Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

Toledo, Ohio, has one of the highest infant mortality rates — defined as when a newborn dies before his or her first birthday — in the state, and there’s a clear racial divide: Toledo’s African American infants face a mortality rate triple that of whites. Toledo saw its highest rate...

This story for The New Yorker's website looks at how pregnant and breastfeeding workers are grappling with the lack of data on the Covid vaccine's safety for their population. It dives into the history of how anti-abortion politics, concern for the developing fetus, and the horrors of medical experiments on non-consenting human subjects informed regulations, developed in the 1970s, around who could participate in clinical trials. Although the designation of pregnant people as a "vulnerable population" has been removed, they are still routinely excluded from clinical trials, illustrating the ongoing effect of those political and social forces today.

One of Maine's largest newspapers aims to uncover misconduct at the state’s largest police force. The Bangor Daily News received discipline records from the Maine State Police in December 2020. The records reveal little and use terms such as “engaged in conduct unbecoming” to hide details of misconduct. In addition...

In the Catholic Church, the nineteenth-century priest Augustus Tolton is considered by many to be a likely candidate for the title of “First African American Saint.” Born into slavery in 1854, Tolton was the first Black priest ever ordained in the United States, and he spent much of his priestly life serving Black Catholics on the South Side of Chicago.

A 2020 climate change report released by the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies lays out a dire future for the state. In mountainous Western North Carolina, home to the state’s freshwater trout industry, the report anticipates average temperatures to increase and an increase in frequency of severe storms. This could present challenges for one of the most important industries in Western North Carolina.

This project will prove that European drivers unintentionally subsidize tropical forests destruction and global warming through purchasing fake clean diesel for their vehicles. Over 50% of palm oil, mostly imported in Europe from Indonesia, ends up in biodiesel. Palm oil is a major driver of both deforestation and carbon emissions, which are released in the atmosphere as carbon sinks are cleared to make room for new plantations.

This project is about India's Gond tribe and the difficulties of those caught up in insurgency groups. It features the stories of some of those affected in the hard-hit Bastar region and found themselves in the crossfire of rebels and government authorities. The project explores the stories of people beyond...

Bosnia-Herzegovina became an unlikely gatekeeper of the European Union. Since Hungary sealed off its borders with the rest of the Balkans, Bosnia’s over a thousand miles long, porous borders became the principal gateway to Europe for tens of thousands of migrants and refugees on their perilous journey to a better life. Thus far the state response has been to largely ignore the uncontrolled influx of undocumented migrants, shifting the burden onto the local communities, volunteers and a few NGO's.

This is a cutting-edge project involving theater and journalism created to broaden public understanding of police-involved civilian shootings. Articles and books have been written on civilians killed by police. But, none have involved theater and an accompanying essay to express the point of view of the victim. SHOT will illustrate Kareem's story of being a Black teen shot by a white police officer.

follows COVID-19 vaccine distribution across a historically segregated city, and whether the groups that were disproportionately hit by the contagion end up receiving their share. This community-powered project combines explanatory, utility-based content with accountability journalism to report on vaccines and vaccine distribution in the Chicago communities that have been most hurt by the pandemic, centering community voices throughout the reporting.

Depression in Dairyland examines the widespread and often overlooked mental health crisis among Wisconsin's dairy farmers. Having faced years of low dairy prices, record farm foreclosures, and coronavirus-induced supply chain interruptions, many of Wisconsin's farmers are experiencing farm-related stress and depression. And they need help. The crisis is widespread, reaching...

A 2018 study conducted by Duke University revealed that surface mining has altered one out of every 14 acres of land in central Appalachia. Federal law requires that coal companies pay to clean up the land, but decades of weak enforcement by state regulatory agencies has allowed the companies to avoid their obligations.

Starting in early 2020, countries across the world hastily declared lockdowns to curb the spread of the coronavirus. In many countries, security agencies took on the responsibility of implementing lockdown measures. Uganda found itself in this situation when President Yoweri Museveni announced a total lockdown in March 2020. The security...

After nearly two decades in Afghanistan, the U.S. now prepares to significantly reduce its military presence in the region. With an administration change and the deadline for withdrawal as stated in the U.S.-Taliban deal fast approaching, journalist Aishwarya Airy investigates how the military retrogrades equipment from the region and tracks what they leave behind with the Afghan forces. She reports on end-use monitoring of U.S. weapons, the cost-benefit analysis of getting equipment out, the impact of the peace negotiations in Afghanistan, and a growing Taliban presence.

If Navajo Nation were a State, it would have the highest per-capita Covid-19 infection rates in the country. As of mid-July, 8,500 cases have been confirmed and over 400 people have died. Access to information during this frightening time “is a matter of life or death,” says Tom Arviso, publisher of the Navajo Times, the newspaper delivering that information to its community. That’s a tall order. The 150,000 people of the Navajo Nation are spread over almost 18 million acres crisscrossed by 18,000 miles of mostly unpaved roads. Cell service is unreliable and 40% have no Internet-access.

Recent decarceration efforts across the US in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have led to no discernible uptick in crime. Instead, these releases, as well as the rash of preventable COVID-19 deaths in jails and prisons, have had the unintended effect of exposing an already widespread and underreported reality — that death by suicide, brutality, and medical neglect in our nation’s jails is far from new or specific to this pandemic, and that many of the victims of these deaths posed no danger to society in the first place.

Women make up about half of those who migrate internationally and within their own countries. Some are pulled by the promise of a better future, but for those who face famine or danger in their home countries, migration is a gamble for their very survival. For this story from National Geographic, photographers with The Everyday Projects—a global network with a mission to challenge stereotypes by presenting diverse perspectives—explore how hardship and obligation, violence, poverty, climate change, and other forces undermine women’s lives, spurring them to make life-changing journeys.

Discussions about forests cannot be separated from their function and survival. Often the forest is underestimated, examined only through the lens of economics for exploitation without paying attention to details about conservation. The biodiversity of the tropical forest in the Pantura area of Java is remarkably well preserved. Local communities...

Report Card explores how the pandemic has exacerbated and brought attention to issues of inequity in public education, as schools across the nation turn to distance-learning methods that leave large swaths of students at a clear disadvantage. Focusing on public schools in and around San Francisco’s Mission District, which has the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the city and in California, where the Latinx population has been disproportionately affected, the project applies an innovative, multi-platform approach to highlight the unseen hurdles that students in underserved communities face throughout the school year. The work appears in Mission Local, an independent, bilingual news site.

This project will look at how people in Hong Kong—now facing a new national security law and crackdown on dissent—struggle with collective trauma and memory.