Giving Compass' Take:

• Lita Tirak, writing for Medium, discusses the Solutions Story Tracker, an online platform following the widespread impact of solutions journalism across the globe.

• How critical is inclusive reporting for real change in marginalized communities? What can you do to create awareness towards the impact of solutions journalism and support programs like the Solutions Story Tracker?

• Read more about the impact of solutions journalism in drawing attention towards larger community issues.

Through the fog of seemingly endless bad news, couldn’t we all use some inspiration? Better yet, some real, tangible evidence that positive change is actually happening right now, in our own communities and around the world? There’s a site for that. It’s a database called the Solutions Story Tracker®, and it’s just surpassed 10,000 stories.

The Story Tracker is a centralized, curated repository of solutions journalism — rigorous reporting on responses to social problems. It represents the labor of over 5,000 journalists spanning more than half a dozen years, reporting on innovative ideas for building a better world.

The Story Tracker includes the work of print, digital, visual and broadcast reporters who have applied a solutions journalism approach across the United States, in rural and urban areas, red, blue and purple states, and internationally, in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. This broad range of perspectives informs the breadth and depth of stories and enriches the database.

It also reflects the mission of the Solutions Journalism Network, founded in 2013 to train journalists and newsrooms everywhere to incorporate this approach into their reporting. Two years after the founding of SJN, the Story Tracker consisted of a list of great examples of solutions stories, produced from the journalists and newsrooms we trained.

In 2016, SJN significantly expanded the collection of stories, launching a database of a thousand solutions stories as a teaching and reporting tool. Before we launched, we originally designed the Story Tracker for journalists. We soon realized its value could reach far beyond journalism and have practical applications in helping advance social innovation and in showing students and professors how the insights of solutions journalism can inform social change.

Read the full article about the impact of solutions journalism by Lita Tirak at Medium.