How systems thinking is guiding El Tímpano’s reporting

Three months ago, El Tímpano began investigating the prevalence of overcrowded housing in Oakland’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities and how those housing conditions affect the health of residents, throughout and beyond the current COVID-19 pandemic.

We knew from the start that this project demanded an unconventional approach to reporting. The crisis of overcrowded housing — particularly as it affects undocumented immigrants and intersects with public health — touches upon a web of public policies, economic structures, and social ideologies that cannot be neatly separated from one another. If we wanted to examine how overcrowding impacts public health, and what we can learn from the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to take a wide lens.

El Tímpano teamed up with Journalism + Design to incorporate tools from a practice called systems thinking as a way to identify the interconnected systems at play in overcrowded housing and surface opportunities to address structural inequities embedded in this largely invisible crisis. While we are still a ways from completing our reporting, we want to pull back the curtain on the process that the Journalism + Design team has led us through to take a systems-oriented approach to this issue, and how it’s informing El Tímpano’s journalism.

Head over to El Tímpano’s Medium page to read intern Sonya Lustig’s blog that breaks down how we’re collaborating with stakeholders and mapping the systems at play as we report on this largely invisible crisis.