Following months of research, canvassing, and listening to community needs, journalists, including Calvin Krippner, produced solutions-based stories about the challenges faced by the Berwyn, Illinois, community.
Krippner's special report highlights residents concerns about government transparency and prioritizing civic engagement.
Last fall, a journalism collaborative comprising Illinois Latino News, the local bilingual paper Cicero Independiente, WBEZ, and the non-profit News Ambassadors launched a community engagement project to learn what residents in the Chicago suburb of Berwyn wanted from local news coverage. The collaborative then used those findings to inform its reporting priorities for the coming year.
In Berwyn, Illinois, a suburb where residents are proud of their cultural heritage, proximity to Chicago and escape from city noise, residents have joined workshops that help generate ideas for their City Council members around issues like the enhancement of green spaces as part of an effort to bring local residents into the budgeting process. This process aligns with how another local government in Edinburg, Texas, has tried to prioritize civic engagement.
Forty percent of Berwyn residents who responded to a city-wide survey said they were concerned about government transparency. That’s according to the survey conducted through our partnering news organizations, which sought engagement in Berwyn last fall.
At a city council meeting earlier this year, Berwyn residents, such as Steve Taylor, voiced frustration about the stalled progress of a government transparency initiative.
“Despite appointing the Ethics Commission last January in 2024 after a year-long vacancy following a complaint, the commission has made no progress on its mandated tasks,” said Taylor, speaking up at a city council meeting. “These tasks included reviewing the ethics ordinance, making recommendations concerning expanding the ordinance to increase the responsibilities and streamline complaints, and further define the processes associated with elected officials expense accounts and potentially expand their jurisdiction. None of these objectives have even been attempted.”
Taylor’s frustration reflects the feelings of residents in Berwyn who feel separated from local government financing and resource allocation.
Berwyn City Council member Rob Pabon is the 5th Ward Alderman. He understands residents’ frustration and wants to find ways to get more Berwyn community members involved in shaping where their tax dollars are allocated.
“Trust is one of the things that's missing in a lot of different communities across the country,” said Pabon. “People don't trust their elected leaders, and they don't trust institutions.”
Pabon has been incorporating outside ideas about civic engagement from surrounding communities. He says that ideas like citizen assemblies and citizen-led commissions still get some pushback within city hall. Across the country, Americans’ trust in institutions has been declining for half a century, with a rapid rise in mistrust in recent years, according to the Pew Charitable Trust. However, some cities have been actively trying to boost transparency and democratic collaboration, including some steps that could work in Berwyn.
The engagement project conducted by our news collaborative aimed to produce this story through the strategy of solutions journalism. This approach involves drawing comparisons to other communities that have successfully implemented solutions to similar problems, highlighting potential avenues for progress.
This year, Edinburg, Texas, won the All-American City award, recognizing its ability to generate civic engagement through the use of citizen advisory boards. In 2012, the Edinburg City Council established an advisory board called the Cultural Activities Board to involve residents in the budgetary process. Today, these boards provide residents with the opportunity to influence the city’s spending on public events, such as parades and festivals. Over 80% of residents claim a Latino heritage, making them demographically similar to Berwyn.
Their approach is a part of a decades-long plan to increase transparency and democratic collaboration in Edinburg.
“We see ourselves as community builders,” said Edinburg Cultural Arts Department Assistant Director Magdiel Castle. “So we bring the whole town together, and we try to give them a sense of belonging, a sense of ‘in this town, everybody knows each other’, and giving them that opportunity provides that sense to be a little bit stronger.”
Castle says taxpayers have the right to know how their money is being spent, and this includes having a voice in that process.
Edinburgh has inspired the community to come together to allocate public money for planned events, which has generated an enhanced culture of civic engagement.
“Once we created the infrastructure for them to be able to participate, then they saw we’re really open for their feedback and for their participation,” said Castle. “And then they had higher aspirations.”
Aurelio Aleman also works for the Edinburg City government and spoke about how planning festivals through a budgetary process can help alleviate the hierarchical feeling towards local representatives, allowing the community to feel like the mayor and city council are not above them.
“From my time here, I just feel like it bridges the gap between our local officials and our citizens,” said Aleman. “We have people of different ethnic backgrounds, and so by putting them all under one, it kind of cements that spirit of integration, of oneness of community.”
In Berwyn, Alderman Pabon is seeking a similar solution called participatory budgeting through citizen assemblies and citizen-led commissions. It's a process through which community members work on allocating a portion of the public budget. These workshops enable citizens to make direct decisions about how government funds are allocated in their community by identifying and prioritizing public spending projects. Furthermore, a particular response from survey respondents was that they want more financial transparency from local leaders on how local funds are being allocated.
“Because it is so collaborative, it meets the values that we hold and the work that we're doing,” said Pabon. “But it also allows us to get so many different people involved in the democratic process and regain and rebuild trust.”
These processes can enhance transparency and help balance the scales when it comes to who is viewed as an expert in the community during budgetary decisions.
“I like to be balanced with having an expert voice and lived experience,” said Pabon. “Because I think both of them are valuable to the conversation, and we can learn from each other, and sometimes lived experience is expertise on an issue.”
One way this has begun to be enacted in Berwyn is through the Berwyn Area Native Plants Club, which has worked in partnership with I <3 Native Plants. Through 5th Ward participatory budgeting, the club aims to bring together residents of Berwyn and nearby neighbors who are passionate about keeping native plants in their gardens, helping native pollinators, and assisting with native plant community projects.
Pabon is confident that participatory budgeting around issues like green spaces can begin to generate a strong civic culture in Berwyn, as it did in Edinburg, Texas.
He says the challenge will be that cultural change takes time.
This story is made possible through the Berwyn Collaborative: Understanding Community Needs, led by News Ambassadors in collaboration with local news outlets, including Illinois Latino News, click HERE.
Calvin Krippner is a solutions-based, investigative journalist who studied at the Northwestern Medill School of Journalism. His work brings to light and analyzes solutions to complex issues in various communities, and he extends local analysis to wider societal trends.
a long hallway with a bunch of lockers in it Photo by Matthew Ansley on Unsplash 
