Our goal for this week was to finalize our group’s mission objectives so a detailed outline of our media project could be produced. Our mission is to give voice to the Regent Park Community and larger Toronto, and create a space for the community to speak out about safety issues that matter to them. We aim to amplify community voices (literally), as we plan to invite the larger community to participate in our radio and podcast work. Given that policing and safety affects Regent Park but also extended neighborhoods of Toronto, we want to give people from all communities in Toronto the ability to participate.
The struggle this week was narrowing down what to talk about. Safety and policing as a topic is itself quite broad. The original plan was to have a weekly radio show running, each episode highlighting a particular subset of safety and policing. Examples of this included carding, gun violence, or drugs. However given the timeline and constraints of the class, multiple episodes (each with a different topic) might not be feasible. We will instead be working on a pilot podcast episode focusing on a single topic, with potential to include more topics in additional episodes at a later point.
Time and availability were the main factors in the scope reduction of our project. Personal availability affects ability to personally produce and organize content. Furthermore, issues of radio time slot availability had affected options for broadcasting our show. In addition, the issue of maintaining permission to broadcast given content. As a result, we will focus on creating a podcast or pre-recorded radio show if live broadcast is not a feasible option.
As we work to make our project more concise, we must make critical decisions on which topics to touch on. Discussing a plethora of content as originally planned might no longer be a realistic option. But this makes the topics we do discuss even more important. We decided that an issue that is particularly prevalent both in Regent Park and Toronto at large is the problem of gangs and gang violence.
Given that we want to amplify the voices that already exist in the community, it is important to consider which stakeholders exist here. Community engagement and involvement is particularly important to us. To begin discussions on gangs and gang violence in the neighborhood, we are interested in hearing about personal experiences from those living in the neighborhood. These personal experiences can ideally be recorded in the form of interviews to feature on our podcast.
We invite the Regent Park community and other stakeholders to become involved in our discussion of gang violence in Regent Park and greater Toronto. This week, however, we came up with some options of particular individuals to contact regarding the matter. We are particularly interested in musicians in the community and their experiences with gang violence. These individuals, rappers mainly, are already producing content on issues that matter to them. We hope the interviewing process could help to collaboratively discuss and address issues of safety in the neighborhood pertaining to gang violence. A wider audience could hopefully be reached by including these stakeholders and the process could be mutually beneficial.
Our goals going forward are then to contact possible participants and consider what kinds of questions we want to ask them and the community at large. We will want to do further research on current and past gang issues in the community to gain further insights on what we want to discuss.
Thankfully we have secured much of the required equipment for our project production. We have a central location to meet with potential interviewees (Regent Park Focus). At Regent Park Focus we also have a quiet space and the required equipment to record interviews.
We are excited to begin collecting stories from the community, and presenting them to you. Stay tuned!
Our Podcast/Radio Show Theme Song
The On Air Police is comprised of Faduma Hagi, Anita Ifeadi, and Katie Glancy.