Candy Neal is still loving the community that loves her

After Candy Neal moved her mother, Josephine, to Jasper from St. Louis in 2023, at least a dozen people reached out to ensure she was registered to vote in Dubois County.

The gestures reflected the kindness for someone new in the community and the endearing care the community had extended to Candy over her 23 years covering it for The Herald.

They remembered what Candy had written about ten years earlier.

“There was a story I wrote in The Herald about how my mother made sure she always went to vote,” Candy explained. “And she would take me with her; teaching me about this specific duty.”

They wanted to be sure Ms. Neal could vote.

“They remembered that,” Candy laughed. “That’s just one little, itty bitty thing.”

A seemingly small story about the generational impact of a mother’s dedication to ensuring she cast a vote and passed on that dedication to her daughter stuck with the readers.

It’s one of the reasons Candy decided to stay in Dubois County after being hired by The Herald in 1997. Originally, she saw the newspaper as the first in several steps to eventually ending up in Baltimore. That’s what reporters could do back then. They built their repertoire of work, got noticed, and moved to the next stepping stone to eventually land a gig with a prominent newspaper.

“Reporters bounced,” Candy explained. “I figured my bouncing was going to be from here to Louisville to Baltimore.”

But something was different about Dubois County from the beginning for the 28-year-old who had lived in Midtown St. Louis her entire life.

After having a good interview for the position with The Herald, Candy stuck around town that day, ending up in Snaps that evening. “People were extremely kind and pleasant,” she said. “And, they would just come up and talk to you.”

She realized that if she got the job, she’d probably move here and be here forever.

She got the job. After settling in and becoming involved in the community, she fell in love and her snap decision was affirmed.

The power of being a reporter in a small town or rural community is being able to ask anyone anything. This also means you get to meet a lot of people and do a lot of things you’d never expect to be able to do–something Candy loved about her job.

Gathering stories also means inserting yourself into situations and taking part in other people’s lives. Candy has a rich history of experiences with people in Dubois County. She’s made homemade turnip sauerkraut (“I didn’t like it,” she said.), sewn homemade Halloween costumes, went to former President Barrack Obama’s inauguration, followed local leaders and business owners around, attended a quinceanera, rode along with police at night and so much more.

She loved immersing herself in other people’s lives and the shortcuts it allowed her to take to live vicariously through them as she developed stories.

“I got to do it for a minute, just to get that experience,” Candy said.

And while she was doing it, people were getting to know her as well.

“I fell in love with this community because of the people,” she explained. “People want to get to know you. Just as I was asking questions for my story, they were asking questions about my background.”

Not only were they asking questions, but they were remembering what she told them. So, it shouldn’t have been a surprise when they called to ensure Ms. Neal was registered to vote.

But for someone from St. Louis, this was foreign to Candy. “Coming from a big city, you don’t get that,” she said. “I knew the people in my neighborhood, but I couldn’t tell you who had a surgery or whose daughter in Jefferson City got married or anything like that.”

It’s different around here.

Falling in love with your home while being a journalist is like seeing two truths about your family. While you know what you love about your family, you also know intimately what breaks your heart.

For Candy, that is the bias she has seen.

“We still have challenges with the Latino community,” she said.

Whether it is a blatant bias or a more subtle, sometimes unrealized bias, those feelings exist in Dubois County.

“That’s upsetting because I’ve seen that kind of bias against minorities–Black people, Latino People, Native Americans–in St. Louis,” she added. “When I first got here and heard things people said about Latinos, it gave me pause to consider how they may be speaking about the Black community.”

She’s enthused by the activities of groups like ALASI, who are making strides in building bridges and understanding between these cultures to reduce bias.

“I do think it is getting better,” Candy said.

However, she is also concerned about the impact of isolationism, which seems to be growing. “People are so busy. All of our schedules are too full,” she explained.

In this fast-paced, busy lifestyle, she wonders who you are really getting to know.

This lifestyle leads to isolationism and a slide into those bias-reinforcing algorithms on social media disguised as entertainment and connections, ultimately breaking the connections that Candy fell in love with.

“The more we start to isolate ourselves, the less we get to know each and then when we don’t get to know each other, we start coming up with ideas about each other based on what we see on social media and on television,” Candy said.

Her love for the community and the impact she was able to make as a journalist carried over into her new career when she left The Herald in 2021. Through her position as the director of Dubois County CARES (Coalition for Adolescent Resilience and Empowerment Strategies), she is now working to reduce drug and alcohol use among the county’s children. That includes attempting to work on building communities and relationships within these adolescent communities.

She is also addressing another issue she sees in Dubois County: the proclivity for having an alcoholic drink in hand at any event, whether it is a 12-year-old’s birthday party, tailgating high school football games, baby shower, or a t-ball game where it’s hidden in a tumbler.

“Can we just stop normalizing that,” she said, pulling on her advocacy hat for CARES.

She recognizes that it’s not a unique problem in Dubois County, but she’s planted herself here and wants to make a difference for future generations.

“We are teaching our kids that in order to have a good time, you have to have alcohol with you,” she said. “Granted, that’s what we were taught too but somewhere, we have to realize that this is a problem and we need to break that cycle.”

She uses her skills as a journalist in Dubois County daily to promote the change CARES is advocating for. Whether that’s asking the hard questions, promoting a better story or meeting with other leaders and groups in the community, those skills have built a foundation for her work in this mission.

Candy’s favorite part of the day is when she first wakes up. She can contemplate what opportunities and possibilities the day may hold in the comfort of her bed.

That’s when the ideas come to her.

“What would happen if we did something like that. Or What about something like this,” she asks. “I don’t know, but maybe we put that out there.”

Then, in the afternoon, she likes to look back at her day and consider what’s been accomplished, whether it’s a big report, taking small steps toward completing another project or making connections.

“I have to force myself to see what’s been accomplished because I have to have something to motivate me,” Candy explained. “Progress is being made. Something is being done, and we’ve done something good for our area.”

Whether that’s a little thing that isn’t great by itself or the final little thing that culminates in the big thing coming together, Candy is still working to make the community that chose her even better.