Show Up for the League: Our 2026 Community Dinner

Thursday, April 23, 6:00–9:00 PM at The Unitarian Church of Evanston
by Helen Gagel

Join us for this special LWVE fundraiser! The focus will be Who Owns the Truth? Journalism in the Age of Distrust. A panel moderated by Natalie Moore will feature Chicago-area journalists dedicated to ensuring the public’s right to know.

This event will build on a tradition of the League of Women Voters of Evanston (also representing Skokie): community dinners featuring expert perspectives on issues aligned with our history of study and activism. Our April 23, 2026 dinner shines the spotlight on an essential element of our democracy, one undergoing rapid change that threatens to impede public access to reliable information. The question on the table– Who Owns the Truth? Journalism in the Age of Distrust– will be addressed by a panel of Chicago-area journalists dedicated to ensuring the public’s right to know.

The experts
Why "show up" for the League?
How to register and support the event

The Experts
Our panel will feature award-winning Chicago-area journalists dedicated to the public’s right to full and accurate information.

Natalie Moore, moderator, senior lecturer and director of audio journalism programming at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Her faculty appointment follows a 17-year career at WBEZ-Radio, where her award-winning reporting focused on race, housing, economic development, food injustice, and violence. Moore is also the author of The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, winner of the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction.
Rummana Hussain, columnist and opinion editor for the Chicago Sun-Times. Prior assignments at the Sun-Times include assistant metro editor, criminal courts reporter, and general assignment reporter. Prior to joining the Sun-Times she was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and City News Bureau. She was named a Jefferson Journalism Fellow by the East-West Center in 2006.
Adriana Cardona-Maguigad, a WBEZ reporter focused on Latina/Latino issues and immigration. In recent months she has covered ICE incursions in the Chicago area. She won multiple awards for an audio project for WBEZ and NPR’s This American Life about unregulated drug rehab centers in Chicago that lured addicts from Puerto Rico on the promise of treatment, only for them to instead end up in the streets.
Morgan Elise Johnson, co-founder and publisher of The TRiiBE a digital media platform “reshaping the narrative of Black Chicago in pursuit of truth and liberation” (thetriibe.com). She has earned wide recognition as a rising journalist, including the Women of Excellence Award from the Chicago Defender in 2025, which honored her for “building a new blueprint for Black media, ensuring our narratives are told authentically, boldly, and without apology.”

One topic that may come up during the discussion is the growing incidence of “news deserts” in the U.S. The Medill School’s 2025 State of Local News Report identified 213 counties as news deserts, up from 206 in 2024. “In another 1,524 counties, there is only one remaining news source,” the report noted. Taken together, some 50 million Americans have “limited to no access to local news.” Happily, that is not the case in Evanston, where we have multiple sources of local news, among them the Evanston RoundTable, Evanston Now, and The Daily Northwestern. We have invited Tracy Quattrocki, publisher and executive editor of the RoundTable, to introduce our panel and comment on the challenges of covering the news as a nonprofit enterprise.

Why You Should Show Up for the League on April 23
For more than a century the League of Women Voters has been showing up:

For voters and voting rights: League registrars sign up and welcome new voters. Our pre-election forums provide neutral space for candidates to present their qualifications and for voters to assess them. And, in our second century, Leagues all over the country are working to protect voting rights against restrictive legislation enacted in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby v. Holder.
For responsive government: Changing times require governments at all levels to adapt. Leagues at all levels— local, county, state and national— advocate for policy and legislation in critical areas such as education, the environment, health care, and housing.
For transparency in government: When legislatures, city and village councils, county boards, and school boards are in session, League members are present as neutral observers. We “show up” to ensure that the people’s business is conducted in keeping with governing statutes and constituents’ needs and expectations.

The Community Dinner is our ONLY major fundraiser. ALL proceeds go to support our local LWVE endeavors (unlike your dues, much of which goes to the state and national Leagues).

How to support the event
Here’s how you can support the event:

Attend– and invite friends to join you. Individual tickets are $250; a table of 8 is $2000. All ticket purchases and donations are tax-deductible, less the cost of the meal. (You will receive a statement to that effect.) Invitations have gone out by mail, but you may also register online on our website Community Dinner Event page.
Can’t attend? Make a donation. Coming, but interested in doing more? Your donation will help to offset the cost of the event, enable us to invite a community member as a guest, and/or help to support our other activities. See the Event page for donation instructions. You can also just call the LWVE office (847-859-7883) or email info@LWVE.org to learn more.
Share news of the event with your book clubs, sewing circles, exercise groups, social media contacts. Contact the office if you want a few invitations to mail, and/or download a PDF of the invitation and email it to your contacts.
Identify potential sponsors from local businesses and institutions. Forward your suggestions to Georgia Vlahos or Lisa Seegers, LWVE Co-Presidents, at president@LWVE.org.
Check the Community Dinner Event page on our website for updates–and share the link with friends and colleagues.

Natalie Moore, moderator– senior lecturer and director of audio journalism programming at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.

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Show Up for the League: Our 2026 Community Dinner

Thursday, April 23, 6:00–9:00 PM at The Unitarian Church of Evanston by Helen Gagel

Thursday, April 23, 6:00–9:00 PM at The Unitarian Church of Evanston
by Helen Gagel