Last year was not a good one for Rockford, Illinois. First the New York Times Magazine published a photo and audio tour featuring two-dozen of the city’s residents under the beleaguered banner “ Portraits From a Job-Starved City .” Then Forbes tapped the community as the 10th most dangerous town in America. Finally, the worst rub: The Daily Show dropped in and made the place a punch line.

This was more than one city could combat with a Chamber of Commerce campaign. And at least one resident thought that all the jabs missed the point about Rockford, anyway. For years, Pablo Korona had been acting as an unofficial champion of the city, arguing with discouraged locals and out-of-town doubters about the value and talent all over his hometown. Rockford just needed to tell its own story better–-both to itself and everyone else. So earlier this year he unveiled a spiffy website full of charming mini web documentaries about the good side of Rockford, gathered for the project Our City, Our Story.

The latest of his 13 episodes is a four-and-a-half minute profile called “Our Curiosity” about the local family-owned company that produced all the gears in the Mars Curiosity Rover. No one was talking about little Rockford’s impressive Space bona fides until this video went viral.

“I felt like all the authenticity of what this city was, was lost in many people trying to put out this polished view,” Korona says. City officials had come up with the slogan “Real. Original. Rockford, Illinois.” “Usually when you have to state that you’re real, some people maybe start to doubt that.” And then there was that other problem with cheery branding campaigns: “Well what happens when you do a Google search?” Korona asks. “You do a Google search on the city here and you’re going to pull up all the negative articles.”

Last November Korona quit his job working for a local ad agency–where he sometimes worked on the very same municipal branding campaigns that he felt were not succeeding. Rockford’s low point in the national news coincided with his itch to find his own voice as a video producer. He conceived this project and launched a Kickstarter campaign to begin funding it. Within 48 hours, contributors had doubled his goal of $3,750. That was his first indication, he says, that people in town were eager for such an idea after a year of national bashing.

“The biggest challenge with [the criticism] is feeling like you don’t have a voice,” says Andrea Mandala, a community supporter of Korona’s project. “We need more people to step up and have a voice–not necessarily just to lash out against what they’re saying, but to open everyone’s eyes. Pablo’s opened peoples’ eyes.”

Each of Korono’s videos, produced with the help of volunteers, focuses on a small scene or single person in the city. There’s one about the grandson of a Sicilian tailor in town, another on a Rockford-born historian who changed how the world thinks of ancient civilization, and a third about a special-needs baseball program created by a local mom. These are meant to be stories about character, not stories about economic development or even necessarily business success.