Vol. 3 Issue 26
A Note on Collective Commitment from Our New Executive Director
Andrew Fan, Executive Director of the Invisible Institute
October 24th, 2023
My name is Andrew Fan. I’m a data journalist and the new executive director of the Invisible Institute.
In my five years at the Invisible Institute, including serving as the interim director for the last year, I’ve learned that leadership within our organization is not a solitary act. Our team values shared decision-making, striving for collective leadership on projects, drawing in community perspectives about our work, and gathering to talk as an organization before embarking on new initiatives.
This process is central to what makes our work notable and powerful. Our audio team’s collective approach to storytelling is on full display in their most recent podcast, You Didn’t See Nothin. This way of working also sits at the heart of CPDP.co, our groundbreaking police data site built on hundreds of iterative design conversations between technologists, data analysts, lawyers, and dozens of young people who talked to us about what they wanted to know about police in their communities.
As executive director, my role is to help my colleagues pursue projects that are both creative and help build a more just Chicago. This model of leadership emerges directly from the example set by our founder, Jamie Kalven. Jamie’s decades of work as a journalist are grounded in his long-term relationships with the people he reported on, many of them residents of Chicago’s high-rise public housing. Even as he founded an organization, Jamie consistently embodied a way of working that centers on inquiry and honest conversation instead of traditional hierarchy.
This kind of shared decision-making is not always straightforward or simple; it is a constant work in progress.
Last week, I sat in on a listening party for our inaugural audio class for South and West siders. After just four weeks of intensive classes, the students, most of them first-time audio producers, created incredible audio stories that centered people in their lives, ranging from firefighters to artists to elders.
The class was a testament to talented storytellers building their voices in a new medium and also to their dedicated teachers, Erisa Apantaku and Sarah Geis from our audio team.
It was also a testament to our way of working. Our audio team is fresh off completing their second widely-celebrated podcast in just three years. At the same time, they are deeply interested in finding new ways to incorporate collaborative relationships with Chicagoans into their work and to craft models to train a broader set of audio storytellers. I am deeply excited to see what they do next.
Our work is distinct, but it also needs your support to continue. Investing in alternate approaches to storytelling takes resources. Our investigative reporting on wrongful convictions, police use of force, and public records produces real change, but also takes time and patience. If you’ve taken a minute to use our online tools, listened to our narrative podcasts, or read some of our investigative reporting in the last year, I hope you’ll consider making a donation to help us sustain the work. All donations to our narrative opportunity fund through the end of 2023 are matched through a generous gift from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation. We deeply appreciate the support.
Join Us: Supporters' Convening
We invite you to join us for our annual supporters' convening in November. On November 28th, we will gather at the Chicago Athletic Association's Stagg Court from 6:00 - 8:00pm in celebration and reflection of our work over the last year and a preview of what's to come.
Thank you for your support of our work. We hope to see you next month.
New Reporting with Our Partners at Illinois Public Media
Champaign Police investigate ‘agency culture’ of not following domestic violence reporting laws
Farrah Anderson and Diana Leane
Champaign resident Rita Conerly called the police at 4:22 p.m. on Oct. 10, 2020, because her former partner — who she lived with for over a decade — was outside her home.
Champaign Police Officer Jonathan Kristensen responded to the call. First, he spoke with the caller, who shares children with her former partner. She told Officer Kristensen that her former partner did not have a driver’s license, but was driving anyway.
Officer Kristensen then asked Conerly if she wanted a present that her former partner, whom she had previously taken out an order of protection against, had brought her daughter.
“That is an insult,” she later told a dispatcher when she called to complain. “That is not a way to serve and/or protect me.”
She said she did not want the present, and Officer Kristensen approached her former partner. After speaking with him for only two minutes, Officer Kristensen said he would “let you guys go on your separate ways,” which the former partner agreed to.
The officer only spoke to Conerly for a minute and a half and left without taking a report, even after she told him the order of protection against her former partner had expired weeks earlier.
When he left, Officer Kristensen notified dispatchers, “Advice given. Spoke w all parties.”
That week, Conerly filed a complaint against the officer who responded to the call. Officer Kristensen failed to follow protocol and protect her from her abuser, she wrote in the complaint.
“He didn’t ask me for my name. He didn’t ask me for any other information for the incident that happened,” she said in an interview. “He did not ask for anything.”
Read the full article →
The above story is part of a partnership focusing on police misconduct in Champaign County between the Champaign-Urbana Civic Police Data Project of the Invisible Institute, and Illinois Newsroom, powered by Illinois Public Media. This investigation was supported with funding from the Data-Driven Reporting Project, which is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill.
