Covering Complexity

By: Martha Jack
As all of my colleagues can attest, reporting on a community like Regent Park is not easy going. Try reporting on it rarely going into the community though, and you come up against a brick wall.

This entire semester, I have been laid up with a busted ankle, so I have had to do most of my reporting on the phone or through email. Despite my persistence, I have been met with unreturned phone calls and emails and promises of interviews that never come through. While for me this makes a difficult situation worse, I really can’t say that I blame them.

For a community that is so complex, the residents and those who are working to help the area seem to recognize that to understand the community, you really need to talk to people on the streets and listen to their concerns. While the city can publish a million reports about the status of Regent Park’s citizens, the numbers and facts don’t make complete sense until you see the conditions people are living in and hear about their day-to-day lives.

On some level, the non-journalist part of me was happy that community workers didn’t have the time to speak to me. There are so many people giving their all to help out Regent Park, and at so many of these poorly-funded organizations, it becomes an all-encompassing endeavour. I was glad not to take time away from the work that so badly needs done.

On the other hand, the journalist in me wanted to be able to tell all these great stories about the amazing work people were doing, and to try and sort out the issues. I hope the community can overcome the negative press they have received in the past and trust journalists to tell their stories.

On an unrelated note, last week I went to hear former U.S. president Bill Clinton speak. Although he was speaking about the world as a whole, I felt like his entire speech could have been just about Regent Park.

Clinton said that the three biggest threats to the world in the 21st century were poverty, identifying on ethnic grounds instead of on our common humanity, and the sustainability of the planet – all issues in Regent Park. As I listened to him, it made Regent Park seem like a microcosm of the entire planet.

He talked specifically about how Toronto has one of the largest amounts of public housing in the world, and should step up to ensure that the new housing being built is environmentally sustainable. He mentioned green roofs, solar panelling and environmentally-friendly lighting as initiatives that will not only help the environment, but lower costs and provide employment.

Seems like a good place to start.