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Pulitzer Center Update February 21, 2025

Young Journalists Cover Mental Well-Being in the U.S.

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Introducing the Mental Well-Being in the U.S. 2025 Reporting Fellows

 

Announcing the 2025 Mental Well-Being in the U.S. Reporting Fellows

Harm-reduction doulas who provide non-medical, non-judgmental support to pregnant people using substances.

Queer farmers who experience mental health crises at significantly higher rates than general farming or LGBTQ+ populations.

Uyghur refugee women who were forcefully sterilized.

Black teachers who must grapple with the fallout of post-election policies in Mississippi.

Americans who live in areas disproportionately burdened by air pollution, despite the correlation between exposure to pollution and mental health disorders.

Our Mental Well-Being in the U.S. Reporting Fellows will cover these subjects this year.

A special call that was launched in October 2024 by the Pulitzer Center’s Reporting Fellows Program received dozens of compelling applications. Current and former students from more than 40 Campus Consortium partner schools were eligible to apply with their journalism story ideas about the people, tools, and innovations promoting mental health across the country. Ultimately, seven Fellows were selected to report on five projects about new and underreported mental health topics.

Congratulations to Howard University’s Asia N. Alexander; Northwestern University Medill’s Khaleel Rahman; Syracuse University team Jennifer Wybieracki and Matt Hofmann; Nicole J. Caruth, of the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism; and Reporting Fellow alums Celeste Hamilton Dennis and Florence Middleton, a team also from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. 

Each project will receive grants of $4,000 from the IV Fund, a nonprofit that has partnered with the Pulitzer Center to promote reporting on mental health and well-being throughout the country.

We’re excited to see what this year holds for our 2025 Fellows and to engage with the important issue of mental health!

Warmly,

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Impact

Winning entries of our letter-writing contests continue to make global headlines.

An article by Peruvian newspaper giant El Comercio spotlighted Vicente Moreyra, a Peruvian high schooler whose letter on illegally deforested land won first place in the Climate and Environment category of the 2024 Local Letters for Global Change contest.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, The Piracicaba City Council approved a measure honoring local teen Juliana Zatarim after her winning letter on climate change's impact on mangroves received a response from Brazil's minister of the environment and climate change. Zatarim was one of the winners in the Letter Contest for Our Forests and Ocean.

Read the full update to learn more about the minister’s response. 


Photo of the Week

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A man bathes his horse in the Atatürk Dam reservoir on the Euphrates River. From the story “Eye on the Fertile Crescent: Life Along the Mideast’s Fabled Rivers (Photo Essay).” Image by Murat Yazar. Turkey.

“The Lost Paradise project, which I conducted in Turkey and Iraq along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, gave me an up-close view of the devastating impacts of dams on the environment, local communities, archaeological sites, and the region's climate. After the project was published in Yale360 and National Geographic, I received positive feedback from various sources, and the issue quickly became a widely discussed topic.”

—Photographer and Pulitzer Center grantee Murat Yazar


This message first appeared in the February 21, 2025, edition of the Pulitzer Center's weekly newsletter. Subscribe today.

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Mental Health

Mental Health