This is the first installment from the 2025 Citizen Journalism class: a photo essay by Shriaditi Kancherla titled “An afternoon at Johnson Park”. In this series, Kancherla captures both the activity and the serenity of the park. 

Piscataway, NJ - Johnson Park lands at the crossroads of urban sprawl, where populated towns Piscataway, Highland Park, and New Brunswick fade into acres of trees and the scent of grass. 

Trenton, NJ - New Jersey prides itself as the “Garden State.” Yet the paradox is stark: while family farms harvest peaches, tomatoes, kale, and corn, schoolchildren in lower-income districts still miss out on the local gifts of the Garden State at lunchtime. Simultaneously, small and mid-sized growers say they need steadier, closer-to-home buyers to make ends meet.

Food inequity in New Jersey can be highlighted by data estimates that in 2022, almost 262,000 children lived in food-insecure households. Those numbers jumped alongside inflation as pandemic support unwound. In turn, for many school-age children, the lunch line is often the surest path to a fresh and healthy meal. 

They are everybody's children

Newark, NJ - I’ve been struggling to understand how, for almost 2 years, politicians and mainstream media outlets have managed to keep up the charade that there wasn’t a genocide occurring in Gaza. 

Even beyond the usual taboos and the early and loose declarations of anti-Semitism, politicians still felt comfortable backing up their votes to send even more bombs to Israel.