Youth Mental Health

As part of her work as a 2024 HEAL Fellow, Morgan Watkins helped prompt critical discussions about deploying solutions journalism within her newsroom, Louisville Public Media (LPM). These discussions led to a new editorial plan launched in summer 2024, which has begun to be implemented. Watkins says: “Our newsroom has made a decision to focus the vast majority of our stories on three principles: solutions, accountability and community-generated story ideas. We’ve heard from our community that they want to know what others are doing — and what they can do — to address the challenges we face. We decided to be more intentional about solutions journalism, because we want to better serve our community. Our aim is to continue our work toward becoming a trusted source of local news for more people in our community by diversifying our offerings and by serving more residents of our community who have been traditionally sidelined in the media.” LPM has produced more than 10 solutions-centered stories since launching its new strategy.

As a social justice journalist with over 25 years in the news industry, Liza Ramrayka was an early adopter of solutions journalism (at The Guardian UK) and has built a career focused on applying this reporting approach. As part of her reporting as an SJN 2023-24 HEAL Fellow, she organized a town hall meeting on teen mental health that was hosted by KALW, a Bay Area-based public radio station. She recently produced a solutions-based series on Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander seniors and mental health in the Bay Area for KALW, supported by the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism. Liza has delivered solutions journalism training based on her experience to a wide range of organizations, including San Francisco State University, Bay Area high schools and KALW. Liza said: “My social justice reporting has always been about what is working and how these solutions can be scaled up or replicated for greater impact, whether that’s across a state, a nation or globally. As news outlets and media consumption evolve, evidence-based solutions stories represent empowering and hopeful journalism that we desperately need right now.”

A Colorado housing initiative run by Lutheran campus ministry, LuMin, received $50,000 from a couple who had economic hardship in college after they heard a solutions story about the organization on NPR. The story, by Emma VandenEinde, was originally broadcast on KUNC, a local public radio station in Greeley, Colorado. LuMin is an organization in Fort Collins next to Colorado State University that subsidizes housing-insecure or homeless students. The donors who had no financial assistance during their college years wrote a letter explaining their donation to LuMin and ended by saying they “would not have known about your organization had it not been for the piece NPR did.”