Blog - Homelands Productions

October 25, 2024

Sharing our umbrella

Jupau Cultural Center — *The impact campaign of The Territory documentary has helped build the Jupaú Media & Cultural Center in the Brazilian Amazon.*

Homelands Productions became a legally recognized nonprofit in 1989 and we soon became known in public broadcasting circles for our multi-part radio series from around the world. Between 1991 and 2013, we filed more than 200 stories from more than 60 countries and won 22 national and international awards.

During that period, Homelands functioned as a sort of super-freelancer. As a tax-exempt organization, we could raise funds from foundations and donors in ways that we couldn’t as individuals. Internally, we operated as a cooperative, sharing decision-making among our producer-members. The core Homelands team has always been small, ranging from three to six (today we are five), but we often hired journalists from outside our group to work on our projects, strengthening our product while providing paying work for dozens of colleagues.

Sometimes, when we had a large project going, we could even pay ourselves for our efforts to maintain the organization – filing our taxes, renewing our business license, fixing our website when it broke. Between projects, we would pare back to the essentials as we laid the groundwork for whatever was next.

Each of us “Homies” has always had other things going – as journalists, professors, authors, editors, citizens, and so forth. But even when our focus has been elsewhere, Homelands has given us a second family, a deeply valued source of personal and professional support.

This is one reason we’ve chosen to keep our collective alive all these years even as our collective output has waned. But there’s another, arguably more compelling reason: maintaining our nonprofit status gives us a way to support extraordinary work conceived and led by others. Over the years, we have extended our 501(c)(3) umbrella to books, films, podcasts, and other projects. Lately, this has become an even bigger part of what we do.

Projects we sponsor may receive grants and tax-deductible donations without having to establish and maintain a legal tax-exempt organization. They may also take advantage of Homelands’ reputation, mentorship, and advice. Fiscal sponsorship is especially useful for exploratory or start-up projects, where the final product or outlet may be uncertain. At this writing, we are pleased to be serving as fiscal sponsor for five projects:

The impact campaign of the Peabody and Emmy Award-winning documentary “The Territory,” which has raised funds for the establishment of a media and cultural center in the homeland of the Indigenous group featured in the film;
“Bear Season,” a documentary film in progress from the team that produced “The Territory,” which takes a bear’s-eye view of the annual polar bear migration in the Canadian Arctic;
“Rough Transition,” which grows out of Gregory Warner’s long-running NPR podcast “Rough Translation;”
“The Turnaway Project,” which is exploring ways to bring the findings of a groundbreaking 10-year abortion study to a broader audience;
“Mort Report,” the electronic newsletter of the legendary international correspondent and author Mort Rosenblum; and
“The Border Chronicle,” an independent news bureau on the US-Mexico border led by veteran journalists Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller.

For Homelands, fiscal sponsorship is an effective way to advance our mission “to illuminate complex issues through compelling broadcasts, podcasts, films, articles, books, and educational forums, and to foster freedom of expression and creative risk through the media arts.” If you’d like to propose a project for sponsorship, send us a note at info@homelands.org.

October 10, 2024

Hugo Balta named Vaisman Award winner

Hugo Balta has been named the recipient of the 2024 Cecilia Vaisman Award from Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.

The Vaisman Award honors an individual working in audio or video journalism who works every day to shed light on the various issues affecting Hispanic and Latine communities inside and outside the United States. It includes a $5,000 cash prize. The award is named for Medill faculty member and Homelands Productions co-founder Cecilia Vaisman, who died in 2015.

Balta is the publisher of Illinois Latino News (ILLN), a multiplatform digital news outlet that focuses on health and democracy. He is the host of Chicago Politics on CAN-TV, a solutions journalism program centered on responses to social challenges and highlighting opportunities facing the marginalized communities of Cook County. Balta also is the director of Solutions Journalism and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with The Fulcrum, a national publication.

Read the press release here.

September 8, 2024

Shining a light on migrant program’s “fatal flaw”

For the September 2024 issue of High Country News, Homelands producer Bear Guerra photographed a cover story by Tanvi Misra about the US Border Patrol’s Missing Migrant Program. Border Patrol is mostly known for its primary mandate to detain and deport migrants, but it also has a responsibility — for which it receives significant federal funding — to rescue migrants in distress.

Critics see these intertwined missions as a conflict of interest, which often makes the journey for migrants even more perilous, especially across the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. Produced in partnership with Type Investigations, this story explores the tension between the agency’s law enforcement and humanitarian roles, and how this plays out in real life in the borderlands.

Bear Guerra is the photo editor for High Country News. All photos below are his.

The early morning sun shines through the Sonoran Desert landscape near the U.S.-Mexico border in southern Arizona. According to the International Organization for Migration, the U.S.-Mexico border is the deadliest land route for migrants in the world.

April 26, 2024

Tolan condemns USC protest response

In an April 25 opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, Homelands co-founder and senior producer Sandy Tolan condemns “the disastrous, unnecessary decisions of [University of Southern California] administrators to call in police to squelch legitimate protest and the free expression of ideas” when breaking up a student demonstration against the war in Gaza.

Tolan is a professor at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and author of two books about Palestine and Israel, The Lemon Tree and Children of the Stone.

“Universities exist to advance knowledge, independent thinking and an open exchange of ideas,” he writes. “But USC is criminalizing protest and speech with the Orwellian charge of trespassing.”

Read the full piece here.

March 28, 2024

Postscript to a story from 2007

*Pedro Córdoba was a mechanic at the world’s largest multi-metal smelter in La Oroya, Peru, and suffered a serious lung ailment related to his work there.*

In 2007, I traveled to Peru to profile a worker at the La Oroya multi-metal smelting complex for Homelands’ WORKING series. The city of La Oroya was known as one of the most polluted places on Earth, and I wanted to spend time with someone who had made the decision to stay despite the well-documented dangers.

I had passed through La Oroya many times when I lived in Peru in the 1990s and always wondered how hard it must be for workers to weigh the promise of a regular paycheck against the risks of living in one of the unhealthiest environments imaginable. It was a choice that working people around the world were forced to make.

Finding a subject turned out to be much harder than I’d imagined. No one I spoke with (including leaders of the largest labor union) wanted to talk about the downsides of working or living there. People were afraid that if the world really understood how dangerous it was, the government would force the smelter to shut down and everyone would be out of a job.

In my reporting, I learned about the high levels of lead in children’s blood and the way in which toxic clouds would settle on the hills around the city, making residents of the hillside shantytowns more vulnerable than workers in the plant. But everyone seemed to want me to go away.

Finally I found Pedro Córdoba, a 47-year-old mechanic who was suffering from a debilitating lung disease caused by years of inhaling rock dust. He was angry and wanted to vent. I felt a little uncomfortable profiling a person whose views were so different from those of most of his coworkers. But his story was true and I felt a responsibility to highlight the terrible trade-off so many people need to make between meeting their economic needs and maintaining their health.

On March 22 of this year, 17 years after I visited and 18 years after the complaint was first filed, the Inter-American Court found Peru responsible for failing to protect La Oroya’s residents from toxic pollution for more than a century. This is how Earthjustice reports on the findings:

In the judgment, the Court ordered the State of Peru to adopt comprehensive reparation measures for the damage caused to the population of La Oroya, including identifying, prosecuting and, where appropriate, punishing those responsible for the harassment of the victims; determining the state of contamination of the air, water and soil and preparing an environmental remediation plan; providing free medical care to the victims and guaranteeing specialized care to residents with symptoms and illnesses related to contamination from mining and metallurgical activities; ensuring the effectiveness of the city’s warning system and developing a system for monitoring the quality of air, water, and soil; ensuring that the operations of the La Oroya Metallurgical Complex comply with international environmental standards, preventing and mitigating damage to the environment and human health; providing monetary compensation to victims for material and non-material damages.

I hope Pedro Córdoba was alive to hear the verdict.

— Jonathan Miller

January 13, 2024

The Territory wins an Emmy

The Territory Producers on stage at the Emmys, January 6, 2023 — *The Territory’s producers on stage at the Emmys*

The documentary film The Territory has won the 2023 Primetime Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking. Homelands Productions served as fiscal sponsor for some of the project’s early work and continues to sponsor the film’s impact campaign.

The Territory tells the story of a land conflict between settlers and the Uru-eu-wau-wau people in the Brazilian Amazon. The filmmakers had extraordinary access to both groups and received critical praise for the extent to which they allowed each side to tell its own story. The filming began shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic reached Brazil; when the virus arrived, the filmmakers provided cameras to the Indigenous group and let them document their efforts to protect their territory. Roughly one-fourth of the film was shot by a member of the group.

Producers Alex Pritz (who also directed), Will N. Miller, Txai Suruí, Darren Aronofsky, Gabriel Uchida, Sigrid Dyekjaer, and Lizzie Gillett received the award at a ceremony in Los Angeles on January 7. They were joined on stage by community leader Bitate Ure-eu-wau-wau and activist Neidinha Bandeira, both of whom featured prominently in the film. Pritz and Miller (son of Homelands’ executive director Jonathan Miller) are co-founders of Documist, a small independent production house. The Territory was their first feature film.

The film has won many awards, including two Sundance awards and a Peabody. It is distributed by National Geographic and available for streaming on Disney+.

November 21, 2023

Guidi named Soros Equality Fellow

Homelands producer and board president Ruxandra Guidi is one of ten people receiving grants from the Open Society Foundations for projects that promote racial equality. She will use the award to produce a narrative podcast, Happy Forgetting, that tells untold stories about racial justice victories in the United States.

“As we navigate the many challenges, both new and unfamiliar, to advance racial justice, we are proud to support the remarkable individuals pushing for real and lasting change that is representative of the inclusive multiracial democracy we aspire to become,” said Andrew Maisel, a senior program officer at Open Society-U.S.

Ruxandra Guidi has been telling stories for more than two decades. Her work has appeared on the BBC World Service, NPR, Orion, Guernica, High Country News, The New York Times, The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Atlantic, among others. She covered Central and South America as a freelance foreign correspondent based in Bolivia (2007‐2009) and in Ecuador (2014‐2016).

Guidi is the president of the board of Homelands Productions, a journalism nonprofit cooperative founded in 1989, and is co‐founder of Fonografia Collective. She also serves on the board of El Tímpano, a local reporting lab amplifying the voices of Oakland’s Latino and Mayan immigrants. In 2018, she was awarded the Susan Tifft Fellowship for women in documentary and journalism by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She is currently a narrative editor for various podcasts and is working on her first novel. She’s a native of Caracas, Venezuela, and is currently based in Tucson, Arizona.

May 22, 2023

Recasting Animism

Homelands’ Ruxandra Guidi’s latest essay, “The Spirit of the Rillito,” has been published in the May issue of High Country News magazine, the 50-year old publication covering the American West.

The piece came out of conversations and scholarly discussions held at the Religion and Environment Story Project, a fellowship out of Boston University that trains journalists, editors and public-facing scholars interested in the intersection of the environment and religion.

“Animism, from the Latin word anima, or soul, (is) a concept as difficult to decipher as dreams, death or apparitions, and it has a problematic history,” Guidi writes. “The founder of cultural anthropology, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, first introduced the word in his 1871 book Primitive Culture, which argued that culture progressed from primitive to modern expressions. Today, Burnett Tylor’s theories, which denigrate Indigenous worldviews as childish and backward, are considered beyond anachronistic.

“But before colonization and the human-centered organized religions that accompanied it, animistic worldviews taught us to listen to the natural world, to move to its beat. For many people, these songs never stopped playing. Others are learning to listen to them anew.”

Photo by Roberto (Bear) Guerra/High Country News.

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About Homelands

WHAT WE ARE

Homelands Productions is an independent nonprofit journalism cooperative. Since our founding in 1989, we have reported from more than 60 countries, produced nine special series for public radio and television, and won 22 national and international awards.

We also serve as a nonprofit fiscal sponsor for projects that excite us, and our Public Interest Reporting Defense Fund helps journalists whose work has gotten them in trouble.