Cultural and spiritual community response in a Covid era

Northern Public Radio – WNIJ

The mission of Northern Public Radio is to enrich, inspire and inform adults in northern Illinois through programs and services that share ideas, encourage thought, give pleasure and create community. We are a member station for National Public Radio (NPR) and create opportunities throughout the year to work with reporters at all stages of their careers. The challenge and opportunity of our reach is the large geographic area we serve; from the rolling hills of northwestern Illinois as far as the Mississippi River, north to the southern Wisconsin border, south to the beauty of the Illinois Valley and Starved Rock state park near LaSalle, with an urban center of Rockford and the educational hub of Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. The urban/rural divide allows us to provide perspectives of scope, scale, and context to how issues affect our listeners in these different landscapes that is not replicated by TV and newspapers given their smaller geographic reach.

Yvonne Boose

Yvonne Boose reports for WNIJ/Northern Public Radio in DeKalb, Illinois, where she focuses on how community members are responding to the coronavirus pandemic artistically, culturally and spiritually. Boose was already at the station, where she contributed to local reporting. For 14 years, Boose worked for Verizon as a workforce supervisor but she decided to return to journalism in 2019 by producing and contributing at WNIJ. (Yvonne interned for the Beacon-News in Aurora, Illinois, in 2009 and for the Elmhurst Cable Access Channel in Elmhurst, Illinois, in 2000. Both internships helped Yvonne realize that she needed to work as a reporter.) Joining Report for America lets her become a full-time reporter focusing on local news. Yvonne is a published poet and has a master’s degree in journalism from Roosevelt University and a bachelor’s in speech communications from Chicago State University. In December of 2019, she received a diploma in radio and television broadcast from the Illinois Media School.