“Would that idea work here in this city?”
As a journalist and champion of cities, that’s the kind of question my father would ask constantly while out on the road.
(His mind would also be racing about who to interview, where to go for context and local color, and angles to consider in framing the story!)
Nearly five years after Neal’s passing, the foundation we’ve built together in his name is sustaining this spirit of inquisitiveness and joy in spreading ideas by enabling others to practice solutions journalism.
It’s our fourth year of offering journalism travel grants supporting on-the-ground reporting on ways cities can work better for all their people. Selected from a competitive pool of three dozen applicants, our eight awardees for 2024-25 will be covering topics ranging from infrastructure to transit, equity, and climate justice:
- Giacomo Bologna will go to Denver and Rochester, N.Y., to look for lessons on how to make sure nearby communities benefit when a downtown highway is removed.
- Michela Moscufo will go to Evanston, Ill., to report on how that city’s reparations program to atone for its legacy of racial discrimination is working.
- Erin Rode will travel to Albuquerque, N.M., to see how an experiment with offering free public transit is impacting the lives of residents with low incomes.
- Indy Scholtens will visit upstate New York to report on transportation gaps that are preventing persons serving time in state prisons from getting face-to-face connection with family members.
- Claire Thornton will head to the Mississippi Delta region to see how new investments in wastewater treatment are affecting the incidence of illness in children.
- Sabrina Toppa will go to Oakland, Calif., to look at how a program embedding artists in city government opens doors to new ways of engaging residents in problem solving.
- Wesley Vaughan will go to Eugene, Ore., and Albuquerque, N.M., to write about new programs deploying unarmed first responders to assist people experiencing mental and behavioral health crises.
- Dan Vock will travel to Carlsbad, Calif., to report on how the city is approaching relocation of a coastal roadway threatened by coastal erosion and rising sea levels.
Stay tuned for news of these stories publishing in such outlets as USA Today, The Baltimore Banner, and NBC News in the coming months!
Best regards,
Andrea Peirce
President, The Neal Peirce Foundation