Special Series

Chicago's South Side neighborhoods are often - unfairly - lumped together as one big homogenous place. But the South Side is a patchwork of distinct neighborhoods, filled with the kinds of characters and day-to-day stories that don’t always make headlines. In WBEZ's Auburn Gresham Chicago series, we take a look at this South Side neighborhood, told through the stories of people who live, work, and play there. Auburn Gresham comes alive here through the personal stories of five people: a high school student, a fitness club owner, a House music legend, a 20-something journalist, and an elderly disabled artist.

In recent years, WBEZ has explored in-depth the challenges and obstacles facing youth who are having a hard time 'making it'. As our award-winning series Fifty-Fifty and Inside and Out found, some troubled kids end up dropping out of school; others end up in trouble with the law. In both cases, mental illness is often the reason many young people fail to succeed. Our series, Out of the Shadows, explores the fractures in mental health care for children in Illinois - and how it affects our youth.

When Rahm Emanuel took the oath of office on May 16, 2011, he wasted little time outlining an ambitious new agenda for the nation's third largest city - and set a 100-day benchmark for many new policy and programmatic initiatives. Our series, The First 100, chronicles the early days of the first new mayoral administration in Chicago in 22 years - and assesses the progress toward key goals.

Big cities naturally have lots of gun violence and murder, right? Well, not necessarily. The cities of Chicago and Toronto are the same size, each with populations of just under 3 million residents. But Chicago is home to approximately 450 murders a year. Toronto? About 60. In our series, Under the Gun: Murder in Chicago and Toronto, WBEZ’s criminal and legal affairs reporter Robert Wildeboer asks: Why the difference? He takes us to Toronto to meet gun owners, police officers and politicians to see what Chicago might learn from our neighbors to the north.

Changing Gears is a multi-year project that will look at the future of the industrial Midwest, with a two fold mission: journalism and public engagement.

Changing Gears is a product of the Upper Midwest Local Journalism Center, created through a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Its host stations are Michigan Radio in Ann Arbor, Chicago Public Radio and ideastream in Cleveland, the parent of WVIZ-TV and 90.3 WCPN.

The Changing Gears team, headed by Senior Editor Micheline Maynard, includes three reporters — Niala Boodhoo in Chicago, Kate Davidson in Ann Arbor and Dan Bobkoff in Cleveland — as well as George Nemeth, the senior producer for social engagement.

Each week, Changing Gears offers feature reports aired on our stations on Wednesdays, and the project also will include occasional documentaries, public events and regional call-in programs.

Changing Gears’ coverage focuses on five main themes: jobs and job creation, community redevelopment, education, the environment and agriculture, and cultural issues, from the arts to food and ethnic diversity.

In all its coverage, Changing Gears seeks to tell the stories of individuals, families, businesses, and innovators — their struggles and solutions, their efforts to reinvent themselves, and their capacity to cope with difficult times.

Inside and Out: What if prisons redeemed kids instead of warehousing them?

That was the mission Illinois took up three and a half years ago, when it separated juvenile prisons from adult ones.

And it’s one of the questions at the heart of WBEZ’s series Inside and Out.

We will be reporting inside the juvenile prison system to assess the state's progress in re-making its juvenile prison system. We will be asking what more needs to be done.

Over the next six months, we will also follow the stories of young people—to find out how they get caught up in the system and what happens to them when they get out.

The series will include personal stories, investigative reports, interviews, analysis, photo essays and community events. We invite you to participate in an ongoing conversation about juvenile justice.

After The Wars: The ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have created a new generation of American war veterans.

These men and women join a long line of people who have fought on behalf of the United States.

Their stories are new and familiar, historic and personal. They are defined by the current moment, but also inextricably linked to the experiences of those who served before them. All bear the physical and emotional scars left by the violence of war. Many carry the burdens that come from inflicting that violence on others.

“After the Wars” is a multimedia documentary project designed to preserve and share the stories of American war veterans from World War II to today.

The project combines photographs and recordings of ten veterans who fought across seven decades. By looking into their lives and hearing their stories, we hope to explore how their experiences fit together. In doing so, we believe we can better understand the nation that we share with them.

Since 2004, Global Activism has featured individuals with ties to Chicago whose mission is to improve the world. We’ve profiled people fighting at the local level in the global battle against HIV/AIDS, campaigning for sustainable water use in Nepal and combating illiteracy in Brazil. Tune in every Thursday to hear stories from the series or subscribe to the Global Activism podcast. If you know someone you’d like to nominate for the series, fill out this form.

Chicago Amplified was created in 2006 to bring wider distribution to some of the most exciting and informative public programming happening throughout the Chicago region. These events serve the purpose of inspiring public discourse about a vast array of topics, from recent scientific discoveries and important issues of the day to cultural connections and the importance of shared experience in both our personal and collective history. Chicago Amplified is a Partner-based program. Click here for more...

Founded in 2000, the annual "Louder Than A Bomb" teen poetry slam engages schools and community organizations from all over the Chicago area. This friendly competition gathers the best and brightest young writers (age 13-19) from thoughtout the region with the winners going on to represent Chicago at the national level. Each year since 2005, WBEZ has invited competition Finalists into our studios to record their work, presented on the series page, Louder Than A Bomb.