We’re almost at the finish line! This week, our team successfully recorded a portion of our podcast and is now working on editing it! Moreover, we began laying out our ideas for our draft article! Although we initially faced some challenges with creating an overall narrative, we are confident in our ideas for both.
Getting the podcast started wasn’t as easy as we thought–we were unsure how to approach it. As a team, we decided to record a mock interview with Patricia and Elena, the residents in our group, but after recording, we realized that the podcast was missing lots of the nuance we gained from our interviews with other entrepreneurs around Regent Park. After speaking with Dr. Mehta, we realized we should use those interviews and add them to our podcast! Since the overarching goal of our project is to highlight the voices of Regent Park’s local entrepreneurs and inspire Regent Park residents and visitors to frequent these businesses, we decided that, moving forward, we will edit our podcast to include clips from our interviews and use our voices to narrate their stories, this way we can tell their stories more fully. Once we understood our audience, it made sense to shift our ideas to meet our goal of promoting Regent Park entrepreneurs and highlighting their struggles due to the redevelopment.
While we are reworking our podcast, we will still use clips from our initial recording. Check out a clip here:
On top of our podcast, our team is creating a piece of long-form journalism. Again, the goal of our project is to showcase Regent Park entrepreneurs and highlight their experiences with the redevelopment, which hindered their ability to thrive in Regent Park. We began working on our layout and draft this week with this goal in mind. To start, we decided it would be best to provide background information on the redevelopment of Regent Park and, in tandem, the stigmatization that plagued it. As a group, we realized it was important to highlight this stigmatization to prove that the media primarily created it and that, despite it, many businesses could thrive.
Next, we will dive into Elena’s interview to explain how the actors in charge of the redevelopment have made an action plan to combat the negative results of the redevelopment and the displacement it caused on the local economy of Regent Park. Using Elena’s interview, we want to highlight the positive aspects of the Social Development Plan (SDP) and Economic and Employment Development Plan (EED). Highlighting this is important since the SDP/EED have genuinely helped many entrepreneurs and residents; we do not want to overlook this and frame the redevelopment as entirely negative.
After this, we’ll feature the entrepreneurs we interviewed. We were lucky enough to interview entrepreneurs with different experience levels and different experiences living in or around Regent Park. We want to highlight these stories because we believe that despite the SDP and EED, much work still needs to be done to rebuild the economic fabric of Regent post-redevelopment. We will group our interviewees based on their answers to our questions. For example, Mo from Mo’s Milkshakes and More highlighted some of the same struggles that Patricia brought. We want our audience to understand that these struggles are not unique to one entrepreneur. We also want to highlight their successes so our audience feels inspired to support these businesses—not out of pity but because they want to see them succeed.
Below is a sneak peek of our journalism piece from our draft:
Local entrepreneurs have various perspectives on the redevelopment. Resident Mohammad of Mo’s Milshakes and More has worked with food his whole life. Inspired by his mother’s cooking, Mo is passionate about his business…While Mo is happy he can set up shop in the newly built Carousel Cafe inside the Daniels Spectrum building, he also mentioned that rent prices for other spaces have skyrocketed. This is along with steadily increasing grocery prices across the nation. Moreover, Mo mentioned that competition has increased since larger businesses entered the Regent Park area, making it harder to stay afloat… Many other local entrepreneurs cite struggles similar to those faced by Mo. Patricia Richards, Corner Shop Chronicles member and Regent Park resident of over twenty years, has just begun her entrepreneurial journey, turning her passions into her livelihood… Echoing the struggles faced by Mo, Patricia mentioned to us that she wishes there were more spaces for entrepreneurs in Regent Park. She proposed a year-long space for entrepreneurs to establish themselves and sell their products to community members…
Finally, our team is also making an interactive “treasure map.” The goal behind the map is to inspire Regent residents to visit the businesses we highlight in our podcast/writing. We plan on making some cards with a QR link to our written piece and podcast and a small prize for residents who visit our table and interact with our map during the final showcase on April 10th.
The Corner Shop Chronicles Team Members are: Elena, Patricia, Jake and Shreya