Co-published by Economic Hardship Reporting Project and New Orleans Public Radio. In Vietnamese culture, water and home are so linked that they share a word. The Vietnamese word for water is nước. But nước also means homeland. Today–how the Vietnamese community has to reimagine its relationship...

EHRP is pleased to announce that it has hired two development consultants from Bash Advisory, Sara Elghobashy and Matilda Johnson. Welcome, Sara and Matilda!. The Economic Hardship Reporting Project supports independent journalists so they can create gripping stories which often counter the typical disparaging narratives about inequality. This high-quality journalism is then co-published with mainstream media outlets mobilizing readers to address systemic economic hardship.

Co-published by Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Baffler. TO EXPRESS THE AMBIENT FEELING that “things are getting worse,” there exists, of course, a meme. It plots iterations of a chart, and on its x-axis floats the disembodied, smiling face of President Ronald Reagan. After his inauguration, watch the data veer up and off into oblivion: from health care spending, executive pay, and the size of the federal government, to the privatization of public services, social isolation, and economic inequality. The bottom line: only half of babies born in 1980—today’s forty-four-year-olds—will make as much money as their parents did.

Co-published by Economic Hardship Reporting Project and Oxford American. A hint of blue on the horizon meant morning was coming. And as they have for the past fifty-four years, Audrey and Gary Revell stepped out their screen door, walked down a ramp, and climbed into their pickup truck. Passing a cup of coffee back and forth, they headed south into Tate’s Hell—one corner of a vast wilderness in Florida’s panhandle where the Apalachicola National Forest runs into the Gulf of Mexico. Soon, they turned off the road and onto a two-track that stretched into a silhouette of pine trees. Their brake lights disappeared into the forest, and after about thirty minutes, they parked the truck along the road just as daylight spilled through the trees. Gary took one last sip of coffee, grabbed a wooden stake and a heavy steel file, and walked off into the woods. Audrey slipped on a disposable glove, grabbed a bucket, and followed. Gary drove the wooden stake, known as a “stob,” into the ground and began grinding it with the steel file. A guttural noise followed as the ground hummed. Pine needles shook, and the soil shivered. Soon, the ground glowed with pink earthworms. Audrey collected them one by one to sell as live bait to fishermen. What drew the worms to the surface seemed like sorcery. For decades, nobody could say exactly why they came up, even the Revells who’d become synonymous with the tradition here. They call it worm grunting.

From June 1 to June 16, 2024, visit Brooklyn Bridge Park to experience EHRP’s labor project with Mother Jones and Magnum Foundation in person. The installation, “Can American Labor Seize the Moment?”, derives from earlier this year when EHRP-supported photojournalists documented the everyday challenges and solidarity within the post-pandemic labor movement.

EHRP is honored to announce that its senior editor Deborah Jian Lee won the EGF Accelerator’s Eddie Prize from the Education Writers Association for “Persecution in the Name of the Lord,” which was co-published by EHRP and Esquire in August 2023. In her piece, Lee reports how over 200 federally funded religious schools exploit the religious exemption from Title IX—the federal policy that protects students from discrimination—and violate the civil rights of countless LGBTQ+ students.

EHRP is excited to announce that its housing series co-published with VPM News in 2023 was named a finalist for an Ñ Award from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. The series chronicled the struggles of residents of a mobile home park in Louisa County, Virginia, after it was purchased by an investment firm in 2022. The two-part series was recognized in the radio/online audio journalism category and reported by Keyris Manzanares, Mark Robinson and Duy Linh Tu.

In May 2024, EHRP senior editor Deborah Jian Lee’s EHRP/Esquire 5500-word feature, “Persecution in the Name of the Lord,” received an Honorable Mention at the Asian American Journalists Association Awards. Lee’s piece was honored in the Excellence in Written Reporting, News category.

The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and Teen Vogue examine the different ways student debt is affecting young people's mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing.

Executive director Alissa Quart joined journalist Jia Tolentino at an EHRP fundraiser in Brooklyn to discuss our organization’s mission to support independent journalists as well as to read from our anthology, Going for Broke. Attendees included renowned editors and journalists from publications ranging from The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The New York Times, along with our friends from the Ford Foundation and many others.

EHRP is thrilled to announce that our contributor Mark Robinson has been nominated for a local Emmy for his two-part feature, co-published with Keyris Manzanares in Virginia Public Media, covering the mobile home residents who are pushing back against the investment firm that bought the land beneath their trailers. Among...

Co-published by Economic Hardship Reporting Project and Teen Vogue. Early on a Thursday morning in Jacksonville, Florida, Ryan Moran and his wife are chatting over breakfast. The couple talk finances, bills, monthly budgets, and the possibility of buying their first home. The COVID-era federal student loan moratorium would have been...

On May 11, 2024, EHRP executive director Alissa Quart appeared on the New Books Network’s Politics & Polemics podcast, hosted by Tom Discenna, to discuss her most recent book Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. Listen to the full interview below or on the New Books Network website.

We are thrilled to share the wonderful news that Puffin/EHRP Fellow Molly Crabapple has just won a New York Press Club Journalism Award in the consumer reporting category. Molly’s illustrated cover article accompanied the EHRP/The Nation article, “The Revolution Against Shady Landlords Has Begun,” which highlighted the tenants fighting for Good Cause Eviction, a measure that would protect them against landlords’ capricious evictions.

EHRP-supported documentary The Post Roe Baby Boom: Inside Mississippi’s Maternal Health Crisis won a Peabody Award in the public service category. Produced in partnership with USA Today and The Tennessean, Mona Iskander and Yasmeen Qureshi follow Mississippi women’s forced pregnancies and births after the Dobbs ruling overturned Roe v. Wade.

Co-published by Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The New Yorker. On a snowy day in late January, Zach Shrewsbury, a thirty-two-year-old Marine Corps veteran, picked me up in his battered Chrysler 300, near the West Virginia state capitol. Our first stop was a gas station, where Shrewsbury bought a gallon of wiper fluid and, because his wiper hose had broken the night before, splashed it generously over his snow- and dirt-covered windshield. I asked where we were headed. Shrewsbury, who is bald with a full red beard, wore a camo baseball cap and a heavy red flannel shirt. He held up his right hand and gave the dashboard the finger. “You know, every West Virginian carries a map of the state with them at all times,” he said, laughing. The middle finger is the northern panhandle, the protruding thumb the eastern one. We would be crisscrossing the bottom of his hand.

Co-published by Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Nation. It was an early summer morning, and Katy had been up for most of the night. During those hours, she had experienced what she would later describe as some of the most fantastical things she had ever seen in her 52 years. She had taken a psilocybin “journey” in the desperate hope of severing her addiction to alcohol, and she was now sitting on the floor in a house in a Colorado suburb, surrounded by six facilitators and 12 strangers. She was thinking about all that had led her to this point.

On May 4, 2024, Senior Editor Deborah Jian Lee spoke at Harvard Divinity School about how EHRP uses fresh storytelling to reimagine the American Dream and to explain systemic hardship.

On April 29, 2024, Executive Director Alissa Quart discussed EHRP and her latest book, Bootstrapped, at an event hosted by the former Deputy Mayor of Boston — Joyce Linehan’s salon — which drew roughly 70 people including local politicos and reporters. Quart was interviewed by Martha Bebinger, a veteran health reporter at WBUR, the NPR affiliate in Boston.

Co-published by Economic Hardship Reporting Project, palabra and WHYY’s The Pulse. The first time that Diego López was shot was in the 1990s. His body was shielded from the bullet, thanks to his leather jacket. He went to the hospital but skipped treatment, fearing he would be questioned by the police. He was so skinny then that he managed to flee by hopping through an emergency room window.