Dear readers,
I’m Isabelle Tavares, your community reporter through Report For America. For the next two years, I will chronicle environmental and public health impacts in Southwest Detroit. I am honored to be invited to listen, to investigate and to spotlight grassroots leaders and solutions.
I’m eager to learn from community media leaders like EL CENTRAL Hispanic News, Latinos en Michigan, and La Explosiva 1480 AM radio. Local journalism is rare, with newspaper newsroom employees dropping 57% from 2004 to 2020. This decline led to the creation of Report for America in 2017 by the GroundTruth Project, pairing journalists with local newsrooms to cover under-reported issues nationwide.
Isabelle Tavares joins Planet Detroit after spending two years in the Dominican Republic.
When I asked Vincent McCraw, my Report for America Regional Manager, veteran journalist, and former editor for The Detroit News, what coverage of Southwest was like over his 20-year career there, he replied, “nonexistent.”
Veteran journalist Martina Guzmán, Planet Detroit’s director of community journalism and Southwest native, also noted that her community was “completely ignored” for most of her upbringing.
Thus, over the next two years, I am committed to tracking the actions of some of the biggest environmental polluters that harm the health of Southwest residents, and report on the grassroots solutions and resiliency that have allowed the community to thrive despite these challenges.
Environment and public health are inextricably linked. As Aude Lorde said, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” I look forward to telling not the story of Southwest, but the stories of Southwest.
I aim to get my direction from the community. Typically, journalists decide what is news and publish it, which leaves readers with many questions. I’d like to listen to the community first, without an agenda, to try to make our journalism a solution to the issues I learn about through conversations with community members.
I step into this opportunity with a rich and varied background in storytelling in journalism, film, and mixed-media arts. Currently, I am thinking in Spanish but writing in English, as I just returned from two years of exploring family heritage through film in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
I’m deeply grateful for the time I spent focusing on my art, expressing my human experience in the diaspora through images and sounds. My formation as an artist in the Caribbean was essential, as I connected with my ancestors and witnessed the painful legacy of U.S. imperialism. I owe everything to the artist community, which taught me to “find the dagger in my heart and work from that place,” as a professor once said.
Although this will be my first time living in Detroit, I’ve been connected to the artist community for four years through Clearline Magazine which I created with my dear friends and Detroit natives Sarah Sparkman and Carolyn Ridella. Our annual print publication explores climate issues through art, prose, and film.
I see my upcoming time in Detroit, Planet Detroit, and Southwest as an overflowing harvest. I can’t wait to learn how information circulates in the community, what is missing from the conversations, and how I can best help fill gaps in what people need to know.
Thank you for having me, and please do be in touch. You can contact me at isabelle@planetdetroit.org.
Nos vemos pronto,
Isabelle Tavares
Planet Detroit Environment and Health Reporter
Isabelle Tavares covers environmental and public health impacts in Southwest Detroit for Planet Detroit with Report for America. Working in text, film and audio, she is a Dominican-American storyteller who is concerned with identity, generational time, and ecology.
