COLUMBIA
JOURNALISM
REVIEW
SPRING
2021:
F even
M erid 2 6
As I See It Atlanta’s Canopy project brings the community in
W by Feven Merid Photographs by Aboubacar Kante
hen Kamille Whittaker began working on Canopy, a journalism project in Atlanta, she thought of something she’d studied during her undergraduate days, at Howard University: Mbongi, a Congolese learning practice. The idea of Mbongi was to “gather around and talk about ideas, but nobody was the teacher or the student; everybody was contributing,” Whittaker said. She thinks of it as a space with no walls. The ethos of Mbongi guided Whittaker, who is Canopy’s fellowship director, as she reached out to six community members—most of whom had no formal journalism experience— inviting them to take part in a paid fellowship program that would pair them with a mentor to help them report the stories they wanted to tell. “Canopy started to form around this idea that there are communities that needed local journalism,” Max Blau, a journalist and one of Canopy’s founders, said. Blau had observed how, in parts of Atlanta that lacked formally trained reporters, people were already disseminating information on an informal basis. “With a bit more training in terms of skill sets,” he figured, “we’d be able to help them advance the work they’re already doing that is journalistic in nature.” Starting in July, as the pandemic raged, Canopy had its fellows and mentors meet virtually, over six weeks of workshops on research, interviewing, and narrative writing. The West End—the neighborhood of Atlanta in which the contributors lived—was to be the focus of the inaugural issue. With guidance from local residents and contributions from professional journalists, Canopy’s West End Issue debuted in October. Stories covered everything from the community’s arts scene in the days of COVID-19 to its rich urban farming tradition and highway “water boys.” “It goes back to that idea of: Why don’t we stop trying to write around communities?” Gavin Godfrey, the issue’s editor and an Atlanta-based journalist, said. “Why don’t we just let the community tell these stories?”
