Text stroke hiding interior text

[Faith5C32]

Hello all, 

I am trying to create a stroke around the text here like my client wants in the screenshot where the text is black, etc. and the stroke is white, 2pt, and slightly rounded. 

Yet...when I attempt to do so, the stroke swallows the interior color fill and it just looks like a white mess. To be honest, I am not super familiar with adding strokes via the appearances panel, but I am happy to have the learning curve here as I'm assuming this is what the client did. When attempting to drag the stroke below the fill in Appearance Panel, Ai won't allow me to. 

Thanks!

[Monika Gause]

You need to select the text with the selection tool and then in the Appearance panel add the stroke to it. Then drag it below the characters. 

So the stroke should be on the Type, not on the characters

[Faith5C32]

Thank you! Now what I am trying to do here is apply a different stroke and fill color to an individual collection of characters, but when I attempt to do so, nothing happens. As you can see in the appearance panel, the stroke is said to be light blue, but it still shows black.

[Monika Gause]

Do not select the characters. Select the text object. There are the things that you need to edit.

And please describe what you want more precisely. I don't think I understand it.

[Jacob Bugge]

Faith,

When you select the text with the Type Tool, you can change the colour of individual latters, but not adding/removing a stroke.

As Monika has said, you can (only) Add (and remove) a stroke when selected with the Selection Tool, and that applies to the whole Type instance.

If you need to change both fill colour and stroke (or no stroke) for individual letters, you can Outline the Type (thereby losing the editability as live Type), or you can work in more or less cunning/silly ways with multiple Type instances, when you can make (repeated) edition of the live Type.

[Monika Gause]

Of course you can have different fills on the words, but then a uniform stroke. You apply the fill to the characters and the stroke to the text object. But I'm really not sure here about the desired result.