Impact Stories

Bicol Umalohokan (BU), a Facebook-based communication support group for Filipino seed-savers, tailored its social media content strategy for a climate action campaign to SJN's four pillars of solutions reporting. This strategy gained the support of Bulatlat, an alternative online publication in the Philippines, and led to organic engagement. Its collaboration with SJN-accredited trainer Portia Ladrido for a webinar series on solutions journalism piqued interest as well, with one student participant making solutions journalism her undergraduate thesis topic and another SJ trainer proposing BU's approach to a Southeast Asian NGO for a hybrid webinar as one of solutions journalism's digital strategy methods.

A survey taken by members of the New York & Michigan Solutions Journalism Collaborative, which is focused on challenges facing caregivers of older adults, identified relationship-building, working together on coverage and content sharing as its biggest benefits. One respondent said that “bringing multiple news outlets together to work on one major project elevates the topic for our audiences and builds collaboration and creativity among reporters and editors.” Another stated that the collaborative “created something out of nothing! Things are happening, alliances have been created and content is being made and shared.”

A solutions story on quality carbon credits is among the most popular articles published to date by Hothouse, a newsletter that investigates climate solutions. The publication credits that story as a big factor in a recent gain of 1,000 new subscribers, helping more than double the audience of the one-year-old publication. It was syndicated in Popular Science and Scientific American. Hothouse was started as part of an SJN LEDE fellowship. Its mission is to produce original, investigative journalism on climate solutions.

Street Roots, a weekly social justice newspaper in Portland, Oregon, was honored in the Society of Professional Journalists Northwest Excellence in Journalism Contest for "Foster Care Shuffle," a five-part series that examined places that are making progress in providing more stable placements for young people in foster care.

The Climate Solutions collaborative in Pennsylvania received a $10,000 grant from America Amplified, which it will use to create advisory groups to help test whether sustained climate change coverage affects individuals’ daily lives. The collaborative, which is part of the Local Media Project at the Solutions Journalism Network and focuses on central Pennsylvania, is made up of five news organizations, two educational institutions and a theater company.

Sanket Jain’s solutions story on how health care workers in India are using WhatsApp to fight misinformation about public health and COVID-19 is a finalist for international reporting in the Livingston Awards. The Livingston Awards honor the best journalism and storytelling by journalists under the age of 35. The winners will be announced on June 8.