That is the question at the center of a new collaborative investigative reporting project in New Jersey.

The Center for Investigative Reporting, funded by a grant from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, will lead a large scale investigative reporting project that will help some Dodge grantees and other organizations bring issues they care about deeper into their communities. The $100,000, one year grant is Dodge's first to CIR. "But I expect this to be an ongoing partnership beyond just one year. I have high hopes for this grant and this work," Molly de Aguiar, program director for media grants at the Dodge Foundation, said in an email.

The initiative is aimed at both bringing some solution-oriented journalism to New Jersey and trying the kinds of creative storytelling approaches and engagement used by CIR to engage followers well beyond the printed word, explained de Aguiar in her posting to the Local News Lab.  

She cites, for example, the series of community engagement activities that CIR used to broaden the reach of its investigation last fall about harmful pesticides used by California strawberry growers (Dark Side of the Strawberry). In addition to publishing the series, CIR created an app for people to enter their zip codes to determine if chemicals were used near their homes. Post cards were mailed to people to let them know how to look up if they lived in a hotspot. CIR even commissioned a one-act play imagining a pregnant woman who lives and works near strawberry fields. The play was performed in San Francisco, Oxnard and Salinas in both English and Spanish.

The new CIR project is just beginning. Dodge is not funding CIR for the content of the reporting, “we have no stake or say in that," de Aguiar writes in Local News Lab. “Rather, this is an experiment on several levels that we’re eager to test and observe, including how to develop and shepherd a large collaborative project like this, nurturing better partnerships, and inviting more community participation around issues that they care about. Fundamentally, we want to explore the power of creative, meaningful community engagement: what impact it has on the community, on local news organizations, and on the nonprofits we fund across the state.”