ÌìÃÀÊÓƵ

Civil Beat’s pop-up newsroom road trip continues this week at the Nanakuli Public Library on Wednesday.

Last week about eight CB staffers spent a day working out of the Kahuku Public and School Library. We had a great turnout from folks in the community who wanted to let us know what is on their mind these days, particularly as the election approaches.

One thing was very clear — people in the rural areas of Oahu often feel very left out of the public conversation, whether it’s in the media or even being included in government meetings and decisions that affect their communities.

Here’s another thing we learned: Even though people have a lot of complaints about things that are happening in their areas, they love where they live and they really just want to help make things better.

So we had the thought that as we take our newsroom around the state we ought to be celebrating the different communities and what people love about their homes.

If you come to one of our pop-ups we hope you’ll help us do that by taking a few minutes to let one of our digital producers film a clip of you telling us what you love most about your hometown. We’ll put those together in a short video from each community we visit and maybe by the end of this grand experiment we’ll have a cool gallery of things to celebrate around our state.

This week’s pop-up is scheduled from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. during the library’s regular hours. We’ll be there all day, so drop by whenever you can. Apologies in advance if some of us don’t get there right when it opens — as you folks on the Westside know, traffic can be a real challenge.

Barring any unforeseen news stories or other last-minute development, here’s a rundown on the staff who plans to be in Nanakuli:

• Ku’u Kauanoe, our engagement manager who has been focusing a lot of her attention the past couple years on West Oahu. She’s written about the landfill, road and development projects, traffic and a whole slew of issues.

• Marcel Honore, who’s arguably the most accomplished journalist in the state when it comes to covering the Honolulu rail project. Marcel has been writing about rail for many years, and he’s now expanding his role for us into climate change, the environment and conservation. Those are topics that we think residents of the Westside might be interested in chatting about with him.

• Blaze Lovell, who covers state government and politics for us. He has a good grasp of how the elections are shaping up and would be interested in hearing more about your views on issues we could be writing about even after the Nov. 8 vote.

• Cassie Ordonio is one of our local government reporters and has also been covering elections, including the races for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs board. Cassie’s done quite a bit of reporting on the Westside, too.

• Ben Angarone is another of our political writers and has been profiling races in particular districts, mainly on Oahu.

• Viola Gaskell is our education reporter and wants to hear about how the education system is working for students, teachers, parents and anyone else with direct experience in Hawaii’s public and private schools. She is particularly interested in hearing about mental health and mental health supports, or lack thereof, in schools.

• Jia Jung is our international reporting fellow and she is especially interested in hearing from members of the Filipino community. Her assignment for us is to cover the Philippines in a way that makes sense for Hawaii readers.

• Courtney Teague is our newsletter editor as well as the person who keeps track of Civil Beat’s readership and engagement statistics, in case anyone is curious about those kinds of things. She’s always looking for ways we could be doing more to reach and engage readers.

I plan to be there too along with other editors. We are happy to talk about journalism and how we decide what to cover (or not) and any other behind-the-story questions you might have about Civil Beat.

Here’s the schedule for other upcoming pop-ups. Please let us know if you’d like us to come to your public library and we will coordinate with our partners at the .