Sitting on a Los Angeles street curb, my partner Alex Li and I were waiting the police siren to stop so we could continue interviewing Tim Sterry and Daisy Kukuruza about their romantic relationship while experiencing homelessness and living on the street.
“Why aren’t more stories like this told by media?” Sterry asked, pointing out that media coverage usually portraits the homeless community in a negative light.
Unfortunately, as a journalist, I can’t disagree with Sterry’s statement.
When the 2018 Fall semester began, our entire JOVRNALISM class had two weeks of brainstorming ideas. The class was already cautious to avoid reinforcing typical, negative stereotypes about the housing insecure community. Our stories ideas ranged from police harassment to sexual assault in the homeless community. Ultimately, our project didn’t used any of our ideas.
One question we often get about our resulting project, Homeless Realities, is how did we connect with this community, which is often standoffish and reluctant to be have its stories told by the media.
It wasn’t easy.
As part of our reporting, a few of us volunteered at several non-profit organizations, trying to contact with the community there, but, while we gain credibility with the organizations, it didn’t successfully lead to ideal sources.
We decided on a different approach: In partnership with the non-profits, we organized a multi-day workshop to teach selected members of the homeless community how to shoot in 360/VR and work with them to tell stories their own stories.
Professor Robert Hernandez leads a workshop with project partners inside the downtown Los Angeles Central Library.
As we met in the downtown Los Angeles Public Library, the 10 participants – who were selected and vetted with the help of the non-profits – had hands-on experience with the 360 cameras and were taught basic immersive storytelling techniques.
Then they each pitched the story they wanted to tell through immersive.
None of the pitched stories were even close to our class’ initial brainstorming ideas. What resulted were stories about a homeless woman running a small business out of her car; experiencing housing insecurity while working two jobs; cooking for church to help others; being a homeless musician trying to perform; using art to help with mental illness and homelessness; and, of course, a young couple in love trying to foster intimacy while living publicly on the streets.
At the time of this project I was a managing editor of USC Annenberg Media and no stranger to approving news pitches.
I have to be honest, with each pitch the participants made I would ask myself typical news editors’ questions like “why is this newsworthy?” or “what’s the news peg?” As editor, it would have been difficult for me to approve these story ideas.
I realized that I was worrying too much because their honest and accurate stories weren’t being experienced – let alone pitched – outside of the homeless community.
Homeless Realities highlights the diligence, dream, arts, talents, service and love found within the homeless community, like any other community. When we first publicly premiered the final pieces at the downtown library, someone from the audience noted that all our stories seem positive and asked if we should look into the dark side of being homeless.
Remember, we did not choose these stories. We empowered the community to tell their stories, the ones they wanted the world to know most. JOVRNALISM came to the community with a platform to tell their stories, instead of the typical news media approach of parachuting into a community hoping to tell stories on their behalf. Media often go in with a story in mind, looking for sources that fit their predetermined narrative.
In our project, these stories come directly from the community. These stories are underreported. These stories deserve to be heard.
Six JOVRNALISM alums and Professor Hernandez were flown to Qatar as special guests of the kingdom after some government officials experienced immersive projects during a 
