The Loveever Blog

The folding chairs were already in rows when I got to the basement of Greater Mount Calvary Baptist Church on a Tuesday evening in late March. The radiator along the east wall ticked and hissed. Someone had set up a metal folding table near the back with a Mr. Coffee machine, a sleeve of Styrofoam… Continue reading What the Person Taking Minutes Knows That the Chair Does Not

Resilience gets talked about as a community’s ability to bounce back after a shock. But in the neighborhoods I’ve spent years watching, resilience rarely looks like a dramatic recovery. It looks like a neighbor who keeps a spare key for the elderly woman two doors down. It looks like a handwritten sign taped to a… Continue reading Why the Most Resilient Communities Are the Ones With the Strongest Informal Networks

There is a particular kind of meeting that happens in neighborhood halls and church basements, where a person with a clipboard and a grant proposal stands up and says, “We have a solution for your community.” The phrase itself is a small wound. It assumes the community is a problem to be solved, a blank… Continue reading The Problem With Outsiders Coming In With Solutions for Communities They Do Not Belong To

Local journalism doesn’t die in a single dramatic moment. It comes apart in the small, repeated choices made inside newsrooms: which meetings get covered, which beats get cut, which assignment editor is told to stop sending reporters to zoning board hearings because the clicks are too low. This is the informal infrastructure of local news—the… Continue reading How Local Journalism Dies One Assignment Editor at a Time

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a community meeting when someone pulls out a notebook. It is not always hostile. Sometimes it is curious, sometimes wary, sometimes simply tired. I have learned to sit with that silence before I write a single word. Because the meeting did not begin when I… Continue reading Why You Should Show Up to the Meeting Before You Write About the Meeting

I learned this the hard way, on a rainy Tuesday in a church basement that smelled of coffee and old carpet. I’d come to cover a neighborhood association meeting, notebook ready, expecting the kind of drama that writes itself—a zoning fight that had been simmering for months. But the showdown I’d penciled into my mental… Continue reading The Room Knows Who Was There: Why You Have to Sit in the Folding Chairs Before You Write a Word

The folding chair scraped against linoleum at 7:04 p.m., four minutes after the meeting was supposed to start. The fluorescent light above the far corner of St. Anselm’s Fellowship Hall buzzed at a frequency that made you aware of your own teeth. Ruth Okafor set down her legal pad, uncapped her pen — a specific… Continue reading What the Person Taking Minutes at Every Meeting Knows That the Chair Does Not

There’s a particular quiet that fills a community board meeting just before the gavel comes down. It’s not reverence. It’s the sound of people scanning an agenda, looking for the item that might upend their block, their permit, or their kid’s after-school program. I’ve spent years documenting the informal infrastructure of neighborhoods—the mutual aid networks,… Continue reading Why You Should Sit in the Folding Chair Before You Write About the Meeting

I learned this the hard way, sitting in a folding chair at my first neighborhood association meeting, notebook closed on my lap. I had come to write about the new traffic-calming proposal—speed humps on Maple Avenue. I’d read the city’s PDF, jotted down the stats, and planned a tidy little piece about safer streets. Then… Continue reading Why Showing Up Before You Write Changes the Story

I almost didn’t go. It was a Tuesday evening, the sky doing that soft grey thing that makes you want to stay home with a cup of tea and call it a night. But the flyer tacked to the corner store’s community board was oddly specific: “Traffic-calming measures on Oak Street, 7 p.m., library basement.”… Continue reading Why You Should Attend the Meeting Before You Write About It