By Eric Ferrero, Executive DirectorIt’s been six months since Jane C. Hu’s deeply reported investigation on public health officials being hounded out of their jobs by right-wing extremists was published, and I still talk about her story nearly every week. It’s one of those stories that sticks with you – partly because it’s even more relevant now than when it ...
Documentary filmmaker Erika Cohn, with a grant from the Fund, worked for seven years to tell the story of illegal sterilizations in California prisons and jails. Her film, “Belly of the Beast,” builds on the reporting of Corey G. Johnson, then working for the Center for Investigative Reporting, and focuses on the fight of inmate Kelli Dillon and her lawyer against ...
Heat kills. And in the United States in the past decade, heat has killed nearly 400 workers — mostly people of color — who were employed in often-grueling outdoor work collecting trash, picking crops and constructing buildings. But it took a team of investigative reporters from Columbia Journalism Investigations and National Public Radio, with support from the Fund, to focus ...
A Dallas Morning News investigation, supported with a grant from the Fund, revealed a pattern of allegations of abuse, including flashlight beatings, chokings and racial slurs, against a Dallas police sergeant, but found that the officer was rarely disciplined. Black people and Latinos lodged most of the complaints against Sgt. Roger Rudloff, who is white, the reporters found. It took nearly ...
Under investigation after colleagues complained about unprofessional behavior and allegations from parents that she had wrongly accused them of child abuse, Dr. Barbara Knox left the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in 2019 to take a new position in Alaska. But she soon encountered new accusations of wrongdoing. On January 28, 2022, she announced her resignation ...
The Daily Chronicle, which covers several communities in and around DeKalb County in Illinois, is publishing a series that examines the condition of public drinking water system in Sycamore, where residents are complaining about foul smelling, yellowish water running from their taps. With support from The Fund, the newspaper has filed public records request that showed that local officials have ...
In the multi-part series, “Diabetes: The Rising Storm,” Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting founder and reporter Jerry Mitchell, working with a team of students and photographers, exposed the human cost of this killer disease. With a grant from the Fund, the series highlighted the Mississippi Delta, which has the greatest frequency of diabetes of any community in the United States. This story chronicled how ...
The Arkansas Nonprofit News Network published a series of stories that showed that, contrary to officials’ claims, multiple inspectors over several years had missed serious problems on a bridge on Interstate 40 that links Tennessee and Arkansas. Arkansas officials had claimed that one inspector failed to detect a crack in the bridge, and that inspector was fired. With a grant from the Fund, the ...
Veteran reporter Seth Rosenfeld worked for two years to break through extraordinary secrecy at the California Public Utilities Commission and report on a lack of safety oversight of Uber, Lyft and other ride-hailing companies. With a grant from the Fund, Rosenfeld reported for the San Francisco Public Press that the commission withheld safety reports not only from the public but ...