An Arizona nonprofit recently launched two new websites that can be used to help migrants currently travelling to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Robin Hoover, president of Migrant Status, Inc. worked with the help of Mexico City-based journalist Laura Garciandia to get valuable information about traveling through Mexico to Central American migrants via a downloadable PDF guide available at guiamigrantes.com.

The guide, written in Spanish, includes information on transit methods and routes, criminal organizations and their known locations to avoid, tips for crossing through the desert safely, emergency resources, first aid advice and more.

Hoover had been working with the idea of compiling and publishing information for migrants to use while travelling to the border for quite a while. In his experience, information is what could help them most.

“Up came the idea of the [online] migrant guide and then some people in Mexico approached me saying they had very similar ideas,” Hoover said. “People need to understand more about the route and what public resources are available. We started sandwiching these things together and a lot more is going to go on the website.”

Creating an online guide that was accessible to migrants came with its own set of obstacles. Hoover said his team had to figure out how to get the information to those with limited internet access. That’s where the second website comes in.

Robinhoover.com is being repurposed into a tool for shelters in Mexico. They can download a PowerPoint version of the guide and have it displayed in shelters 24/7 so migrants without their own cell phone or internet access can view it. The website is also used for outreach to promote long-term relationships between nonprofit groups who want to help and the shelters that need it. Hoover said such a partnership could help get resources directly to migrants at a higher efficiency rate.

“There's not a U.S. or Mexican authority that's putting resources directly into the service providers hands,” he said. “There are religious groups, friends, but not the government. Folks in the U.S. who want to help, we can take them down there to do face-to-face introduction.”

Hoover has been involved in advocacy for 33 years. He founded Humane Borders in 2000, which is a local faith nonprofit that maintains a system of water stations for migrants travelling through the desert to use. He left his position in the organization in 2010, and retired from ministry two years later.

Despite the change, Hoover said he is still very active in advocacy for migrants and the issues they’re facing today. He’s been working “quietly” on specific projects, experimenting with satellite locator beacons for migrants and issuing flashlights for rescue operations. He published a book in 2016 called “Creating Humane Borders.” In it he gives an ethical analysis of border policies, an overview of the help faith communities provide and his recommendations for policy reform. He lectures and goes on speaking tours as well.

“There's a lot of people who want to do the right thing and [learn] how they can help,” Hoover said. “The resistance is just this hate-filled Trump administration and all the anti-immigrant sentiments. It means that any kind of substantial reform is still a long ways away.”

Migrant Status, Inc. is actively seeking contributions to continue dispersing valuable information to migrants. Contributions can be mailed to 2250 W. Painted Circle, Tucson, AZ 85745.

“Five dollar contributions make all the difference,” he said. “When I ran Humane Borders we raised a quarter of a million dollars and it was a Mississippi of five dollar bills, so what people contribute really does matter.”

Before Mort Rosenblum reported on international wars, joined the Associated Press, or received eight Pulitzer Prize nominations, he attended the University of Arizona as a young Tucsonan. Now, after more than half-a-century of journalism, Rosenblum is taking to teaching local citizens

about news literacy, and how to find out what’s going on in these complex times.

Part of the UA’s Community Classroom series, Rosenblum’s class, “Keeping Tabs on a Mad World: A Correspondent’s Guide to Global News That Matters” is a series of five weekly lectures to “equip townsfolk who give a damn about how to follow news that matters in the world.”

How did a professor of journalism get involved in teaching to the public? Are you tired of college students?

No, no, it’s the other way around. I started out at the University of Arizona back in 1831 or whenever, and I started working for the Star, then I joined the Associated Press in 1965. Then a couple years later I found myself in the Congo… I was covering a mercenary war in the middle of Africa. But at one point, when I was running the International Herald Tribune in Paris, I got asked do come back and do short courses teaching during summer vacation, and I really liked that. But then in 2004 when I finally left the Associated Press, I was asked to come back and do a short course in international reporting, and that to me is the most important thing I do. Because if we old crocs don’t pass along what we’ve learned the hard way to new generation of reporters that have better tools and often much better skills than we did, things are gonna get lost.

How much freedom did you have in crafting this course, and what are you going to do to ensure it’s not just a seminar or a lecture?

For one thing, I fall asleep in seminars and lectures, so I’d probably fall asleep while doing one. So what I’m going to do is engage an audience, I’ve got some incredible footage and interviews I’ve already done… There will be some lecture and explanation but there will also be lively back-and-forth discussion, there will be video clips, Skyped and taped interviews with people who do the news. So it’s not just me sitting and talking.

What is news literacy?

News literacy is a term someone came up with, and I wouldn’t use... But to be news literate, you need good solid sources to start with: a daily, The Times, The Post, The Guardian. You need to have television sources which take you to a story in certain ways – you get to see the faces and hear the words… So once you have an understanding of what the real-world problems are, the real crises in the world, and once you have an idea of how they fit together, essentially once you open a world map and look at it, then it doesn’t actually take much time to follow the major changes.

Do you think there’s a difference between when you started college and the college students of today, or any seekers of knowledge today?

There’s a huge difference. Today, we have this “Tower of Babble,” words are everywhere. And so the good stuff is better than ever, if you know how to find it. But it’s like looking for nuggets in a garbage can… So the trick is to find those basic, solid sources you trust, individuals more than organizations these days. Give yourself a basic framework, and then go from there. Otherwise you’ll just get drowned out.

Can a person nowadays truly know what’s going on in the world?

A person can know what a person doesn’t know. Truly know? No. But know more than people who just make it up or just listen to what some clown politician tells them? Yeah. And so my purpose for this course is to help people inform themselves with solid reliable sources, about what’s happening now and what’s likely to happen. When you study journalism, the old questions are who, what, where. But the important ones are why, and what next?

An amendment to the neighborhood plans of Miramonte and Broadway-Alvernon was granted by Tucson City Council yesterday to allow for an “adaptive re-use” of the Benedictine Monastery. This latest development will bring the developer, Tucson Monastery, LLC, the city and the residents one step closer to finalizing development plans on the historic site.

The mayor and council unanimously passed a motion to amend the plans to allow for public use of the monastery and to incorporate a joint letter of agreement between the Tucson Monastery, LLC and the residents as conditions of the rezoning. It is still undecided what the monastery will be used for in the future, so the letter of agreement ensures that the public will have a say in the outcome.

The letter also ensures that no student housing will be established on the site surrounding the monastery, but rather 250 units of high-end apartments. It states any building cannot surpass 55 feet in height (which council member Steve Kozachik said is about 30 feet less than where this conversation began) and a row of oleanders on the southern and eastern sides of the property will remain intact.

The 7.5 acre site has split zoning between O-3 (professional and semiprofessional office, high density residential developments, and limited research and development uses) and R-3 (high density residential, primarily for apartments or single-family development).

Kozachik, of Ward 6 where the monastery resides, gave a ten-minute speech explaining the long and difficult process that preceded this agreement and amendment. He said the original zoning of the site allows for 660 student housing beds and complete demolition of the monastery. In May the council initiated the process of providing the Benedictine Monastery with a historic landmark designation, which protects it from demolition.

There have been dozens of meetings, hundreds of people included in public outreach by the developer and the architect, three planning commission hearings and significant neighborhood communication, according to Kozachik.

He said in the beginning of this process, the developer had an underlying entitlement because of the existing zoning and made some initial proposals. Over a hundred people came to each of the two public meetings held to discuss the proposals last summer.

“At the first one, where the initial concept of a project was presented, it was seven stories tall, it was approximately 86 feet tall, and there was an audible gasp in the room when the rendering of that was shown on the screen,” Kozachik said. “Remembering, of course, that the underlying zoning still existed and that was the opening gambit for what was going to be proposed.”

After that bad reaction, the developer worked with the Miramonte and Sam Hughes neighborhood associations to make some consensus about what would be done with the property. With this agreement and amendment passed, a rezoning process can move forward.

“I sit here tonight wanting to just simply make the point that we are preserving the monastery, there will not be student housing, we have significantly reduced the mass over what was originally proposed, there will be a public use of the monastery, and there will be a public process going forward,” Kozachik said. “It’s been a difficult process, everyone knew it was going to be because this is a sensitive site.”