They hear us coming

Hey, it’s Luke,

I’m going to give you an update on our campaign to save RANGE but first, I wanted to call back to a story we wrote last week. One specific passage, actually.

This comes from Daisy Zavala’s story on Francisco M ., a man who fell off a ladder while working under the table as a roofer in unsafe conditions, and then spent nearly a year fighting the Washington Department of Labor & Industries (L&I) for compensation:

In April 2024, the closed case was “reviewed” (L&I says it wasn’t, technically, reopened) after Mesa reached out to RANGE and RANGE inquired with L&I. As a result, the agency compensated Francisco for lost wages.

Throughout his ordeal, Francisco was aided from the beginning by local community organization Latinos en Spokane (LES). After hitting roadblocks, LES needed to enlist the help of another organization to even have the claim accepted by L&I. When an initial award from the state included compensation for a small amount of medical bills, but nothing for lost wages, it took LES reaching out to us and Daisy making calls to have the case “reviewed.”

The state didn’t even wait to see what we had published. They saw that they had made a mistake in Francisco’s case, and took action while we were still reporting.

As important as it was to get justice for Francisco, this story is bigger than just him.

If he needed the help of a community watchdog and, eventually, a local newsroom to get justice for the injuries he sustained on the job, we can only guess at the number of people who have fallen through the cracks of Washington’s vaunted worker-protection program.

Systemic problems require consistent coverage and RANGE wants to be the place that is applying consistent pressure and giving readers the tools and information they need to apply pressure, too.

We are deeply proud of our reporting for workers and communities who have lacked access to power — so proud that we want to do a lot more of it in the coming years.

For the last month, we’ve been asking you to help save the RANGE team you already know, because that’s what we need right now.

Our plan, though, is to get stable and get sustainable so we can grow this thing to whatever size it needs to be to provide a consistent voice that is deeply connected to community reporting across beats and within communities.

This is cringe, but I often fall asleep thinking about what RANGE will look like in 2 years, or 5, or 10.

When I do, I picture our team of 3-and-a-half transformed into a newsroom of 10 or 15. I picture the team you know supported by labor reporters ensuring that workers get a fair shake from their employers and from the state. I picture Spanish-fluent reporters doing deep reporting for our community of over 35,000 neighbors who don’t currently have access to the kind of accountability journalism that would help clear the institutional barriers to better justice outcomes for people like Francisco.

I picture our reporters working together to build the most comprehensive, people-centered newsroom since the Spokane Press — which spent nearly four decades fighting on behalf of everyday people against the excesses of power.

With your help, we can get there. Our entire team believes deeply in Spokane and in our readers.

How much do we believe? At the scariest part of the last month, our Audience Editor Val Osier got the team together so we could start planning the next 10 years. It sounds unhinged when I type it out.

What sort of organization does that?

I’ll tell you: the sort of organization that trusts its community to show up and figure out a way.

I felt good bringing my dreams for RANGE into that meeting, and I could tell Val, Erin and Aaron felt the same. We have a long road to travel, but it feels like the wind is at our back because I know Spokane has our back.

The Save RANGE campaign jumped out to a better start than we could have imagined, but we still need your help .

In addition to all the money we raised, we had 78 people sign up to become paying members, 63 people upgraded their membership and 21 former members decided they wanted to start helping again.

When the dust settled, we hit 600 total paying members for the first time ever.

Our goal for September is more modest. We would like to add 35 new members, members who upgrade or former members who begin again.

We got off to a hot start, but sustainability is a marathon. With your help, chipping away a little at a time, Spokane can have the deep, sustainable, people-focused newsroom it deserves.

Thank you for your support.

Luke_

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