Hey Verified News Community! VNN’s Brittany Harlow here. Thanks for joining me for our July News Byte!
July has been the busiest and biggest month of the year for the VNN team thus far!
We teamed up with Osage News and several other collaborators for our first American Indian History Symposium Indigenous Roots.
We made a major donation to the Tulsa City County Library while we were there - nearly $19K to unlock hundreds of thousands of American Indian records for the public.
And we premiered our new mini documentary “Indigenous Roots: Natural pathways between history and today” featuring Cherokee Citizen Joe Ballard and his licensed clinician wife Grace.
As if those weren’t enough community events, the VNN Media Services team also put on “The Gathering Business Summit” with the American Indian Chamber of Commerce of Oklahoma. I even had the opportunity to interview Assistant Secretary - Indian Affairs Bryan Newland about Indian Country Business!
You can read more about it in our series Native Commerce News presented by AICCO.
In other Native news, VNN Oklahoma’s Rachael Schuit reported how State Superintendent Ryan Walters’ Bible teaching mandate and mission to have social studies developed by Prager-U could impact Native history education in Oklahoma.
She also explored the topic of homelessness amongst Native Youth in Tulsa, which is twice the rate of white youth homelessness in the city.
And over in OKC, Trista Vaughn and Brittany Harlow attended the Indigenous Journalists Association’s Indigenous Media Conference for the first time!
VNN is turning 6 on August 1st! We can’t wait to celebrate our birthday week with you, so keep an eye out for some great information coming up via email and social media. Subscribe and follow if you haven’t already!
And make sure to make the VNN app and its latest newsfeed part of your news routine. Just go to app.verifiednews.network and save it to your phone’s home screen. Bookmarking works, too!
Thanks for tuning in for this month’s quick VNN News Byte.
See you back here in August!