global movement, we can even help connect you with “SoJo” in your area.) Please follow, share, and subscribe to our bilingual weekly newsletter.
We’d love to welcome you… and to hear your voice. Amidst all that’s not working, what’s working where you are?
Or is today not the right time for that question? Are you coming up empty?
If so, when you’re ready, we’ve got a story for you.
Un abrazo fuerte,
Mónica Quesada Cordero, Costa Rican photojournalist
Katherine Stanley Obando, U.S. journalist
Co-Founders, El Colectivo 506
In solidarity with our colleagues around the world
