Medill Solutions Journalism Hub and Solutions Journalism Network award five Flip the Frame Local Tour Grants
Journalism educators in Dallas, Memphis, Baltimore, Boston, and Paterson, New Jersey, will lead students through neighborhoods usually framed by what is wrong to find what those communities have built — and are still building.
EVANSTON, ILL. — The Medill Solutions Journalism Hub, in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN), today announced five Flip the Frame Local Tour Awards. The awards support journalism educators who lead students on guided tours of local neighborhoods, where they learn to report on communities and their responses to youth mental health and other challenges through their assets instead of their deficits. The recipients are:
- Annette Nevins, Southern Methodist University
- Anabella Poland, Montclair State University
- Chalise Macklin, University of Memphis
- Tina McDuffie, Boston University
- Celeste Headlee, Morgan State University
Each educator — fellows from the 2026 SJN/Medill Solutions Journalism Educators Academy — receives $1,200 toward guide honoraria, transportation, and related costs. The five tours cover neighborhoods in South Dallas; Klondike and Orange Mound in Memphis; Paterson, New Jersey; East Baltimore, Maryland; and historic Roxbury in Boston.
The grants grew out of Flip the Frame, the Hub's equity-framing curriculum developed by Medill Solutions Journalism Hub Director and Clinical Associate Prof. Deborah Douglas. It began with an academy tour of Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood led by urban historian Shermann "Dilla" Thomas who reminds us: "If it has a name, it has a history."
Learning a community’s aspirations and contributions first produces more authentic, contextual stories than those built exclusively on the knowledge of what has gone wrong in a community, especially those where residents have been systemically marginalized by social and government policies.
The outlook a community tour provides exposes storytellers, especially student-journalists, to residents’ on-the-ground perspectives about what they are doing to address pressing social problems, according to Medill Dean Charles Whitaker: “This approach doesn’t make a story softer: It makes it more accurate because it shows how much work a community is already doing that deficit coverage leaves out.”
The need for this type of experience is clear. When five educators in five cities were asked how news outlets portray their neighborhoods, everyone gave the same answer: crime and poverty.
“News outlets that tell communities only what's wrong with them lose those communities' trust,” according to Douglas, who notes that research bears this out. “When trust is lost, audiences disconnect from credible news and information sources. As an expression of Experiential Learning Theory (Kolb), these tours are meant to teach the next generation of reporters to lead with what a place has built.”
The tours will be completed by Dec. 31, 2026. Educators across the nation will be able to use each grantee's teaching module, with credit to its author. Open seats on each tour will be offered to faculty, staff, and community members.
About the Medill Solutions Journalism Hub
The Medill Solutions Journalism Hub at Northwestern University trains journalists, newsrooms and educators in solutions journalism, a framework for rigorous reporting on how people respond to social problems. The Hub is part of the Medill Local News Initiative and offers free training, coaching, and project support to news organizations thanks to support by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
About the Solutions Journalism Network
The Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) is an independent, nonpartisan nonprofit that leads a global shift in journalism toward rigorous reporting on how people are trying to solve problems, and what can be learned from their successes and failures. SJN was founded in 2013 and works with newsrooms, journalists, and educators around the world through training, curriculum, funding, and the Solutions Story Tracker, a searchable database of solutions stories.