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Please join us in celebrating our incredible 2019-2020 New Economy Reporting Project Fellows, who closed out their fellowship in early June.
Starting with a gathering at the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy in Baltimore, and ending with a virtual appreciation and feedback session on Zoom, it’s been a whirlwind of a year!
The theme of this year's fellowship was The Progressive Vision for a New Economy: How Are We Going to Pay for It? Fellows wrestled with this question in virtual press briefings on “Financing Medicare for All” and “Debt Financing / Modern Monetary Theory” and in office hours with a radical economist, while also learning from organizers and experts on the ground about the solidarity economy solutions gaining traction across the country.
It was a unique year to say the least. Midway through the fellowship, COVID took over the newscycle. For the rest of the fellowship, there was hardly any room in the media for stories that didn’t have a connection to the pandemic. All this happened in an already challenging media economy, where there are fewer stable reporting gigs and more precarious freelance labor. This program has given us a window into the business of journalism and the incredible challenges that so many of our fellows face to do serious reporting on economic solutions, particularly those who have less class privilege and those who are Black, Indigenous or People of Color.
Despite these challenges, this was an incredible and inspiring group of fellows who reported on a wide variety of stories related to finance and the solidarity economy. Here is a selection of some of our favorite stories they reported on recently:
On Strike Now for Three Years, Spectrum Workers Are Demanding Public Ownership
By Amir Khafagy in Truthout
Impossible Contradictions: When capitalism and nativism find themselves at a crossroads
By Brendan O’Connor in The Baffler
Famed Bay Area Co-Op Getting Into the Housing Game
By Chad Small in Next City
The Strike at McDonald’s Is About More Than Fighting Abuse—It’s About Workplace Democracy
By Eli Day in In These Times
Fighting Apartheid By Taking Ownership of Land and Time
By Jaisal Noor in The Real News Network
Paper Genocide: The Erasure of Native People in Census Counts
By Jen Deerinwater in Rewire.News
The End of Student Debt: Free College and Debt Strikes
By Katie Styer in Making Contact
This Is a Horror Story: How Private Equity Vampires Are Killing Everything
By Kim Kelly in The Nation
Mapping Covid-19 outbreaks in the food system
By Leah Douglas in The Fern
Two MI Tribes make land purchase in an effort to return land back into the hands of Native Americans
By Michelle Jokisch Polo in WGVU PBS/NPR
The Impossible Choice: America's Paid Leave Crisis
By Al Jazeera Fault Lines (where Darya Marchenkova is Associate and Digital Producer)
As Extreme Weather Linked to Climate Change Hobbles Agriculture and Causes Billion-Dollar Damages, Immigrant Farmworkers Are Left Behind
By Timothy Pratt in 100 Days in Appalachia
We are honored that we could support this talented and brilliant cohort of reporting fellows. Thank you to all of our donors for making this program possible, and most of all, thank you to the fellows themselves. We are grateful for your dedication and passion. There is no solidarity economy without truth-telling, independent journalists like yourselves.
We look forward to staying connected and following your careers in the years to come!
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