Service organisations such as the Rotary Club are known for giving back to their communities, usually in the form of monetary donations and volunteer hours. The Rotary Club of Neepawa wanted to take that even further, with the contribution of information.
While the club has always had a close association with NACTV, including projects such as Rotary Reads and their annual television auction (now an online auction), that relationship has transformed through LJI, first just filming and airing some meetings of public interest and gradually developing that into a civic program of their own: Rotary Presents.
The club has worked with station journalists to share their guest speakers with the community in a more structured program with a formalised question and answer period that can accommodate questions from both club and community members. In this way, the club has taken their own educational and enrichment opportunities and, in partnership with NACTV, turned them into an exploration of civic issues and community projects for a wider audience, which in turn encourages wider community engagement across a broad spectrum of issues.
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About LJI
LJI Impact is the section of commediaportal.ca where the journalists and their organizations participating in CACTUS' Local Journalism Initiative can share their greatest successes.
Through the written stories, photos and videos you see in the LJI Impact section, you'll be able to read first hand accounts about how the presence of a community journalist is making a difference in communities across Canada through the Local Journalism Initiative and the Community Media Portal.
The Community Media Portal is a gateway to the audio-visual media created by community media centres across Canada. These include traditional community TV and radio stations, as well as online and new media production centres.
Community media are not-for-profit production hubs owned and operated by the communities they serve, established both to provide local content and reflection for their communities, as well as media training and access for ordinary citizens to the latest tools of media production, whether traditional TV and radio, social and online media, virtual reality, augmented reality or video games.
The Community Media Portal has been funded by the Local Journalism Initiative (the LJI) of the Department of Canadian Heritage, and administered by the Canadian Association of Community Television Users and Stations (CACTUS) in association with the Fédération des télévisions communautaires autonomes du Québec (the Fédération). Under the LJI, over 100 journalists have been placed in underserved communities and asked to produce civic content that underpins Canadian democratic life.
