Grantees investigate impact of contaminated water from California prison on residents of nearby town
Freelance journalist Emily Nonko teamed up with D. Razor Babb, a journalist who is incarcerated in state prison in California, to report on health concerns stemming from water quality inside the prison and in the surrounding community. With support from the Fund, the pair identified illnesses among incarcerated people, prison staff and people living in communities near the prison. ...
South Dakota Searchlight and ICT, with support from the Fund, have teamed up for a long-term project to document cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people in South Dakota. This month, the team reported on the murder of Acey Morrison, a transgender woman and member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. It took four years for the man who killed her ...
With support from the Fund, Streetlight, a nonprofit news outlet, found that a Muskogee, Oklahoma, data center has received workplace safety and state environmental violations while using millions of gallons of municipal water a day. The Bitcoin mining facility run by Polaris is part of a race to bring more data centers to Oklahoma as technology companies double down on ...
Close to one-third of all city-funded apartments for formerly homeless people in San Francisco are run by the nonprofit HomeRise, but the organization has struggled to live up to its promises, endangering its residents and its mission, an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle and UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program found. Regulators have flagged the nonprofit’s failures, only to see ...
For KUNM, the public radio station in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Kent Patterson and Mercedes Mejia produced an hourlong documentary on environmental pollution and efforts to pursue environmental justice in two communities that straddle the U.S./Mexico border. With support from the Fund, the team filed a public-records requests to obtain a 700-page transcript of an administrative hearing for a state fine ...
Journalist Caron Creighton’s feature-length documentary film, “Wood Street,” premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Film festival and will screen in Michigan and North Carolina next month. Produced with support from the Fund, the film documents the experiences of people living at one of the largest homeless encampments on the West Coast. When the city moved to evict them from the ...
The Tar Creek area of Oklahoma was a mining site for a nearly a century, leading it to be designated a Superfund site because of significant toxic pollution. As recently as the 1990s, one-third of children in the area had elevated levels of lead in their blood. The federal government managed a “buyout” of the area, allowing residents to sell ...
With support from the Fund, Investigate Midwest analyzed data about pesticide use and caner rates and interviewed more than 100 farmers, environmentalists, lawmakers and scientists. The result is a picture of a nation at a crossroads in dealing with this public health crisis that has not just been ignored by state and federal health officials, but aided. The team found ...
Hemp products are legal in Wisconsin, but only if they have very low levels of THC, the chemical in marijuana that makes people high. With support from the Fund, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel commissioned independent testing on 30 gummies, vapes and edibles bought at hemp stores – and found that most of them contained illegal levels of THC. Some contained ...
When a woman sued New York State, alleging that a guard routinely sexually assaulted her when she was in prison, the state claimed it couldn’t find the guard and filed a motion to dismiss her lawsuit. Reporters at New York Focus and Hell Gate easily located the guard – and, as a result of their reporting, the state withdrew its ...