It’s been five years since we started offering journalists travel grants in honor of my father, Neal Peirce. Each year, our open call for proposals focused on city solutions nets a bigger and better response—making the job of picking just seven projects to fund a little harder each time.
This year, we received 42 applications—the largest pool of applicants to date—from all corners of the country. Journalists pitched stories on a range of topics, from addressing homelessness to transportation to domestic violence, to be produced in print, photography and podcast.
A thread through many of the projects our selection committee ultimately picked: a high potential for city-to-city learning. They’re the kinds of stories my father loved to read and loved even more to write, examining policies, programs, and ideas with the potential to make cities better places for all their people.
Here are this year’s awardees selected from a remarkably competitive round of applications:
- Kenna Coe will travel to Indianapolis to report on the city’s approach to implementing a bus rapid transit system.
- Ian Coss will go to Rochester and Syracuse in Upstate New York to explore how residents have made their voices heard in debates over repurposing old urban highways.
- Benton Graham will go to Madison, Wisconsin, to see how that city enables climate-friendly electric buses to perform amid cold winter temperatures.
- Marina Lopes will travel to Juneau, Alaska, to report on how a small city is rethinking its flood-control infrastructure in light of climate risks.
- Adam Mahoney will travel to Miami and Atlanta to report on lessons learned in countering accelerating waves of climate-related gentrification in urban neighborhoods.
- Christine Ro will visit Seattle to learn if allowing one staircase in new apartment buildings rather than two could lower building costs and ease housing shortages.
- Natalie Skowlund will go to a Durango, Colorado, mobile home park to learn how forming a community land trust helped residents turn fears of displacement into hopes for home ownership.
We hope you are as eager as we are to read, listen to and learn from these stories as they come out over the coming months!
Best regards,
Andrea Peirce
President, The Neal Peirce Foundation