A small group doing the reading
Nobody here is an expert. We read the documents, which turns out to be most of the job.
Home Ground started because two people in Kingston kept having the same frustrating conversation.
Something is visibly wrong in this city. Ask ten people what’s causing it and you’ll get ten answers, most of them confident and few of them sourced. Meanwhile decisions get made at Council, at Queen’s Park and in provincial funding announcements, and the people affected by those decisions are rarely in the room.
Council reports, court rulings and public health data are all sitting there in public. Almost nobody reads them, so the loudest version of a story usually wins.
We read the primary sources and publish what they say, with links attached, in language you can use at a council meeting or across a dinner table.
How we work
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We publish sources for everything
If we can’t point to where a number came from, it doesn’t go on the site.
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We drop claims that don’t hold up, including our own
There’s a section on our sources page listing things we looked into and could not verify. One of them was a story we believed when we started.
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We use the language health agencies use
People who use substances, rather than terms that carry judgement. The Public Health Agency of Canada publishes guidance on this and it costs us nothing to follow it.