While other criminal justice reform advanced in Connecticut over the last couple of years, one increasingly contentious issue was untouched – elimination of cash bail. With support from the Fund, reporter Kelan Lyons of the Connecticut Mirror spent a year observing court proceedings in Hartford and New Britain, conducting several dozen interviews, and crunching state data to show that even ...
With one of the Fund’s new follow-up grants, which help grantees continue reporting stories after the initial investigation is published, High Country News and the Nevada Independent uncovered a pattern of Nevada Gold Mines jeopardizing worker safety and limiting reports of accidents. After their initial story ran earlier this year, reporters Nick Bowlin and Daniel Rothberg received a wave of ...
For decades, the federal government has known that climate change will force people in the U.S. to relocate – but has failed to provide funding or a plan to help them. As a result, communities are left in harm’s way as floods, hurricanes, fires and other climate-related disasters mount. A team of journalists, with a grant from the Fund, spent ...
A major development project in New York City promised benefits to the community – but those commitments have not been kept and there is often no way to hold developers accountable in such situations, reporter Neil deMause found in an investigation for CityLimits. With a grant from the Fund, deMause dug into community benefits agreements, or CBAs, that are touted ...
In Hawaii, 85 percent of children who were removed from their parents in abuse and neglect cases last year were removed without a court order. Hawaii Civil Beat’s John Hill has produced an extensive series supported by the Fund, which has chronicled the clash of parental rights and workers who manage child protective services, including police. His latest story highlighted a ruling ...
The Food and Drug Administration has been investigating for four years whether the increasing popularity of grain-free dog food has led to a rise in heart disease in dogs, but has yet to reach a conclusion. A tangled web of industry funding and interests appears to have influenced the origin, data collection and course of the FDA study, according to ...
The Environmental Protection Agency has stepped up its focus on a group of chemicals known as PFAS, which are found in drinking water and many common products – but the tests the EPA is using to assess drinking water are likely missing significant levels of the pollutant, reporter Tom Perkins found for an investigation in the Guardian supported by the ...
The timber industry has claimed that logging actually helps address climate change – a claim disputed by most environmentalists but supported by the Nature Conservancy, the largest such nonprofit in the country, which has been dogged by accusations that its ties to large corporations compromise its focus on its mission. In a new investigation for Grist, with support from the ...
In a series for Capital & Main supported by the Fund, reporter Aaron Cantu, a fellow with Type Investigations, found that state and federal efforts to reduce air pollution in California’s San Joaquin Valley may not be working. For the year-long investigation, he examined public records, interviewed residents and experts, and worked with organizations who use specialized emissions-capturing cameras. The ...
In a deep dive into thousands of pages of documents, reporter Laurence Du Sault, writing for Open Vallejo and ProPublica, probed what happens inside the Vallejo, California, police department after police kill civilians. With a grant and editorial mentorship from the Fund, Du Sault and the Open Vallejo team analyzed and coded years of internal police records, built two databases ...