Impact

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 ...

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 ...

For six months, Rachel Cohen investigated the D.C. charter school lobby, tracing the history of how the charter sector has evolved over the past two decades. Using public records requests, leaked documents, interviews and archival research, Cohen pieced together a story of how federal intervention, an army of lobbyists and D.C. taxpayer dollars have all helped local charters successfully beat ...

Fund for Investigative Journalism Diversity Fellow Romina Ruiz-Goiriena’s report, “Gaming the System,” uncovered a cycle of corruption in the immigration system by detailing how wealthy people navigate around U.S. immigration barriers while the other 90 percent are detained or deported. The four-part investigation, published in the Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald, detailed how rich foreign nationals from Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, ...

David Armstrong’s investigation for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution uncovered dangerously high levels of lead in the soil of a westside community in Atlanta and a lack of testing for residents, especially children. The mostly poor, largely African-American community detailed in his report was designated as a “Superfund removal action,” by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), yet residents found little help in ...

An unprecedented collaborative investigation among newsrooms across California uncovered hundreds of incidents of police misconduct involving dishonesty, sexual assault and use-of-force, as well as a cover-up by investigators from the Orange County District Attorney’s Office.The investigation began in 2018 when California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law the “Right to Know Act,” which made records related to officers involved in ...

Peter Fairley broke national news when he reported for InvestigateWest and The Atlantic that the Trump Administration was blocking the release of a study showing that modernizing the U.S. power grid could reduce reliance on coal and increase the growth of renewable energy.With a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Fairley reported that a National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) ...

Carolina Public Press received a tip that some district attorneys in North Carolina “never” prosecute sexual assault cases. Journalists at the nonprofit news outlet pulled more than four years of data from the state’s court system and assembled a team to analyze it. What they found would lead to bipartisan reforms to the state’s sexual assault laws – reforms that ...