Lacking cultural-knowledge resources leads trauma survivors to build them for others

Evidence

The Key was meant to be educational. Lina felt there was so much she hadn’t known in her own life. She didn’t know the first thing about applying for college financial aid, for example, and she wanted the newspaper to be a vehicle to spread this kind of information to the large new immigrant community in Bay Ridge and especially to other young Arab Americans. “I wanted there to be something for people my age,” she told me, “to let them know that it’s okay. I wish there had been something for me, to help me adjust.” They put out about a dozen issues of the newspaper, but it was ultimately too much work with too many debts for the two founders, and the enterprise folded after about nine months. Still, the Key marked a change in her outlook, when she began looking outside herself and off into the future. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 675

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: immigrant community media startups as grassroots knowledge infrastructure filling gaps in formal institutions.
• XREF: Parallels community-organizing-through-institutions themes in social capital literature (Coleman).