Vol. 3 Issue 5
Reflection on 2020 from Jamie Kalven
Invisible Institute team members and friends prepare gift bags of books and toys for kids in the Market Box program, 2020, Photo: Eve L. Ewing
The calendar is confounded. The pandemic, aided and abetted by human folly, has created a rupture in time, a Before and an After. Stranded in between, we struggle for our bearings. In the midst of such dislocation, the convention of the year-end appeal, in which an organization recites its accomplishments and seeks support for the work that lies ahead, takes on a somewhat surreal quality.
In addition to publishing several major investigations, the Invisible Institute in 2020 received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Investigative Documentary for the film 16 Shots, and our podcast series Somebody was judged the Best Serialized Story in the Third Coast/Richard H. Driehaus Competition. Such public acknowledgement is gratifying. It’s a source of pride, and we want you to know about it. But it’s akin to light from a star that has passed on—an afterglow, a byproduct, not the thing itself, not the real work.
That work is largely done out of public view. A few recent examples among many: . . . the countless conversations with South Side teenagers we have come to know through our Youth/Police Project, as their lives unfold beyond school . . . the phone calls from inmates in the medical section of Cook County Jail who described their living conditions in the midst of the pandemic . . . the summer employment program we designed for “at risk” public school students in which the students made wellness calls to seniors living in public housing and interviewed them about their lives . . . the Market Box initiative, undertaken together with neighboring organizations at the Experimental Station, that has provided 4,895 bags of locally grown food to South Side families, and in the process built a network of 400 households that serves as a vehicle for disseminating and collecting information . . . the steady stream of investigative leads that come through our tip line . . . And above all: the searching interrogation of our own practice by team members in conversation with one another, returning again and again to the same core questions. Why does the Invisible Institute need to exist? What won’t get done, if we don’t do it?
Our work is animated by the conviction that there are things that can only be learned on the ground from those most affected by abusive policies and practices. That is our basis for discerning stories that demand to be told and for orienting the storytelling. From the start, we have seen our work as exploring the question: what might it mean to fully inhabit the role of neighbor under conditions of urban apartheid? Sharpened by the pandemic and what it has revealed, that question remains at the center of our practice, as we renew our commitment to invest the time and care required to build the relationships necessary to support the conversations we urgently need to have—as a society, as communities, as individuals—as we endeavor together to dismantle structures of racial inequality and exclusion.
That is the work you make possible, when you support the Invisible Institute.
Onward.
Jamie Kalven
December 19, 2020
The December 2020 issue of Rolling Stone features Jamie Kalven in "The Untouchables: An Investigation Into the Violence of the Chicago Police," by Paul Solotaroff.
Somebody Podcast received the 2020 Third Coast International Audio Festival Award for Best Serialized Story. Click the image above to watch the team's acceptance speech. Somebody also was included in Rolling Stone's list of The Best Podcasts of 2020, and received a nomination for Best Audio Documentary from the International Documentary Association. The 36th Annual IDA Documentary Awards will be presented on January 16, 2020.
Listen to Somebody on all podcast platforms, and read our teaching guide.
Market Box, a mutual aid initiative coordinated by organizations in the Experimental Station, organized a holiday gift distribution for the children in our network of 400 households. We partnered with author Eve L. Ewing and six local bookstores to provide each child with writing and art tools, toys, a coloring book zine produced by the Market Box team, and three books selected for their age and interests. Each household also received a grocery store gift card. Over 870 donors and 50 volunteers made "Santa Box" possible. Stay tuned to be involved in Market Box in coming months.
Earlier this month, together with Partners in Health, we co-hosted a conversation between Dr. Paul Farmer, Dr. Thomas Fisher, and Jamie Kalven, moderated by Dawn Turner, titled "Understanding Pathologies of Power in the Age of COVID-19."
Watch the event →
