The Homelands Blog

Ramzi’s Story on NPR’s Weekend Edition

If you didn’t hear “Ramzi’s Story” today on Weekend Edition Saturday, please check it out online. It’s a portrait of Ramzi Hussein Aburedwan, a Palestinian musician who took part in the intifada as a boy. He went on to found a network of music schools for Palestinian kids. The piece was produced by Homelands’ co-founder and senior producer Sandy Tolan.

Sandy profiled Ramzi for Weekend Edition in 1998 (to listen, click here and scroll down to “The Stone and the Viola”), then serendipitously bumped into him on a recent reporting trip to the West Bank. In the earlier piece, Ramzi was an 18-year-old viola player with dreams of sharing his love of music with children living in Palestinian towns and refugee camps. Sandy was thrilled to find out that he’d managed to make those dreams come true.

Radio Doc Explores Impact of Crisis on Migrants

A documentary on BBC Radio 4 today looks at the impact of the global economic crisis on migrant workers and the people who depend on them. “Cutting the Lifeline” was reported by Homelands’ Jonathan Miller in Honduras and the USA and produced and narrated by Vera Frankl in London. The audio will be available for streaming until May 12. We hope you’ll have a chance to listen.

The half-hour show takes listeners from the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, where thousands of Central American workers have lost their jobs, to a former fishing village in northern Honduras that depends on money sent by family members in America, to a farming community in western Honduras, where a mother of five eagerly awaits her husband’s return after a 10-year absence.

Remittances from migrant workers are now the largest single source of income for Honduras, but few services exist to support the migrants or their families. Migration carries terrible risks, from the perilous journey north (90 percent of Honduran migrants are undocumented) to the strain that long-term separation puts on family relationships. Still, with few opportunities at home, one in seven Hondurans has chosen to leave. The economic downturn has made many rethink that calculation.

P.S. We just learned that “Cutting the Lifeline” has been chosen as a “Pick of the Week” by the BBC. An excerpt will air on Sunday, May 9 at 6:15 pm in the UK.

Please Support our Friends at Fonografia Collective

If you believe in the power of multimedia documentary, you’ll want to check out Fonografia Collective. It’s a partnership between a photographer, Bear Guerra, and a print and audio journalist, Ruxandra Guidi, and they do extraordinary work from Haiti, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, the USA and elsewhere. Homelands Productions is proud to serve as their non-profit fiscal sponsor.

After five years, Ruxandra and Bear have just launched their first-ever fundraising drive. You can buy exhibition-quality prints of Bear’s black-and-white photos from Haiti or make a tax-deductible donation through Homelands. Your contributions support thoughtful, empathetic reporting about human rights, health, the environment and social justice. Tell them we sent you!

You Go, Salina and Raffaella!

Salina Kosgei, who was the subject of a profile in the WORKING series we produced for Marketplace, came in third in today’s Boston Marathon. She won the race last year by less than a second. Salina was extremely gracious when we invaded her life for several days in western Kenya last spring. It really changes how you see the race when you know someone at the front of the pack!

While we’re congratulating our profile subjects, here’s a shout-out for Raffaella Mangiarotti, an Italian industrial designer who was also incredibly hospitable as we dogged her every step for the better part of a week in 2008. She and her creative partner Matteo Bazzicalupo were recently featured in a mid-career retrospective at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan. That’s a tremendous honor. Raffaella and Matteo’s firm is called Deepdesign, and they create everything from jewelry and cutlery to vacuum cleaners and hair driers. We stumbled on them in an Internet search, called them out of the blue, and they welcomed us into their lives.

Congratulations to Indie Peabody Winners

It was wonderful to learn yesterday that two of our freelance friends won Peabody Awards for their radio documentaries. Deborah George, who will edit the Hunger Chronicles series, was editor for “The Great Textbook War,” independent producer Trey Kay’s hour-long program about a 1974 battle over textbook content in West Virginia. The Peabody committee called the documentary “thoughtful, balanced and gripping.”

Nancy Solomon’s hour-long documentary “Mind the Gap: Why Good Schools Are Failing Black Students” also won a Peabody this year. The committee said Nancy, an independent producer with a long public radio pedigree, “exhibited great empathy for the students and teachers at the suburban New Jersey high school she studied, meanwhile asking tough, necessary questions.” That was our impression, too.

The Peabody Awards “recognize distinguished achievement and meritorious public service by TV and radio stations, networks, producing organizations, individuals and the World Wide Web. The awards program… is the oldest, most prestigious honor in electronic media.” Other public radio winners were NPR.org, Oregon Public Broadcasting, NPR reporter Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson and talk show host Diane Rehm. Congratulations to all!

New Series Exposes Food Crisis in California

After more than four months of reporting, Homelands co-founder Sandy Tolan and his students at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism have launched a powerful (and disturbing) multimedia series about hunger in California. “Hunger in the Golden State” is a collaborative effort of the Annenberg School and California Watch, a project of the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting.

The series will run in California newspapers (including The Los Angeles Times), on radio stations (through KQED’s statewide public broadcast, The California Report), and in online news outlets, such as KPCC.org.

Thirteen Annenberg graduate students interviewed dozens of state and local food bank officials, as well as Californians who struggle with food shortages every day. The reporting unearthed new numbers that show that hunger is rising at an unprecedented rate in the Golden State. Nearly one in eight people in California has asked for food assistance in the last year and food banks and social services are overwhelmed.

The stories explore food waste, nutrition in schools, the fraying food safety net, and ways to help Californians fighting to ward off hunger.

Homelands Project Featured in Diversity Book

If you’re interested in the relationship between nature and culture, you’ll want to check out the newly released Biocultural Diversity Conservation: A Global Sourcebook (Earthscan, 2010), compiled by the Canada-based NGO Terralingua with support from the Christensen Fund. Homelands’ Worlds of Difference series is one of the book’s 45 featured projects.

Worlds of Difference explored the responses of societies with strong local traditions to the pressures and opportunities of a globalizing world. The award-winning project produced 40 radio features from 27 countries between 2002 and 2005. Most aired on NPR news programs. We also created six hour-long documentary specials, narrated by María Hinojosa and distributed in the US by NPR. The specials dealt with issues such as language, religion, biodiversity and economy. The project website contains more than 60 pages of text and photos and more than 10 hours of streamable audio.

Founded in 1996, Terralingua “works to sustain the biocultural diversity of life—the world’s invaluable heritage of biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity.” The group has set up a web portal where interested people can discuss biocultural diversity and update each other on their efforts.

NPR Remembers Marco Armendáriz

If you’ve been following this blog, you know about our outrage at the murder of self-taught Mexican lawyer Marco Antonio Armendáriz Vega, who was shot to death in his home at the age of 56 last October. Marcos represented the poor and powerless against the corrupt and powerful in Mexico’s northern Sonora state. Our hats are off to NPR, who broadcast Peter O’Dowd’s remembrance on All Things Considered on March 8. The story provides some fascinating details about Marcos, who worked mainly for free, and who relished his role as an outsider. We hope the publicity will put pressure on Mexican investigators to identify those responsible for his murder.

O’Dowd is a reporter for public radio station KJZZ in Phoenix. Marcos was featured in a profile of e-waste recycler Vicki Ponce produced by our friend Ingrid Lobet as part of Homelands’ WORKING series on Marketplace.

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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.

WHO WE ARE

Producer-members Sandy Tolan, Alan Weisman, Jonathan Miller, Ruxandra Guidi, and Bear Guerra work in radio, podcasting, photography, video, and print. We are also authors, teachers, and mentors.

WORK WITH US

We love collaborating with other people, projects, and organizations. We also serve as fiscal sponsor for projects that align with our mission. If you’d like to explore how we might work together, send us a note at info@homelands.org.

SUPPORT OUR WORK

Our work would be impossible without the generosity of supporters who share our commitment to high-quality public-interest journalism. Please donate online or visit our support page for more options.