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Omaha Documenters / Omaha Institute for Nonprofit Journalism
4734 S 27 St, Ste. 1A Omaha, NE/. 68207
PO Box 7360 Omaha, NE. 68107
https://www.oinj.org/omaha-documenters
Abbie Kretz
Director
abbie@omahadocumenters.org
+1 (402) 630-6695
Yes
The team is currently led by it director, Abbie Kretz. Ms. Kretz is a bilingual white woman who has worked with and can move across different diverse groups, especially immigrants and refugees. She has more than 12 years of experience protecting workers rights, building neighborhood leaders and driving large increases in voter participation in South and North Omaha. As we recruit Documenters in the coming months and hire a PTE in 2023, we will ensure these hires reflect the demographics of the community. For us, however, it is not just about recruiting people from diverse backgrounds, but ensuring they are equipped to be successful in their roles. Hence, we will provide individualized training, offer fair rates of pay, and offer opportunities for professional development. Omaha Documenters is also overseen by the board of the Omaha Institute of Nonprofit Journalism and the Documenters advisory board.
See attachment
In order to launch Omaha Documenters, we’ve built a centralized hub for public meeting data in Omaha and Douglas County. Historically, residents would need to visit multiple websites to find information like meeting agendas and minutes. On Documenters.org, any Omaha resident can find out which public meetings are happening this week and any relevant information shared by those agencies.
Omaha Documenters
1656900.0
990000.0
Service/program
LB 1024 is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help our communities, historically underserved and discouraged from active participation in the civic process through a number of barriers. This proposal extends that opportunity by training, hiring and engaging community members to document our public meetings, building engagement from these same communities in our local, legislative processes. This is a unique, equity-first investment that secures LB 1024's down payment for future generations. Whether it's public health, infrastructure, workforce, education or almost any other opportunity, if it touches government, this proposal helps ensure our communities are in the room when decisions are being made. Omaha Documenters trains and pays people to attend critical public meetings at the city and county levels and to share those results. We publish our reports online and collaborate with community media partners -- from community media like El Perico and 1st Sky Omaha -- to more established media like local newspaper and television -- to disseminate information using a variety of tactics and in different languages. By documenting what is happening in local government, Omaha Documenters supports the work of essential employees, who are mostly unable to attend these meetings. Omaha Documenters also offers flexible employment and training opportunities to anyone interested in learning and participating. Out of over 100 applicants, Omaha Documenters -- along with Atlanta and Fresno -- is in the first expansion cohort of Documenters.org, founded by the community lab City Bureau in Chicago. We will be working with other Documenters programs in a community of practice that includes these cities, as well as Detroit, Cleveland and Minneapolis. Our office is currently located in South Omaha, although we are looking for a space between North and South Omaha and on the bus line. Our program started in July 2022 and we plan to begin to document and publicize meetings in November 2022. We anticipate following at least five public agencies with ten Documenters to start, increasing the number of meetings we document as we hire and train more community members.
Omaha Documenters started in July 2022. We are training and hiring Documenters in October 2022 who are beginning to document meetings in October 2022. Our team will be small to start (approximately ten people) in order to learn and grow intentionally. We will offer orientations every three months in the first year to recruit more Documenters and cover more meetings. By the summer of 2023, we are planning to hire a .5 FTE in the role of community organizer or civic producer.
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Fundamental Change (i.e., a proposal that will continue to elevate North or South Omaha's presence and perception within the region, significantly improving the lives of area residents through physical development) Long-Lasting Economic Growth (i.e., a proposal that will foster gainful employment opportunities and financial investment in the area, leading to the creation of generational wealth and widespread economic vitality in North and South Omaha) Transformational (i.e., a proposal that will help energize, recharge, or spur significant and favorable advancements in North or South Omaha's function or appearance)
Multimodal Transportation (i.e., enable connectivity through driving, biking, taking transit, walking, and rolling) Other Infrastructure (i.e., develop or improve broadband, business districts, roadways, sewer, etc.) Policy (i.e., develop or improve context-sensitive education, finance, health, training, zoning, etc.) Quality of Life (i.e., create or enhance natural spaces, mixed uses, parks, safety, etc.) Sustainable Community (i.e., create or enhance housing, services, education, civic uses, recreation, etc.)
Local government bodies hold dozens of public meetings each month. The vast majority receive no media coverage, produce minimal records, and have no community engagement. The Documenters Network addresses a fundamental challenge in building a just and inclusive society: public meetings are workshops for democracy, where local policy is shaped, and where residents can witness, learn about, and act on the systems that impact their lives; yet every day, in municipalities across the country, many government meetings happen with little to no oversight or input from the public. Although transparent by law, in practice public meetings can be hard to find and difficult to follow without context—and as local newsroom capacity has diminished, the reporters who previously interpreted for the public are disappearing. These unobserved meetings are a point of failure for our civic information system and a critical missed opportunity for genuine democracy. Government is the foundation and very definition of how we serve community needs. Decisions about sustainability, multimodal and accessible transportation, infrastructure like streets and sewers, easements for broadband, public utilities, business districts, parks, public safety and policy are decided and funded in local government meetings, historically to the detriment of our communities. The largest local news outlets rarely provided actionable information for historically underserved communities, but the dramatic cuts in local news have only further negatively affected public engagement. Fewer Omahans today have a strong understanding of what happens in the city and county, leading to mistrust of and a decreased interest to actually participate in these public institutions. In Omaha, the ability of “regular citizens” to attend public meetings is nearly impossible with many happening during working hours. Working-class Omahans need to know what happens at local public meetings, but are prevented from attending because of the way these meetings are structured and scheduled. For many Omahans, the systems of local government are opaque and inaccessible. To address these issues, Omaha Documenters trains and pays local residents to attend and annotate local public meetings, turning the knowledge, relationships, and capacity of local residents into a powerful community information resource. The Documenters Network dramatically increases local journalism capacity while simultaneously creating points of access for anyone to participate in the process of producing civic media. Documenters is a proven civic journalism and engagement model active in seven cities nationwide where content is freely available to all local media and the public. This approach specifically addresses the policy needs of education, health, and residential/zoning identified in the visioning workshops. However, policy development also plays a role in the other needs identified - sustainable communities, transportation, infrastructure, and quality of life needs. By regularly attending public meetings, annotating the proceedings, creating useful and clear content, and disseminating it, Documenters make local government clearer and more accessible, leading to increased engagement and trust in these institutions.
The visioning workshops identified three key findings to improve community outcomes in Omaha. Insufficient infrastructure Development that fits within the cultural context Access and tools to leverage community resources Local government bodies discuss and decide key development and infrastructure decisions at public meetings that receive limited public participation and oversight. They can check the box and move on. By training and paying Omaha residents to produce an accessible and reliable public record of these vital civic decisions, we’ll open up the civic process to hundreds of community members over the next three years, representing tens of thousands of residents. Our community is rich with resources, innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. By connecting community members with tools and knowledge of how to navigate local government, our democracy will better reflect the cultural context of Omaha and allow residents to efficiently access local resources.
Without trained, independent observers and journalists attending local meetings, it can be difficult to actually know what is happening at the local level. The absence allows the connected and well-funded to disparately impact policy decisions and creates fertile grounds for misinformation and disinformation, feeding a national crisis in civic trust, conversations and engagement, that in the case of a pandemic and urgent public health measures, can be life threatening. But by training and paying local residents to follow public meetings, Omaha Documenters will be able to help quell this misinformation. We will provide information on what the city and county are doing to address housing needs, assistance for small businesses, job training, and business development to residents in North and South Omaha. We’ll partner with local media outlets to publicize our work and use social media, but we will also partner with other organizations and entities to inform their clients and constituents.
In year 1, we will add another regular part-time staff member, along with 20 part-time/temporary Documenters.
Three (we already have one)
Over the three year period, we anticipate 80 temporary jobs being created. Some of these individuals may, however, may become regular part-time workers, particularly if they cover certain agencies and meetings on a regular basis.
Omaha Documenters will start off paying $15/hour for temporary workers in year 1, with potential to raise this to $16/hour in Year 2. For FTEs, wages will range from $45,000-$55,000.
We anticipate partnering with local businesses and organizations in and serving residents in the Qualified Census Tracts. This can include recruiting Documenters and providing them with information we receive from public meetings that could potentially benefit their businesses, but by following project requirements and contract awards in public meetings, also helps ensure that minority contractor requirements are truly being fulfilled and not being gamed with tokenism.
Omahans do not know what is going on in local government, while every year the city is spending $1.35 billion, the county is spending approximately $400 million, our school districts and public utilities are spending even more. Based on the findings in the visioning sessions, they expressed that the infrastructure is poor, and they do not know how to access tools and resources, or understand the development process to improve local lived conditions. Documenters are a resource for creating critical local information for people from the grassroots level to the wider community and engaging our communities in the decisions that spend the nearly $2 billion allocated annually by local government entities.That spending is critical to diversifying our economy, improving local neighborhoods and increasing livability.
Documenters contributes to a larger sense of belonging in Omaha. People in Omaha want to contribute, but oftentimes they do not know how because they don’t understand how local government systems work or where their time and skills can be most useful in local development processes. By opening up the government process, Documenters allows residents to navigate local civic systems and learn from other cities in the Documenters Network.
Omaha Documenters is part of the national Documenters network, launched in 2018 by City Bureau of Chicago. Out of 100 applicants, Omaha was selected as a member of the first cohort of cities in the national expansion of the Network. Across the country, the Documenters Network has trained more than 2,000 residents to Document more than 3,500 local public meetings. The Documenters Network was just recognized for its innovations with a $10 million Stronger Democracy Award, demonstrating excellence in civic engagement and local journalism. Journalism skills are civic skills and Documenters is a nationally recognized example of participatory civic media. By connecting workforce development with civic media, Documenters radically reimagines the role of local participation in civic life.
We’ll be monitoring the following quantitative and qualitative outcomes: # of individuals trained who Document meetings; # equipped with information and interested in learning more (nonprofits, community groups, etc.); # of community/listening education events; # of media outlets/articles that reference our work; # of actions that happen as a result of our work; # of local public meetings coming into compliance with open meeting laws; Types of skills and knowledge Documenters gain
As part of the Documenters Network, City Bureau provides real-time dashboards (disaggregated by race and gender identification) tracking these Key Performance Indicators. This includes program satisfaction and skill development surveys every four months. Documenter staff will also be in regular contact with Documenters to assess what is working well and what needs improvement. This is also a space for staff to better understand the skills and knowledge Documenters are learning through the program and how it is helping them.
No
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For this program, we work directly with The Reader and other media outlets, such as 1st Sky Omaha, Omaha Star, Mundo Latino, El Perico, Flatwater Free Press, Omaha World Herald, KETV, WOWT, KM3, Telemundo, University of Omaha Journalism Program/The Gateway, Creighton University Journalism Department and Nebraska Examiner. We will also partner with community-based organizations in North and South Omaha who have a direct connection to community members. Thus far, we have spoken with the following organizations: Heart Ministry Center, Heartland Workers Center, Girls Inc of Omaha, Elevate Omaha, South Omaha Neighborhood Association, and Step Up Omaha.
None at this time, but all of the local media organizations are serving or seeking a representative for our Omaha Documenters Advisory Board.
No
Currently, Omaha Documenters is housed at 4734 S. 27th Street in South Omaha. However, we are looking for a more central office between North and South Omaha and near a bus line to better serve both communities. To increase the accessibility of our programs, Omahans are able to participate remotely from their homes.
Within one or more QCTs
The amount requested will be used to cover payroll expenses and Documenters wages for the last 6 months of 2023, all of 2024 and 2025, and the first 6 months of 2026.
The amount requested will be used to cover payroll expenses and Documenters wages for the last 6 months of 2023, all of 2024 and 2025, and the first 6 months of 2026.
No
Omaha Documenters is requesting funding for salaries and wages. Therefore, we will fundraise to cover other expenses during. Funding from 1024 ARPA funding will allow us to build and grow the program. Therefore, we will fundraise for other expenses so it can continue after this grant period.
We are currently seeking funding for Omaha Documenters from local foundations and individual donors and exploring potential national funders next year. We are also brainstorming different services and programs we can offer to media and nonprofit partners as a way to generate revenue to support the program, in collaboration with Documenters programs in the six other cities.
Weitz Family Foundation - $200,000 - pending - notification by December 2022.
The program is designed to grow on an incremental basis. We will add more people once they are trained and we have learned how to do the work well. While this program is in six other comparable cities, we want to ensure our approach matches the needs and desires of Omaha.
Our budget reflects this growth, particularly as we add staff and Documenters over the next three years.
At this time, Omaha Documenters has $20,000 committed for 2023 from the Sherwood Foundation. We are currently fundraising to complete the rest of the 2023 budget.
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Organizational Chart Pro Forma Proposal Budget/Sources and Uses