Bucket List Community Cafe

Bucket List Community Café is an online community journalism site for Denver. We have a unique niche at the intersection of community and journalism. Everyone has a story, and we build community by sharing our stories. We are North Denver’s home for information, inspiration, and interaction. We share news, issues, culture, events, people, pets, food, fun and more so that you can know what is happening on your street and across town. We are hyperlocal and strive to represent the diverse voices within our community.

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SUPPORT FROM COLORADO MEDIA PROJECT

Advancing Equity 2023; #newsCOneeds 2023, 2022, 2021

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $5,000 to support Bucket List Community Cafe in working to develop and offer a paid journalism scholarship program that provides mentorship and cohort support to BIPOC students.

2023 Advancing Equity Update: This digital start-up newsroom is currently hosting eight paid interns, three of whom are receiving additional scholarships supported by their CMP grant. Their internship cohort is over 35% BIPOC. As a start-up business with only one full-time staff member, their interns have found CPA’s Workforce Pathways/Internships Working Group to be a valuable additional source of training and mentorship. Their participation has helped CMP better understand the challenges facing small newsrooms hosting internship programs, and given them access to models of good organizational and internship program structures from other participating newsrooms.

Crestone Eagle Community Media

The Crestone Eagle serves rural Saguache County, including the towns of Crestone, Saguache and Center, Moffat, Villa Grove and La Garita, extending into the northern San Luis Valley. The Crestone Eagle is the primary information resource for the Crestone community and the greater Saguache County region. The Eagle reports on local, county and state government, and on federal actions that affect our region. It provides news analysis; health, emergency and public safety notices; relevant information about schools, education and community service; and notice of committee meetings and actions.

SUPPORT FROM COLORADO MEDIA PROJECT

Advancing Equity 2023; #newsCOneeds 2023, 2022, 2021

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $10,000 to increase coverage of and engagement with underrepresented demographics in the rural San Luis Valley, such as Latinx, indigenous, and youth populations. This is being achieved through partnerships with libraries, community leaders, and local community correspondents in regional communities in 2023. 

2023 Advancing Equity Update: The Crestone Eagle has hired ten new writers as a part of their regional reporting project, covering equity and inclusion, agriculture, water, and economic beats, as well as a Regional News Project Manager, who is coordinating their work and establishing local community partnerships with libraries, community centers, and schools across the San Luis Valley.

G.E.S. Gazette / Denver North Star

The G.E.S. Gazette is a new bilingual publication for the Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea neighborhoods and RiNo Art District. Each month, the G.E.S. Gazette brings news about local politics, community happenings, arts & culture, and more to residents. The G.E.S. Gazette is supported by its sister paper, the Denver North Star.

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SUPPORT FROM COLORADO MEDIA PROJECT

Advancing Equity 2023, 2022; #newsCOneeds 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $9,140 to expand the G.E.S. Gazette's ability to reach Spanish-speaking residents during the City's spring election cycle, through increased community engagement, a bilingual debate, and increased page counts.

2023 Advancing Equity Update: The majority of the Gazette’s grant project was focused around the Denver spring elections. Their planned bilingual debate for District 9 City Council was the best-attended across the city, and they were asked to host a second debate for the run-off, which was equally successful. Both community members and candidates were enthusiastic in their feedback on the quality of the debates. Building on the success of these events, the Gazette is working to formalize the personal relationships their editor established with community leaders into institutional relationships that will support their bilingual community engagement efforts moving forward. 

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2022 Advancing Equity Award: $6,000 to support the production of North Denver Latinx Stories, written by BIPOC authors from Globeville, Elyria, Swansea and North Denver, via collaboration between the Denver North Star and its newly-established sister paper, the G. E. S. Gazette.

2022 Advancing Equity Impact: This grant helped us ensure more Latino voices in both publications, which is important to ensure we are reflective of our communities. By including more local writers, we were able to include stories on topics we knew were important to the community. We looked at the impact of the pandemic on students, police and the community, and other issues identified by the writer. By providing funds for translation, it helped us create a fully bilingual second paper, even as translation costs exceeded our initial estimates.

KGNU Radio

KGNU is an independent, noncommercial community radio station that has served Denver and Boulder for over 40 years. We seek to stimulate, educate and entertain our audience, to reflect the diversity of the local and world community, and to provide a channel for individuals, groups, issues and music that have been overlooked, suppressed or under-represented by other media. The station seeks to expand the listening audience through the excellence of its programming without compromising the principles stated here.

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Support From colorado media project

Advancing Equity 2023, 2022; #newsCOneeds 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019

2023 Advancing Equity Award: $25,000 to support KGNU's paid journalism internship program that provides real-world training and mentorship to BIPOC students, and to participate in a peer-to-peer cohort that shares lessons from KGNU and other best-in-class models.

2023 Advancing Equity Update: KGNU’s summer internship program is up and running. The first two AELN-funded interns (Jinx and Por) were in the midst of onboarding in early June, joined by an RFA Reporter, two additional interns supported by Workforce Boulder County funding, and several volunteer high-school interns. Over the summer, both interns have been stand-out participants in CPA’s Workforce Pathways/Internships Working Group. By the end of the summer, they’ll be joined by two more AELN-funded interns, Ilvonne and Juanita, for the fall semester. KGNU has been a leader in exploring working with workforce development funding programs from both government agencies and public universities, documenting timing and schedule challenges that make engaging with CU Boulder’s Public Interest Internship Experience program difficult for their newsroom, and the benefits of having payroll for some interns administered through government workforce agencies.

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2022 Advancing Equity Award: $25,000 to provide paid internships to support emerging storytellers and journalists of diverse backgrounds from the various journalism and communications schools across the Colorado Front Range.

2022 Advancing Equity Impact: The paid news internship program has been an absolute game changer, allowing KGNU to attract young diverse talent that would not have been available to the station in a volunteer capacity. The paid interns filled roles from on-air hosting, to reporting, to headlines production in English and in Spanish, fund drive pitching, social media posting, digital editing, voice work, and more. They gained hard and soft skills during their internships providing them with the experience needed to enter the field of media successfully.

Hosting several paid interns at once in the News & Public Affairs Department helped create a core group that served as a magnet to attract others students. This also generated an important safe space where a sense of belonging, collegiality, and collective growth was key to their success and that of the program. Their energy was fantastic and created a fun and friendly atmosphere that other students eagerly volunteered to be a part of.

A greater impact of the internship program is its function in creating a pipeline of diverse talent ready to enter the media ecosystem. KGNU was happy to provide professional references and written letters of recommendation for several of the interns as they applied to other programs, jobs, and internships with one intern taking on a new internship at the Denver Post and another awaiting a final decision from Joe Neguse’s office for an opportunity to intern with the congressman.