Native American issues in Riverside and San Bernardino

Amanda Ulrich reports for The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California, where she focuses on Native American issues in Riverside and San Bernardino. Ulrich was already based in Palm Springs when she joined Report for America so she knows the area well. She has reported from the United Kingdom, Italy, the Caribbean, and in cities across the U.S., covering topics ranging from marginalized communities to environmental issues. Before relocating to Southern California in 2019, Ulrich worked as a reporter and web editor for a newspaper in the British Virgin Islands. While there, she wrote about local government and the many long-standing impacts of Hurricane Irma, which decimated the region in 2017. Ulrich started her journalism career as a reporting fellow for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in 2016. She is a graduate of Wake Forest University and hails from Vienna, Virginia.

Risa is a multimedia reporter who has worked for the Chico Enterprise-Record in California. She covered local politics and the community impacts of local disasters, including the Camp Fire in November 2018 and the Oroville Dam crisis in 2017, for which she won an award from the California News Publishers Association. Her team at the Enterprise-Record was nominated for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in breaking news reporting for their coverage of the California wildfires. Born and raised in southern California, Risa earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism from California State University, Chico, where she was editor-in-chief of the student publication.