The Community Alliance newspaper is growing, and beginning in August we will provide readers with more content on arts and culture in Fresno. This is possible thanks to a grant from the Fresno Arts Council. We expect this to be a two-page color spread in every issue.
We will feature the great arts and cultural opportunities going on in Fresno, and the content will be in English and Spanish. In addition to the print version of this paper, the content will be on our website and social media platforms.
It is our hope that providing more arts and cultural information, which has long been a goal of the paper, will build a stronger community, help artists thrive and get larger audiences for local performers.
Stop the Hate
The successful Stop the Hate work this paper has been doing was funded by a grant from the California State Library. In this campaign, we held town halls and training sessions, passed resolutions and distributed hundreds of “Stop the Hate, Be the Love” yard signs and bumper stickers.
The biggest accomplishment was building the Stop the Hate coalition that brought together grassroots community groups to stand in solidarity to stop the hate. The Community Alliance and our 501(c)(3) arm, the San Joaquin Valley Media Alliance, put a lot of resources into this project.
One unexpected development was having law enforcement wanting to be an ally in this work. The idea of working with the police was a foreign concept to some community activists, but having the police around prevented right-wing thugs, like the Proud Boys, from disrupting any of our events.
We are still waiting to see if reporting a hate crime to the Fresno Police Department is a successful strategy. After a hate crime at the Porchfest music festival in the Tower District, police arrested the suspect and the chief of police said it was a hate crime, but when the case was charged by the Fresno County District Attorney’s office no hate crime charges were filed. We will keep you informed with new information when it is available.
Plan for the Future
The two special projects outlined above were possible because three years ago the staff and volunteers at the paper decided to establish a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which enabled us to pursue new pathways for grant funding.
With the decline of newspapers in this country, more people (especially young people) are getting their news from social media and we realized that we needed a strategy for long-term survival. We are hiring young people who are social media savvy, expanding our outreach to youth and, we hope, getting them engaged in work on social, economic and environmental justice issues.
We plan to continue printing the Community Alliance monthly and reaching more people with our hopeful message that a better world is possible. Our vision is to inspire a new generation to embrace core progressive values, build a movement for social and economic justice and understand the essential role of a free press in this struggle.
