In our LISTEN sessions last year, we asked for volunteers to continue to report on their communities. A grant gives us the opportunity to provide two of aspiring community journalists with training and professional editing. It also helps us better understand our neighbors.
Follow along each Friday through May with this J-Corps Audio Journal.
This week, team Rahman shares what it is like to secure interviews and shares a couple outtakes.
Amina Rahman: Hi, this is Amina Rahman and Hafsa Rahman is with me. We're here to update you on our journey to becoming citizen reporters with NPR Illinois. This week was exciting, I got to do a few interviews with community members. It was a little challenging to get them to come and be on the recorder, but we got a few of them.
We're getting some interest. It's really interesting portraits of people in the community and what makes them feel special about being Muslims in Springfield or the challenges they find. For example, we got John Cragoe who's grown up in Springfield. He became Muslim later on in life. One thing that is important to him is halal food, especially halal meat.
He's very passionate about educating people in the community about where they can find it, or how they can procure it, and what restaurants have it. He is so passionate about it that he is even trying to replicate recipes that he grew up with. Chili and how he replicated it with halal meat and how he's passing down that Springfield tradition of chili to other places in Illinois, like his family in Chicago.
Jon Cragoe: Because I'm a convert who takes halal food seriously, means that I had to personally re-engineer all of my favorite foods. It took me a while to recreate my version of Joe Rogers. My dad got his name on the wall at Joe Rogers back in the seventies. And I got on the wall in like 2006. Once I decided to start eating halal, I was like, "Okay, I need to figure out how to make (halal) chili like this."
Amina Rahman: I was just at the Capitol with some other members of the Muslim community (in Springfield) , also from from Chicago, and all over Illinois. We were speaking to our representatives about things we're passionate about, especially with regards to what's happening in Gaza and West Bank. One of our community members that was with me, was Ashraf Tamizuddin.
He's been in the Springfield community for over 30 years. He's been in leadership positions in the Muslim community as well in Springfield. He finds it important that Muslims in Springfield use our geographic location and proximity to the Capitol to advocate for Muslims and other justice issues that are not even related to Muslims, because that's part of our faith — to stand up for what's just and what's right.
Ashraf Tamizuddin: My name is Ashraf Tamizuddin. I lived in Springfield for over 30 years. When I came over here, there were very few families. We were very private. They are mostly working people and the thing is, Springfield is the capital of Illinois, so we have a lot of opportunities to work, not just for the Springfield community, but for Illinois, and for the whole country.
Amina Rahman: The recording wasn't so hard because I used Zoom. That made it really easy because I feel like the sound was good and they had to be in a quiet space. I had to be in a quiet space, just getting people comfortable. Sometimes they're a little bit robotic in their answers, but I feel once I ask them questions or make a comment — laugh with them about something, they get more natural. That's been helpful.
Hafsa Rahman: I'm reaching out to people my age in the community to get their like advice on what they want represented. I find it's hard to get answers from them because they feel like it has to be something big and important. When really we're looking for all the aspects of the community, just simple stuff, like every day.
Amina Rahman: And we've been emailing back and forth with Priyanka (editor) as well to talk about our overall plan, and how we're going to structure the four part series, and what kind of themes we're going to do. That's been helpful to get more organized. Priyanka had helped us organize our ideas. She helped us out by creating a script.
Hafsa Rahman: Definitely helpful because it took our overall ideas and all the little details we had and sorted them out to make it a little easier for us to put together into a real storyline. We're hoping to get more input on what they want about the history of the community, about the present issues, and general life as Muslims.
Amina Rahman: Also, Ramadan is coming up in three weeks.
Hafsa Rahman: That's our audio journal for this week. Amina and Hafsa Rahman with NPR Illinois J-Corps.
Press Forward Springfield is awarding its first project grants. NPR Illinois along with the Illinois Times and Capitol News Illinois are each receiving funding to report on different untold stories in our community. The three reporting projects will be posted in May.
Community Foundation for the Land of Lincoln in collaboration with the Field Foundation and the Illinois Department of Human Services are leading this project as part of their Healing Illinois program.
NPR Illinois is using the grant to test its vision for community reporting and journalism training — the Journalism Corps or "J-Corps."
