The Community Journalism Innovation Lab is NNB’s transformative action hub. In here, community members, graduate, undergraduate and K-12 students, faculty members and professionals come together to create community-based projects to improve information creation, production, collection, and distribution in different types of communities.

The process is simple: anyone can identify an opportunity for collaborating and bring the idea to NNB’s CJIL. Together, we will determine how to move the idea forward and identify who are the people who can help. Ideas can be communication projects, problems that need solutions, solutions to existing problems, technical or academic questions that need answers, answers that need to reach specific audiences, and so forth.

The goal is to bring people in the community together to create something new and, we hope, transformative to the community. The process is done with the community for the community, and it is owned by the community. In this way, the community is empowered by its own work and the benefits stay with the community.

We have been working with local filmmakers, investigative journalists, activists, educators and citizen journalists who work to bring the historic African-American neighborhoods of south St. Petersburg to the forefront of the discussion about the future of the city. We provide production support, media expertise, investigative reporting, research, networking and training to anyone in the community looking to make a difference and tell the stories of South St. Petersburg.