The article, produced by the Altavos Institute, EHN, Palabra and the Texas Tribune, focuses on the community of Cloverleaf, one of many communities along the 52-mile-long Houston Ship Channel that suffer from poor air quality. The channel is home to more than 200 petrochemical facilities that process fossil fuels into plastics, fertilizers and pesticides. Emissions pose significant health risks to the community.
Texas Tribune reporter Alejandra Martinez and freelance journalist Wendy Selene Pérez, an environmental fellow at Altavos Labs, spent months reporting from the community. They found that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s air monitoring system failed to measure dangerous pollutants emitted by nearby petrochemical plants, and that the information it does provide to the public on air quality is in a format that is difficult to understand and often only available in English. This information gap leaves Latino-majority communities like Cloverleaf guessing about the safety of their air.
For this bilingual study, EHN partnered with Altavoz Lab, a project that supports and mentors local journalists of color working for regional publications. Environmental Health Sciences, EHN’s publisher, is one of Altavoz Lab’s environmental fellowship partners and funders. The project received additional support from the Pulitzer Center.
A month after the story was published, reporters returned to Cloverleaf to make their coverage available to the people most affected by it. They met with residents in laundromats, grocery stores, and on the streets to distribute the story and easy-to-understand, bilingual postcards explaining the health risks and how people can protect themselves. In August, the reporters hosted a community workshop around their coverage.
“This kind of intensive outreach effort represents a major shift in the way forward-thinking news organizations think about community engagement and their responsibility to the people they cover,” said Autumn Spane, EHN’s bilingual content manager. “It’s no longer enough to just dive into communities and pull information and share it in ways that are inaccessible to those most affected. We have to reach people where they are, as Martinez and Pérez did.”
Lion stands for Local Independent Online News. The Lion Awards recognize excellence in local journalism that centers around the organization’s three pillars of sustainability: operational resilience, financial health, and journalistic impact. Univisión and local news site La Esquina Texas republished the article in Spanish. An audio version of the article was also produced for Radio Bilingüe. These local and national partnerships expanded the project’s reach.
“The catalyst for this collaboration was Alejandra Martínez and Wendy Selene Pérez. They have put together a great team, reporting on the ground and getting even closer to the local community,” said Altavos Lab founder Valeria Fernández. “We have a lot to learn from local journalists about how we can work together as a publication.”
“Through its collaboration with Environmental Health News, the Altavos Lab has created a model for an operational partnership that goes beyond offering a fellowship,” the judges said of the collaboration. “The two organizations worked together to increase the impact of the fellows’ projects by aligning participating organizations to provide editorial, reader and financial support.”
Read, listen and watch Altavoz Lab stories in English and Spanish.
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