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Introducing…the Religion & Environment Story Project

June 7, 2021 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Here’s a kitchen-table story for you. I’m a science journalist who has been thinking about how humans relate to their environment for decades. I’m also an atheist … who fell in love with a religious studies professor.

While I’d be off on reporting trips from West Virginia to India, Stephen Prothero would be teaching religious literacy to students at Boston University. Over the years, our kitchen-table conversations revealed how much our two arenas rarely overlap and how much is lost because of the divide.

We wanted to try to reconcile the split between these siloed beats of religion and the environment so, with funding from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and a base at Boston University, we launched the Religion & Environment Story Project, or RESP.

Our goal is to bridge the divide between religion and science reporting, and to promote new thinking and new narratives that will inform and educate the public, especially on the climate crisis.

In May, RESP partnered up with the Society of Environmental Journalists and the Religion News Association for a webinar entitled “Missing Stories: Uncovering Environment-Climate-Religion Connections.” Watch the whole event, or read the summary in this piece in SEJ News.

Part of this inaugural event was to announce two great opportunities to help journalists find these missing stories. The shared deadline is fast approaching.

  • SEJ’s Fund for Environmental Journalism is offering story grants of up to $5,000 for stories that cover religion and the environment.
  • RESP is offering a paid 6-month fellowship open to journalists, editors and public-facing academics who are producing — or want to learn how to produce — stories at the intersection of religion and the environment.

Deadline for both the story grants and the fellowship is June 15. Apply now and spread the word to others who might be interested.

For more information on these opportunities — and on stories that cut across religion, spirituality and climate change, follow RESP on Twitter at @ReligionEnviro.

Filed Under: climate change, journalism, News, religion, RESP Tagged With: fellowships, grants

thank you, sej/fej!

September 14, 2012 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Three’s a charm. I’d applied for reporting funds from the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Fund for Environmental Journalism before, to no avail. But take note, you other scrappy journalists out there, you must persevere! I did, and now I am thrilled and thankful to learn that my application this summer, which will help support my new book project, Elemental India: Dispatches from the Global Environmental Front, was funded. The indispensable support will help me begin reporting in North India this fall. Thank you. Shukriya!

Here’s the announcement of all the grant recipients…

Fund for Environmental Journalism Announces Summer 2012 Grantees.

Thanks to generous funding from the Cornelius King Foundation and the Heinz Endowments, plus numerous small gifts from members and friends of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), we are pleased to announce that the organization is awarding a total of $12,105 to five journalism projects selected in SEJ’s Fund for Environmental Journalism (FEJ) Summer 2012 grant cycle. In addition to the grant, SEJ will also provide mentoring support to any grantees requesting it.The Society of Environmental Journalists launched the Fund for Environmental Journalism in 2010, to support reporting projects and entrepreneurial journalism ventures related to the environment. For the first time in its history SEJ began awarding small grants to both staff and freelance journalists, to cover costs of travel, lab testing, graphics development, website costs, and other budget items without which journalists might have been unable to produce and distribute specific timely stories about important environmental issues.

Congratulations to the winners in the Summer 2012 round:

Jane Braxton Little and Winifred Bird
Greenville, CA, USA and Nagano, Japan
$3,500 for travel to the Ukraine and Fukushima to produce an article on approaches to managing forest contamination in the aftermath of nuclear disaster

Tara Lohan
San Francisco, CA
$730 for travel expenses to support a feature story and photographic essay showing the impact on rural communities of fresh water diversion to Las Vegas

Barbara Moran
Brookline, MA
$1,325 for travel and media-production expenses for articles examining the impact on environmental pollution and public health of industrial laundries in New England

Erica Peterson
Louisville, KY
$3,500 for air-testing expenses to support reporting for a radio series about industrial pollution in Louisville, Kentucky

Meera Subramanian
West Barnstable, MA
$3,050 for travel expenses to produce articles, and chapters for a book, about sustainable growth and development in India

To learn more about the FEJ awards program, including applicant eligibility and submission guidelines, or to see information and links about past awards, please go to the Fund for Environmental Journalism web page. We are currently fundraising for the next FEJ round of grants. Please consider making your own donation today, to help SEJ build the Fund for Environmental Journalism and support new work! Many in this field are adapting to disruptions in their employment and new methods in media; yet they remain steadfast in their goal of providing our communities every day with vitally important information on environment-related issues. If you would like to help experienced environmental journalists to continue producing rich, rigorously investigated and unbiased content, please make a gift on SEJ’s secure website.

Filed Under: journalism Tagged With: Elemental India, grants, Society of Environmental Journalists

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