What we achieved in 2022, and what's coming up in 2023

Thanks to all our members, contributors and readers for your support in 2022. With your help, here's what we managed to achieve...

What a difference a year makes! Last year just two of us were working from our kitchen tables over Zoom. A year later and we have doubled our team to four people and are writing this from our brand new office!

As ever, we are so thankful to our members for your continued support of our magazine, we wouldn’t be able to do everything we were do doing if weren’t for your support. Not a member yet? If you like what we do and want to help us grow, check out how you can get involved here!

A Year in Numbers 

The year has been a bit of a whirlwind. We produced four issues of the magazine as well as a mini festive edition. Within these 228 pages we have had words written by 65 contributors, pictures taken by 36 photographers and designs created by 15 illustrators. 

There are at least 20 different nationalities among these contributors, including: American, Brazilian, Bangladeshi, Chinese, English, Filipino, French, Indian, Irish, Italian, Kurdish, Nigerian, Pakistani, Palestinian, Polish. Romanian, Scottish, Sierra Leonean, Slovakian and Yemeni.  

We have also published in 11 different community languages: Arabic, Czech, English, Gaelic, Polish, Romanes, Romanian, Scots, Slovak, Spanish and Ukrainian. 

Our membership and subscriber base have also grown considerably over the year and we now have around 180 members paying between £3-10 each month to support our work (thank you!). Our social media presence has also increased with 7,500 followers across all platforms. And our website has doubled our unique visitors from 2021. 

The Community Newsroom

We finally moved into our own office! After two years of working from home, cafes and rented rooms, we partnered up with another media organisation The Ferret and found a space just off Victoria Road. (A big shout out to the South East Integration Network for letting us use their office one day a week last year!)

We spent a couple months moving ourselves in, and getting the space ready with donations from the community and work done on it by local tradies. Just before Christmas, we hosted the grand unveiling of Govanhill’s community newsroom with the Annette Street Primary School drummers opening the space to the public. 

Partnerships and Collaborations

We have worked in partnership with lots of different community organisations this year to deliver several events, workshops, training programmes and outreach. This includes: Street Level Photoworks, GAMIS, Romano Lav, G42 Pop Ups, Govanhill Baths, Being Mixed, Thriving Places Govanhill, and others.

We began a year-long partnership with Scotland’s investigative journalism platform The Ferret to collaborate on a project delving into health inequalities in Scotland and beyond. The partnership combines The Ferret’s investigative skills with our solution-focused approach to explore potential solutions to this topic. 

We started publishing stories as part of this project at the end of last year, specifically on how the energy crisis is affecting our health. Into the new year we will be publishing on topics like GP waiting times and sexual health with the help of our newly trained community reporters. Speaking of which… 

Training and Workshops

Ever since the idea of the magazine was formed, we had always planned to run training programmes to enable and support more people from different backgrounds to contribute to the magazine. This year, we made that happen and ran four different training programmes.

In the spring, we ran a series of workshops with our Young Voices team, a group of 16-25 yr olds from backgrounds underrepresented in the media. They produced the summer issue of our magazine, with articles on subjects as diverse as fast fashion, mixed-race identity and South Asian cooking. They also interviewed local MSP Nicola Sturgeon in a wide ranging conversation covering rent controls, Ukraine, witch trials and the future of Govanhill.

We also helped to facilitate a group of refugee and asylum seekers produce, edit and present their own live radio show as part of Scottish Refugee Festival Week. Similarly, we provided training for a group of Roma young people to write an article for the magazine and produce a radio show. 

Most recently, we ran  a community reporters programme for our health inequalities project. Around 30 people from all different backgrounds learned skills in writing, multimedia, fact checking and solutions journalism. Participants will create and report on stories for our magazine and The Ferret’s website. 

Exhibition and Events

We ran several events that brought together the local community and allowed them to share their own stories. In the summer, we hosted and curated an exhibition at Street Level Photoworks entitled FONDS. Working with local photographer Morwenna Kearsley, we created a unique photo series of objects that different community members shared with us, as well as the stories associated with them. We also produced an accompanying radio show featuring the interviews.

We also had stalls at different events around Govanhill, as well as hosting a panel discussion with our Young Voices team at the G42 Pop Ups market to mark the release of their issue. 

Awards and Media Coverage

This year we won 'Most Innovative Print Publication' at Independent Media Awards 2022, our Editor and Founder was Highly Commended in the ‘Editor of the Year’ category at the PPA Scotland Awards. We were also Highly Commended at the AOP Digital Publishing Awards in the Local Hero award and placed runner-up in the Local Media category at the Scottish Refugee Media Awards. 

Awards aren’t the be-all-and-end-all and our focus will always be on the community that we serve. But awards do help us get the word out about our publication to the wider industry and help us to get funding to continue with our community mission – so for this we are thankful for the industry recognition we received last year.

Like awards, media coverage also helps to be introduced to a wider audience – last year we were featured in The i Paper, The Glasgow Times, Hold The Front Page, Nieman Lab, The Ferret, and more. We were also invited talk about the magazine at events including the International Magazine Centre in Edinburgh, the Glasgow Social Enterprise Network and the Public Interest News Foundation’s Local News Plan.

Funding 

Greater Govanhill is a social enterprise, and in order to achieve long term sustainability we have three main revenue streams: advertising sales, membership revenue and grant funding. We also raise additional funds through consultancy service and events.

We managed to secure several grants this year. which have enabled us to serve the community and meet our objectives in different ways. 

Our collaborative project with The Ferret has been funded by a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network and European Journalism Centre with funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We received money from the Glasgow Communities and Wellbeing Fund which enabled us to provide the training workshops. The radio show we produced with refugee and asylum seekers was part-funded by the Scottish Refugee Council and our FONDS exhibition was funded by Museum Galleries Scotland. At the end of 2022, we also secured funding from the Winter Wellbeing Fund (to run events in our new space), from Thriving Places Govanhill (to create resources for ESOL learners) as well as Google News Initiative’s News Equity and Innovation Challenge funds, for our new project, which means we have been able to expand…

Coming Up in 2023

We’re very excited to welcome Juliana de Penha to the team. Juliana is a freelance journalist from São Paulo (Brazil) based in Glasgow. She is the founder of Migrant Women Press, an independent media focused on women's experiences with migration. She worked with migrant communities, especially women, in the charity sector in Scotland and Italy. She holds a bachelor's degree in Cultural Studies and Communication, a Master's in Human Rights and International Politics and is concluding an NCTJ Diploma in Journalism.

Juliana will be working with us on our new project that will see us develop a network of independent community publishers all around Scotland and develop a new website which will showcase their work and bring the stories from Scotland’s communities to a wider audience. More on this coming soon!

We’ll also soon be announcing a series of workshops, talks, screenings and discussion events that we’ll be holding in our new space over the coming months. We’re still keen to hear your suggestions for events - if you have ideas, please let us know here.

Our next magazine will focus on health and wellbeing issues and out at the end of February. We’ve had some great suggestions for ideas for content, but as ever, if you want to contribute, please let us know by emailing hello@greatergovanhill.com