1st Place, In-Depth Feature
2022-23, Division 3, News Writing
By Hannah Monville & Aidan O’Malley
Focus
Midland HS
Picking up trash. Donating to a charity. Meeting someone new. There are many ways to be a good neighbor, but how often are people intentional about it?
Alysia Christy, the director of Community Impact for the Midland Area Community Foundation, works with the Cultural Awareness Coalition on promoting a week dedicated to being a good neighbor.
Neighboring Week, held from Sept. 26 to Oct. 2, is a city-wide event hosted by the Midland Area Community Foundation and the Midland Cultural Awareness Coalition. Neighboring Week started in Midland about ten years ago with its roots in the faith- community. After years of this faith led tradition, there wasn’t as much engagement within different aspects of the community as the founders had hoped.
Education systems, businesses, and nonprofits had lost touch with Neighboring Week; so it disbanded for several years until it was picked up again by the Midland Cultural Awareness Coalition.
“Three years ago, the Cultural Awareness Coalition decided that Neighboring Week fits exactly in line with our vision of building an inclusive community,” Christy said. “So we took that and created intentionality around it again to not provide the direct request or requirement that organizations engage. But to instead share what Neighboring Week is, we want you to be aware of it and empowered to do something.”
The two groups invite the community to support Neighboring Week in their own way. Many organizations have become aware of Neighboring Week, and use the initiative to fulfill their personal mission statements while being a good neighbor.
“I would say about 80% of our own coffee shops have come together on their own,” Christy said. “It’s a really powerful example. Generally, like missioned businesses are naturally competing for customers and they could easily just each do their own thing around Neighboring Week and highlight their own efforts. But instead, they made this decision to come together and say, ‘let’s serve the community as a collective team'”.
Coffee shops aren’t the only organizations getting involved. Erin Patrice, the founder of a business podcast called Breaking Bread Village, is kicking off Neighboring Week this year by hosting the first annual “Celebrating You” awards ceremony. At this ceremony she celebrates people who have had a positive impact on our community. Last year for Neighboring Week, Patrice also started an event where she held live discussions between panelists to promote conversation within the community.
“I intentionally brought people that thought vastly different from each other,” Patrice said.
“What’s beautiful is the after moments of the show, these people want to connect and that’s how I know we are planting seeds and impacting. When you have people that are normally divided in thought, with different goals in life, and they want to sit down and have coffee to get to know each other more.”
In addition to the Breaking Bread Village, Patrice is part of the Midland Cultural Awareness Coalition, and has always been an involved member of the Midland community.
Through Neighboring Week, she is able to share her personal mission of spreading conversation to help connect and heal her community.
“As I learned the impact of conversation, that’s when I learned that it could be medicine,” Patrice said. “That’s when I realized that we could use this to bring people together.”
The idea behind Neighboring Week is to be a good neighbor, and many of its leaders believe that includes making intentional connections with different areas of our community.
Megan Murphy, the director of marketing at Live Oak, was excited for the chance to collaborate with other coffee shops during Neighboring Week.
“I’m so excited about it, we want all the businesses in Midland to get involved,” Murphy said. “We just want every single person to get involved, whether it be a small thing or a huge activity, raising money or anything like that.”
During Neighboring Week, there are a variety of activities for everyone to get involved in.
The Child Protection Agency is hosting an event to learn about their business while handing out brownies and bookmarks.
The Grace A. Dow library is hosting “Floats with Goats”, where they will have Faygo floats and a petting zoo. Ultimately, each different activity has the same goal of introducing people to their neighbors.
“Get to know people who think differently than you because you have got to get out of your own bubbles,” Patrice said. “Because that’s not real life. I tell kids, when you all graduate, and you go off to college, and then go off and get your job. Life is not just Midland, life is bigger than that. We have to make sure that we model that now and learn to usher in and bring in different people and different experiences.”
NW-11. In-Depth Feature
The entry should be a single story. Judges will not consider sidebars, infographics or other elements packaged with the story. The story must stand on its own. Entries should concern subjects of a substantive and contemporary nature and go beyond the surface facts, give the reader detailed background information with interpretation based upon the facts and background information and often (but not necessarily) an analysis as to its meaning. It is an elaboration of the WHY. Multiple sources are necessary. Submit a PDF of the print page(s) on which the story was published or the URL to the story on an online news site.
JUDGING CRITERIA
- Lead captures attention, arouses curiosity
- Topic relevant to interests and/or welfare of school or students
- Extensive, intensive and thorough investigation
- Effectively combines basics of good news and feature writing
- Effectively organized with smooth transitions; carefully outlined
- Sentences, paragraphs of varied length; written clearly, concisely and vividly
- Proper diction/grammar
- Balanced and fair presentation
- Story relies on information from primary sources gathered/interviewed directly by the journalist(s); general Internet sources and secondary media reports are used sparingly