The Homelands Blog

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.

New Book Celebrates Craft of Audio Storytelling

Documentary radioheads will definitely want to check out Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound, just published by the University of North Carolina press. The book’s 20 essays are written by “some of the most influential and innovative practitioners from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.” Among those influential and innovative practitioners is Homelands co-founder and senior producer Sandy Tolan.

Reality Radio was edited by John Biewen, a longtime public radio producer who now serves as audio program director at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. The co-editor is Alexa Dilworth, the center’s publishing director.

WORKING Goes Live on iTunes!

For the first time, you can download Homelands programs and play them as you commute or jog or snowshoe or do your calisthenics. Thanks to a welcome nudge from our friends at the Public Radio Exchange (PRX), we’ve created two albums with selections from the WORKING series and posted them on iTunes. Click here for Volume 1 and here for Volume 2. Buy before midnight tonight! Operators are standing by!

Remembering Mexico’s Silenced Voices

Please check out our friend and colleague Ingrid Lobet’s remembrance of two courageous men she encountered as a reporter working in Mexico, both of whom were murdered in 2009. Her piece, “Brave and Dead,” airs on Living On Earth this week. Ingrid is the show’s west coast editor. The essay remembers self-taught lawyer Marco Antonio Armendáriz Vega and environmental journalist Jose “Pepe” Galindo Robles. Both men were brutally killed in their homes late last year. No one has been arrested in either murder. Marco Antonio, known as Marcos, was featured in Ingrid’s profile of Vicki Ponce, a middle-aged woman from Sonora who joined a group of unemployed friends to start an electronics recycling business. The profile was part of Homelands’ WORKING series.

Homelands Work Celebrated in “Best of 2009” Shows

Happy holidays, everyone! ‘Tis the season for “best-of” shows. We just learned that Ingrid Lobet’s profile of Vicki Ponce, an electronic waste recycler in Mexico, is included in the Best of Public Radio 2009 special that is airing on noncommercial stations around the country this month. The three-hour show, intended as a fundraiser for public radio stations, is hosted by NPR’s Robert Siegel and Ari Shapiro and features segments from shows on NPR, American Public Media and Public Radio International. Ingrid’s profile, which first aired on Marketplace as part of Homelands’ WORKING series, is in the second hour. (For a tragic postscript, please see our December 11 post about the murder of Marco Antonio Armendáriz, who helped Vicki and her co-workers stand up to local officials.)

On December 30, WBEZ Chicago’s Worldview program will rebroadcast an interview with Homelands co-founder Alan Weisman. Alan talks about his New York Times bestseller The World Without Us, which asks what would happen to our embattled planet if human beings were suddenly to disappear. The World Without Us was named TIME magazine’s nonfiction book of the year in 2007 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It has been translated into more that 30 languages.

Congratulations Ingrid and Alan!

Jon

P.S. We’ve had some trouble with our PayPal donation button in the last couple of weeks, but it’s now fixed. Apologies for the inconvenience. There’s still a week to make your tax-deductible donation in 2009!

No Progress in Armendáriz Case

In October we reported on the murder of Marco Antonio Armendáriz Vega, a self-taught lawyer who had spent years defending the poor and powerless in northern Mexico’s Sonora state. Marcos (as he was known) was shot in his home in Agua Prieta at point blank range. Our colleague Ingrid Lobet, who met Marcos while reporting a profile of e-waste recycler Vicki Ponce for the WORKING series, has been in touch with his friends and family and tells us that no progress has been made in the investigation. The case has been handed from the local police to the ministerio publico, which is like the district attorney’s office. Meanwhile, Marcos’ daughter Paty is taking over her father’s practice, and another daughter is considering leaving law school to help. We wish them success and safety.

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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.

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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.