Decibel Hosts 5th Listening Session in Del Valle

Last Wednesday, January 26, 2022, Decibel held its fifth listening session for the Del Valle community. It’s nearly been a year since Decibel began using our “community-led” approach to covering the Del Valle area and we’re proud to say that every story we have created derived from one of these listening sessions.

Once again, due to the recent surge of the Omicron variant, we were forced to host this listening session in a virtual setting over Zoom. Although our team was looking forward to conducting a listening session in-person, we decided that the health and well-being of everyone involved was paramount to anything else and a virtual listening session would suffice.

Something new that we implemented into this listening session and the promotional material we used leading up to the event is the use of both the English and Spanish languages. We made this decision in hopes of reaching and connecting to the Spanish-speaking residents in Del Valle. This decision led us to hire a translator for our listening session who was tasked with executing translation for any Spanish speakers in attendance.

Throughout our time reporting in Del Valle and during these listening sessions, we have been joined by the Austin Monitor’s editor-in-chief, Elizabeth Pagano.

This event did not have as many RSVPs as our last event. Out of the 21 who signed up to attend, six Del Valle community members showed up to our Zoom call. Everyone who came to our listening session spoke English as their first language but we still utilized our translator to ensure everything that was discussed was translated into Spanish as well. We also offered all participants a $10 Sonic Drive-In gift card as an incentive to join our call. Participants seem to appreciate our gift in return for sharing their perspective.

At the start of this event, after general introductions, we polled our attendants to find out how familiar they were with our work. The results from this poll were spread across the board. Two of the five who answered said they were “somewhat familiar” with our work, one person said they were “very familiar”, one said “I’ve heard of Decibel but haven’t seen a story” and one person said “I’ve never heard of Decibel.” The sixth participant did not respond to this poll.

Results from the first poll at our recent listening session. We asked participants how familar they were with Decibel's work.

Next, we presented two of our recently published stories to our participants: Fuerte y Unidos and ‘This Community Is A Blind Spot’: Del Valle Residents Fall Into Internet Access Gap. After having our attendees watch our work, we asked them how they rated Decibel’s overall storytelling of each piece.

More poll results from our listening session. With these polls, we asked attendees to rate the overall storytelling of the work we presented during the session.

All of our listening session attendees rated our storytelling of “Fuerte y Unidos” as “excellent.” The response to “This Community Is A Blind Spot” was a bit more mixed but still very positive. Four out of the six participants rated our storytelling of the piece as “excellent” and the remaining two participants rated it as “good.”

“Fuerte y Unidos” is a first-person news documentary that highlights the work of Blanca "Bella" Gonzalez, who responded to gym closures due to the pandemic by opening her own fitness club, which she runs out of her garage. The Del Valle resident now hosts multiple workout classes every week where she leads a Lantinx group of local women through a mix of Zumba and strength workouts.

In response to this video, one listening session participant said, “I really loved it because it represents a lot of people in our community.” The same participant also said, “[Del Valle residents] start with something they like to do and then they bring other people with them and make a business out of it.”

“‘This Community Is A Blind Spot’: Del Valle Residents Fall Into Internet Access Gap” is what we refer to as a voices package where we hear from multiple residents about one issue. As mentioned in the title, this piece is about the challenges people face in Del Valle when trying to find and connect to a reliable source of internet. Folks living in the area must overcome multiple obstacles when trying to secure an internet connection such as expensive pricing, limited provider options and slow internet speeds.

After watching this video, one participant said that although he rated both stories “excellent” he recommended that in Decibel’s future content, we should try to reach a “combined audience” that represents the “mixed culture” of Del Valle. This same participant continued their thought saying, “... I think that will help with unifying the community.”

We then turned the focus of the listening session toward Decibel’s coverage of the Del Valle community as a whole. We presented our participants with another poll which asked them to rate our work overall. Four of the six participants said our overall coverage of Del Valle was “excellent” while the remaining two said our coverage was “good.”

Results from our fourth listening session poll. We asked participants to rate our overall work in Del Valle.

We asked the participants who rated our coverage as “good” to elaborate further and explain what they thought we should do to make our work improve to “excellent.” One attendee told us that we should ask the Del Valle community for things that they need help advocating for. “I think it’s really hard and frustrating to reach out to people in leadership because we have a lot of issues with our roads and safety that we need help with and we just need a voice,” the participant said.

Over the span of our listening sessions in Del Valle, the difficulty of residents trying to figure out what authorities to call was a common sentiment that we heard from residents. As a result, we have been working on a comprehensive resource guide that will help Del Valle residents know exactly what to do and who to call to have their needs addressed. We are going to collect feedback on the current version of this guide from community members and plan to roll out the fully completed version in the next few weeks.

We continued the session with a final poll which asked our attendees where they would like to see Decibel stories in the future. A clear majority of four of the six participants said they would like to see our work on Facebook. One attendee said they wanted to see our stories on Instagram and the remaining attendee said they would like to see our work in another place that we did not mention in the poll.

Results from our final poll during the Del Valle listening session. In this poll, we asked attendees where they would like to see Decibel stories in the future.

When we asked participants to elaborate, one participant said that in order to reach a younger audience, we might want to consider placing our content on the video-focused social media site, TikTok. The same person also suggested that when it’s safe to do so, Decibel should partner with institutions already in the community like churches to host in-person presentations of our work for residents who may not have easy access to the internet. Another platform that multiple attendees suggested Decibel utilize is the NextDoor app. Many of the attendees also mentioned that they prefer to consume news that is presented in short, easily digestible videos.

Towards the end of our session, attendees spoke about the issues affecting them and their neighbors. “Del Valle is growing so much and there are apartments being built, more houses being built but the roads are not changing so that causes a lot of traffic,” said one attendee. The same person also spoke about how the community notices the unfairness of how the Circuit of the Americas gets a lot of resources to improve its infrastructure and yet Del Valle seems to be overlooked.

Another attendee mentioned she believes that a police substation is needed in the area. This Del Valle resident told us that when she has called 911 in the past, authorities show up “eventually’ due to the distance.

We wrapped up our session by taking recommendations from our attendees on people in the community that are doing important work and we could potentially feature in a future story.

Even though we did not have any Spanish-only speakers attend our listening event, we learned a lot about how we can better host a bilingual listening session in the future. We learned that we need an experienced and patient translator to successfully assist our event. Another thing we discovered is the different pace that occurs when a speaker must take a moment to pause when they are finished speaking so that the translator can have a chance to quickly translate what was said.

Based on the feedback we received from this listening session, Decibel continues to be successful at telling Del Valle stories but we have room for improvement. We have to do a better job at highlighting Black voices in Del Valle and have to explore new ways to get feedback from this community since turnout at these listening sessions remains low.

We are hoping to hold some one-on-one conversations with community members in the coming weeks. If you are interested in chatting with us, have suggestions on how we can better listen to the Del Valle community or want to provide a tip for a story in Del Valle, please email us at news@klru.org.