In “The Adoption Trap,” freelance journalist Sandy West took a deep look at private foster and adoption agencies operating in Texas with little regulation or oversight from state child welfare authorities. With support from the Fund, West focused on two women locked in court battles to maintain their parental rights in lawsuits filed by people to whom neither they nor ...
As part of the Utah Investigative Journalism Project’s ongoing coverage of gaps in support for survivors of domestic violence and lackluster law-enforcement response in some cases, Eric Peterson and Sydnee Chapman reported on the case of a man who allegedly attacked his girlfriend and kidnapped her children – after Utah prosecutors had dropped charges against him in a 2022 domestic-violence ...
Journalist Rebecca Grant’s new book, Access: Inside the Abortion Underground and the 60-Year Battle for Reproductive Freedom, from Simon & Schuster’s Avid Reader Press, charts the reproductive freedom movement from the days before Roe through the seismic impact of Dobbs, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing states to ban abortion. With support from the Fund, Grant investigated how, in the wake of the Dobbs decision, ...
For Rolling Stone, Antonia Juhasz traveled through rural Louisiana and New Orleans to talk to local community members about how President Donald Trump’s tax bill would gut funding for environmental work – and how that would impact people’s lives. An EPA employee told her that the result will surely be that more people get sick and die. With support from ...
Brightline, the nation’s only privately owned city-to-city passenger train, has failed to implement basic safety measures – and 182 people have died on the railway in the last eight years, according to an investigation by WLRN (the NPR member station in South Florida) and the Miami Herald, with support from the Fund. Reporters spent a year combing federal rail data, ...
The second season of Katie Thornton’s podcast, “The Divided Dial” recently aired on WNYC’s “On the Media” and NPR stations nationwide, digging into the history of shortwave radio propaganda and how it became a recruiting tool for militias and laid the groundwork for right-wing use of the internet and podcasts. The Fund supported the first season of the podcast, which ...
An investigation by Streetlight, a nonprofit news outlet based in Oklahoma City, found that most information from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on facilities under its oversight excluded data on Black residents who live within one mile of factories, Superfund sites and other toxic sites. This omission affected a majority-Black neighborhood in Oklahoma City that has fought for better environmental ...
Journalist Dom Phillips and activist Bruno Pereira were brutally murdered in the Amazon while Phillips was investigating illegal fishing in the region for his book, “How to Save the Amazon.” The book was about halfway finished when Phillips was killed, and a group of journalists came together to finish it for him – with support from the Fund and several ...
Independent journalist Beth Shelburne partnered with the Alabama Reflector to investigate the state’s runaway legal spending in defending its prison system. Shelburne obtained and examined years of state finance data connected to civil litigation against prison staff, discovering that the state’s legal spending has surpassed $57 million since 2020. The resulting four-part series revealed an extraordinary number of excessive force ...
Following up on their investigation into the health impact Van Nuys Airport has on Southern California residents, a team from Capital & Main found that the airport is not complying with a decade-old requirement to post warnings about exposure to hazardous fuel. The investigation was supported by the Fund, and it documented widespread community concerns about the airport. Van Nuys ...