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 ...
In a series of stories for San Francisco Public Press, veteran reporter Seth Rosenfeld has exposed a culture of secrecy at the California Public Utilities Commission that has made it nearly impossible for the public to know if dangerous drivers for ride-sharing companies were being taken off the road. The commission has enormous powers, regulating power companies, water, telephone, transportation ...
Willamette Week reporter Nigel Jaquiss first learned in 2020 about Portland’s interest in undoing the damage done to a historically Black neighborhood after a highway had been built that had erased 1,000 homes and gutted the local business district. With support from the Fund, he was able two years later to report on the city’s efforts to spend $90 million ...
The industrial jobs that employed a generation of residents of Akron, Ohio, are mostly gone, but the health effects of the toxins they worked around every day live on. Some illnesses are only now surfacing, and, if the findings of epigenetics and toxic exposure studies are any indication, they could keep doing so for generations. With grants from the Fund, reporter Yanick Rice Lamb, who ...