WRITING

Erica Hellerstein

Erica is an award-winning investigative journalist born and raised in the Bay Area. She worked as an investigative and political reporter at INDY Week in Raleigh, NC, a researcher and consultant on a VICE documentary, a reporter/researcher at PBS/Frontline and a fellow at the International Women’s Media Foundation, where she covered migration and domestic violence among asylum seekers in Honduras and on the California-Mexico border. Her investigative series on North Carolina’s commercial hog farming industry won the Philip D. Reed Award for Environmental Writing and was a finalist for numerous other awards. She has a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University and an M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Marie Claire, Elle, and elsewhere, and her investigations have been highlighted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR. Childhood poverty in San Jose and for The California Divide Project Erica covers childhood poverty in San Jose and the Bay Area as part of “The California Divide.” Poverty is the biggest coverage gap in the state. In response to this, CALmatters, McClatchy’s five California news organizations and the 25 Digital First newsrooms have created a news hub with a collaboration project on the topic. “The California Divide” is an unprecedented news partnership that combines the strengths of respected news-gathering organizations across the state. The shared goal is to build a sustainable and replicable model for data-driven, change-making journalism in this critically underserved coverage area. Report for America has teamed up with three of the new hub’s newsrooms to offer three new corps member placements: CALmatters in Sacramento, The Fresno Bee in Fresno and The Mercury News in San Jose.

Emily Woodruff

Emily has been the managing health editor of Being Patient, a health news start-up exclusively covering brain health and Alzheimer’s. As a freelancer, her work has appeared in STAT News, The Baltimore Sun, Gothamist and Refinery29. Earlier she worked as a copywriter and an SEO specialist. She majored in English at the University of Florida in Gainesville and received an M.S. from the Columbia University School of Journalism. Public health in south Louisiana Emily covers healthcare and public health in south Louisiana, with a focus on the New Orleans metro region. Currently, there is not a single, full-time health reporter working for any newsroom in Louisiana, a state that sits near the bottom on nearly every U.S. public health metric. The story of healthcare is also often the story of poverty in America, and the lack of coverage of health in a poor state like Louisiana means important stories are slipping through the cracks. Emily reports to the New Orleans Metro Editor and Managing Editor and covers daily news related to all aspects of public health, including coverage of hospitals, public health officials and health agencies, academic research, and city, state, and national data. She produces enterprise and feature stories for print and online related to these and other related topics. Emily works in concert with journalists who have complementary beats, such as education, business and City Hall, to create stories that have a broader impact.

Eileen Grench

Eileen is an Olympic fencer-turned-journalist. As a dual Panamanian-American citizen, she competed for the Panamanian team at the 2016 Olympic Games and also won national, Pan-American and World Cup medals. She is currently a fellow at the Global Migration Project at Columbia University, where she has told the stories of Central American women as well as inequities in migrant women’s health — writing for The Intercept, The Nation, and Documented, among others. She has also contributed research to The New York Times. Earlier in her career, she worked as a clinic assistant at Stanford Children’s Hospital, where she served as a Bilingual advocate for documented and undocumented Latino families. She majored in Spanish and international studies at the Ohio State University and received an M.S. from the Columbia University School of Journalism. Juvenile justice in the Bronx Eileen covers justice issues, starting with juvenile justice in the Bronx. The South Bronx, the poorest congressional district in the country, is home to Horizon Juvenile Center, which houses nearly one-quarter of the 700 16-and-17-year-olds incarcerated on any given day in the city. The center made headlines recently amid outbreaks of violence. The neighborhood, in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, is also home to Bronx Criminal Court, which no longer has any reporters assigned full-time to the press room. The verdict’s out on the borough’s nearly year-old innovative drug court, which stresses treatment over incarceration as the opioid addiction crisis mounts. The South Bronx, meanwhile, has been designated as the site of one of the local lockups slated to replace Rikers Island, much to the ire of many area residents. Overall, the Bronx is about 85 percent black or Hispanic, roughly mirroring the demographics of Rikers. Eileen uses a combination of data and in-person reporting to explore the human toll and political scope of justice-related issues.

Devna Bose

Devna has worked as a multimedia journalist for newspapers across Mississippi. She interned at the Neshoba Democrat, Jackson Free Press, Meridian Star, and Oxford Eagle. She has covered city government, mental health, the LGBTQ+ community and other issues. She attended University of Mississippi, where she served as Managing Editor of the student-run publication, The Daily Mississippian. She has won several awards for her feature writing, photography, and design from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Mississippi Press Association. Public schools in Newark, N.J. Devna is expanding Chalkbeat’s Newark bureau and works closely with the bureau chief to report on critical education news in the area. She helps the Newark team build a loyal base of readership among local education stakeholders: parents, educators, nonprofit leaders and policymakers. Embracing Chalkbeat’s local-first approach, Devna attends school board meetings, press conferences and community events in Newark. Additionally, she helps plan and organize community engagement events, such as office hours and listening tours, to draw in traditionally harder-to-reach readers. Devna’s engagement work creates ongoing opportunities to exchange ideas with partners to understand how Chalkbeat’s content is serving its audiences, allowing the news organization to continually improve its approach.

Ciara McCarthy

Ciara McCarthy has worked as an intern for the Marshall Project and a researcher at the Guardian U.S., where she contributed to “The Counted,” an Emmy-nominated project on police killings. She later worked as a staff community reporter for Patch, covering neighborhoods in Manhattan. In college, she was the editor-in-chief of the Daily Northwestern, the respected student-run daily of Northwestern University. In her first year as an RFA corps member, McCarthy covered local government for the Victoria Advocate. In her second year, she will focus on rural public health. Covering rural public health In her first year, Ciara covered City Hall for the Victoria Advocate, the second-oldest newspaper in Texas, a 172 year old, family-owned daily newspaper serving the rural communities in and around Victoria near the Gulf of Mexico. During this time, she also helped her newsroom maintain continuing coverage of Hurricane Harvey recovery efforts in rural communities overshadowed by Houston flooding and calamities elsewhere. In her second year, Ciara shifted her coverage gap and focuses on rural public health issues in Victoria County and the Crossroads region, focusing on how local petrochemical plants impact residents’ health, along with other issues specific to the state of rural health in the area.

Christopher Aadland

Chris has worked at the Wisconsin State Journal, where he covered public safety, city government, breaking news and others subjects. During college, he was a student reporter at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune covering state government and politics. As a student at the University of Minnesota, he was the Managing Editor of the award-winning, student-run Minnesota Daily. Chris, whose father is an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, started learning the Ojibwe language while at the University of Minnesota and developed a desire to contribute to better, more nuanced coverage of Indian Country as a journalist. Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes on the Wind River Reservation Casper is less than three hours east of the Wind River Reservation, where the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes reside. Already historically underserved communities, the tribes have received less coverage from the Star-Tribune over the years as the newsroom has downsized. Chris is based in Riverton, the largest city bordering the reservation, to cover Native American issues. There is no shortage of story ideas to pursue — for instance, the future of health care near the reservation is currently uncertain as the hospitals there undergo changes, and the government shutdown of early 2019 briefly created what one of the tribes deemed a crisis situation. Chris produces regular enterprise pieces while also writing breaking news and daily stories.

ChrisAnna Mink

ChrisAnna Mink is a pediatric infectious diseases specialist and has been a freelance journalist. For more than two decades, she served her community as a successful physician, including working as the Medical Director of at the K.I.D.S. Foster Care Clinic as part of Harbor UCLA Medical Center and as a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. In 2014 she began writing more about about health and ultimately decided to become a health journalist. She got a M.A. from University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and has written about child health issues for the California Health Report and University of Southern California’s Center for Health Journalism. Covering children’s health in the Central Valley, California ChrisAnna focuses on children’s health, both physical and mental, and explores how the paper can inform, educate and help bring about a healthier community. Childhood asthma, obesity, and food insecurity are big issues in Modesto and throughout the Central Valley. Stanislaus, and nearby Tuolumne County, also are among the California counties with the highest number of emergency room visits by children with dental issues, according to the California Department of Public Health. More than 300,000 kids in the Central Valley live in poverty. She works in concert with local schools, state and county health and environmental agencies and local hospitals and a new care center to identify current issues and solutions in children’s health. 

Chris Ehrmann

Chris is an Emmy-nominated journalist, photographer and documentary filmmaker. He has worked for the Associated Press in Michigan covering state politics, the 2016 presidential election and the Flint water crisis. Previously, he was a reporter for the Newport News-Times on the Oregon coast where he directed, filmed and edited two documentaries: one on the homeless crisis in Newport and another on inmates living with mental illnesses, which earned him an Emmy nomination. He attended Wayne State University in Detroit where he was a part of the Journalism Institute for Media Diversity Honors Program and a recipient of the Robert McGruder Scholarship and the Benjamin J. Burns Endowed Scholarship. Statehouse coverage focused on criminal justice and mental health Chris reports from Hartford, Connecticut’s state capitol, alongside veteran statehouse staff, with a mission of looking at criminal justice issues across the state, including poverty, race and changing policy of who is prosecuted, how they are incarcerated and how politics in America today influences those issues. He has access to AP colleagues on the national state government reporting team, data experts and a network of colleagues with deep experience reporting on government. AP’s team of reporters in Washington, D.C. also help him understand the connections between state and local trends. He produces a balance of spot news and enterprise work, with an emphasis on data-driven stories that can be distributed to AP customers around the state.

Carlos Ballesteros

Carlos Ballesteros is a former reporter for Newsweek, where he covered politics, foreign policy, labor and immigration. He has also written about his hometown of Chicago for the Chicago magazine, South Side Weekly, Nation, and In These Times. He was editor-in-chief of Claremont College’s Student Life for which he led a team of more than one hundred student journalists.

Camille von Kaenel

Camille is an environmental reporter who, for three years, has covered climate change policy for E&E News in Washington, D.C. Her writing has also appeared in Fast Company, Atlas Obscura, The Alpinist, among others. Born in Switzerland and raised in California, she has a bachelor’s in international relations from the University of Geneva and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University in New York. Wildfire recovery in Northern California Camille works with both of these news organizations to cover wildfires in Mendocino and Butte counties. During the summer of 2018, Mendocino County saw the state’s largest wildfire in its history. This after still recovering from the major wildfire in October of 2017. Not six months later, Butte County beat the record. The Camp Fire killed 86 people, destroyed 15,000 structures and displaced thousands. Camille tracks the wildfire recovery processes, reports on the ongoing legislation in Sacramento and digs into the science of how the drought, climate change and more are affecting this problem. Camille produces a mix of local human-interest features on the people recovering, science stories on what is happening and policy stories on the state’s prevention plans including new technology to fight in the future.