Sharing stories in the news and lifting up the voices of people in our community really lends itself to making the Fox Valley feel like home. The Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region and the Greater Green Bay Community Foundation have been engaged in a major effort to support the work of local newsrooms to bring issues of importance in our region to the forefront through storytelling, and it’s called the NEW News Lab.

The News Lab was launched two years ago as a pilot program and local news collaboration in northeastern Wisconsin made up of six news organizations: the Green Bay Press-Gazette, Appleton Post-Crescent, FoxValley365, The Press Times, Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Watch. We teamed up with those organizations as well as The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay’s Journalism Department as an educational partner.  Microsoft provided the initial support to launch the project, and since then many other supporters have stepped up to fund this important initiative. Recently, that investment and commitment to preserving local journalism was renewed, thanks to collaborative support from the community foundations, and Microsoft’s partnership with the Green Bay Packers and Titletown Tech.

Content produced by the NEW News Lab is shared at no cost for the purpose of increasing access and broadening awareness of community needs. These stories have been picked up by more than 125 news outlets nationwide, and have reached an estimated audience of more than 23 million people.

In this episode, we feature one of our news partners, Wisconsin Public Radio, and it’s Home is Here series.