Grantees’ Stories

New York became the first state in the nation to set up a workers’ compensation system in the wake of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The program covers medical bills and cash for recovery time for countless injured workers. But in recent years, the program’s benefits have quietly shrunk by over a third, according to a new investigation by ...

Thousands of children in the throes of mental health crises are turned over to foster care each year by parents who can’t access – or afford – the treatment they need, according to a first-ever database of such “relinquishments” created by The Imprint, with support from the Fund. More than 20 years ago, a report for Congress identified this problem, ...

Miami-based Armor Correctional Health Services has a long history of complaints of providing subpar care to inmates – and has even been convicted of felony abuse over the death of an inmate. Even though Florida law bars companies with such convictions from doing business with the state, the state has continued to contract with Armor companies, according to reporting by ...

When the FBI investigated the Cook County Sherriff’s Office for a ghost-payrolling scheme in 2022, agents uncovered evidence that a high-ranking official had been involved in misconduct years earlier – and was not disciplined, but promoted. The FBI found that the official had been robbed at gunpoint outside of an illegal gambling den and fired his county-issued gun at the ...

U.S. immigration policies in President Donald Trump’s second term have exacerbated a serious humanitarian crisis – stranding many people in remote, dangerous areas where aid workers are unable to reach them – according to new reporting in The New Humanitarian, with support from the Fund. A team of reporters tracked so-called “reverse migration” by people who were fleeing violence in ...

For a decade, the nonprofit Colibrí Center for Human Rights worked with state agencies and humanitarian organizations to identify migrants whose remains were found along the U.S.-Mexico border. As part of this work, the organization managed a database of DNA samples from families across the U.S. and Latin America, facilitating hundreds of successful identifications. But in 2024, the database itself ...

With support from the Fund, Gabrielle Russon obtained 700 pages of depositions from a civil lawsuit stemming from the Walt Disney Company’s battle with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in recent years. The dispute arose after Disney leaders spoke out against a state law in Florida restricting discussion of LGBT issues in schools. Depositions of three key Disney executives show that ...

After the Trump Administration created the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, in early 2025, more than 5,800 U.S. Forest Service employees were forced out of their jobs. With support from the Fund, Christine Peterson documented the impact of these cuts on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, a 30,000-square-mile are in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. She found ...

The ongoing tariff war between the United States and China has driven up demand for soy produced in Brazil – and record levels of soy production are likely to have a significant environmental impact. A 580-mile railroad through the Amazon has been proposed to support increased soy production, but Indigenous communities and environmental advocates oppose it. With support from the ...

There are thousands of wells around Texas that produce low levels of gas and oil and are leased by companies operating on a shoestring. Different than the problem of non-producing “orphan” wells that have been covered extensively in the media, these low-producing wells are allowed to continue operating unless oil companies spend thousands of dollars to close them. Some ranchers ...