Impact Stories

Gambit [October 2021]: Gambit, a New Orleans alternative weekly newspaper, hosted a solutions focused forum with the top three candidates for a local citywide council seat. The event followed a series of housing-focused solutions stories Gambit published earlier in 2021. Like the solutions stories themselves, the forum focused on lessons learned from other responses to housing crises, including one
on post-Hurricane Katrina housing initiatives. “Asking the questions from a solutions-based perspective … changes the way you, and by extension the candidates and public, think about an issue,” said Gambit Editor John Stanton.

JoAnna Haugen [September 2021]: JoAnna Haugen, who writes solutions-focused travel stories, was one of the five winners in the storytelling category for Newsweek's Future of Travel Awards. “Filling a gap in travel journalism today, JoAnna Haugen seeks out hidden stories that may hold powerful solutions to the issues that plague the planet,” wrote Norie Quintos, one of the judges and a contributing editor at National Geographic Traveler.

A series of IowaWatch stories on how rural communities survive and thrive received the most reader engagement that Suzanne Behnke, the organization’s editor, said she’s ever experienced in her two years at the publication. One example: “How a handful of Iowa towns thrive, rise above rural decline.”

Civil Eats [September 2021]: Solutions stories on regenerative dairies were among the most-read Civil Eats stories in 2021. “The Nation’s First Regenerative Dairy Works with Nature to Heal the Soil — at Scale” and “Is the Future of Big Dairy Regenerative?” each received more than 15,000 page views, two of the 15 Civil Eats stories that reached that level in that calendar year.

Las Vegas Optic [September 2021]: In Alamosa, Colorado, law enforcement is reducing the jail population and issuing fewer arrest warrants by referring more people to treatment, recognizing that drug abuse is at the root of some criminal behavior. After the Las Vegas Optic in New Mexico wrote about that effort, called LEAD for Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, officials in the city of Las Vegas, as well as in San Miguel County, New Mexico, are working to put it in place. San Miguel County also has purchased a building it plans to turn into a treatment facility. LEAD is a nationwide program that first launched in Seattle in 2011.

El Colectivo 506 [summer 2021]: El Colectivo 506, a grassroots news organization in Costa Rica, hosted a Zoom call in which rural journalists, national and regional authorities and readers discussed the newsroom’s coverage of how communities can better prepare for and prevent climate disasters. As a result, people from different parts of Costa Rica met one another and shared ideas about how national and regional leaders can work together. The richness of the discussion convinced El Colectivo 506 to host more such solutions-oriented conversations.