Speak City Heights is a media collaborative aimed at amplifying the voices of residents in one of San Diego’s most diverse neighborhoods, City Heights.Through reporting and multimedia projects from our partners—KPBS, voiceofsandiego.org, The AjA Project and Media Arts Center San Diego—the collaborative will help residents and policymakers frame a discussion about what constitutes a healthy community, its barriers and how they’ll overcome them in City Heights.
Why City Heights? Its transformation from a sleepy San Diego suburb to the city’s dense, urban core has given way to a diverse community of immigrants and refugees. This vibrant state of flux both inspires and challenges the neighborhood. It is among San Diego’s poorest, lacking quality housing, updated infrastructure or easy access to healthcare and nutritious food.
These challenges have attracted millions of dollars’ worth of private and public investments in City Heights. It is becoming a microcosm of change that might inform how communities elsewhere define community health and go about securing it for their diversifying and growing populations.
We believe that a healthy information system and dialogue is critical to that process.
Our mission is to document the challenges specific to City Heights, and the work being done to address them. It is to inform City Heights residents of the changes happening in their neighborhood, so that they might participate in those changes. And it is to reach beyond neighborhood borders to spark a dialogue among all San Diego communities about our shared policies and, potentially, shared solutions.
Collaborative coverage will appear here and on partner television channels, radio stations and websites.
Speak City Heights is an independent, non-profit media project supported with initial funding from the California Endowment. Our community partner is Mid-City CAN. We are a fiscally-sponsored project of Media Arts Center San Diego, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.
The content, creation and production of the website is a true collaboration of many partners. Especially website management, production and coordination from San Diego State University Professor Amy Schmitz Weiss, web design and production by Jessica Plautz, and Yueh-hui Chiang for web programming and development.
