At USC Annenberg's Center for Health Journalism, we're looking for working journalists who think big and want to make a difference.
We're offering $2,000-$10,000 reporting grants to the competitively selected participants in our 2016 National Health Journalism Fellowship, which is open to print, broadcast and online journalists from around the country. The all-expenses-paid Fellowship includes 4 1/2 days of workshops, seminars and a field trip that will enrich your understanding of the challenges facing vulnerable children and their families, including how community conditions help determine their prospects for health and well-being.
About half of the 20 National Fellows will receive grants of $2,000 each to undertake ambitious health reporting projects on underserved communities, healthcare reform or vulnerable children. The other half will receive grants of $2,500-$10,000 from one of two specialty reporting funds -- the Dennis A. Hunt Journalism Fund or the Fund for Journalism on Child Well-being. And supplemental grants of $2,000 will be made to up to five Fellows who propose innovative community engagement strategies.
The Hunt Fund will support investigative or explanatory projects that examine the effects of a specific factor or confluence of factors on a community's health, such as poverty, health disparities, pollution, violence, land use, access to health care and access to healthy food. Past grantees have explored themes including environmental health; the disproportionate toll of chronic disease on certain communities; barriers to care; health reform innovations and challenges; and land use and development policies that interfere with prospects for good health. The Child Well-being Fund will support investigative or explanatory reporting on the lifelong impact of poverty, trauma or stress on children. We're interested in projects that look at child welfare or child health and well-being, including, but not limited to, the impact of toxic stress; the intersection between partner violence and child abuse; the role of policy in improving prospects for children, including those in public schools, juvenile detention or foster care; and innovative approaches to the challenges faced by children in underserved communities.
Competition for the National Fellowship and the specialty reporting grants is open to both newsroom staffers and freelancers. The grants can be used to defray reporting and publishing-related costs such as travel, database acquisition and analysis, translation services, community engagement strategies and a journalist's otherwise uncompensated time. Preference is given to applicants who propose co-publication or co-broadcast in both mainstream and ethnic media.
"It's one of the best one of these programs I've ever attended," said 2015 National Fellow Michael LaForgia, an investigative reporter for the Tampa Bay Times whose Fellowship project, "Failure Factories," has won numerous national awards. "The Fellowship showed me how to pursue social issues as public health stories and also taught me about the types of people to seek out as expert sources."
For more information, visit CenterforHealthJournalism.org or e-mail Martha Shirk at [email protected]. To improve your prospects for success, we strongly recommend that you discuss your project idea with us in advance (and no later than March 16.)
(USC Annenberg/Center for Health Journalism,
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