The storyproduced by the Altavoz Laboratory, EHN, word And The Texas Tribunefocuses on the community of Cloverleaf, one of many communities along the 52-mile Houston Ship Channel that struggles with poor air quality. The shipping canal is home to more than 200 petrochemical facilities that process fossil fuels into plastics, fertilizers and pesticides. Emissions pose significant health risks to the community.

Texas Tribune Reporter Alejandra Martinez and freelance journalist Wendy Selene Pérez, both environmental fellows at Altavoz Lab, spent months reporting from the community. They discovered that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s air monitoring system fails to measure dangerous pollutants from nearby petrochemical plants and provides air quality information to the public in formats that are difficult to understand—and often only in English. The information disparity leaves Latino-majority communities like Cloverleaf guessing about the safety of their air.

For this bilingual study, EHN worked with the Altavoz Lab, a project that supports and mentors local journalists of color working in community publications. Environmental Health Sciences, the publisher of EHNis a partner and one of the financiers of the Altavoz Lab Environmental FairThe project received additional support from the Pulitzer Center.

A month after the story broke, the reporters returned to Cloverleaf to ensure that those most affected by their reporting could benefit from it. They met with residents in laundromats, grocery stores, and on the street, distributing both the story and easy-to-understand bilingual postcards explaining the health risks and ways people can protect themselves. In August, the reporters held community workshops focused on their reporting.

“This kind of intensive outreach represents a broader shift in the way progressive news organizations are thinking about community engagement and their responsibilities to the people whose stories they share,” said Autumn Spanne, manager of EHN‘s bilingual content, he said. “It’s no longer enough to parachute into a community, extract information, and share it in ways that aren’t accessible to those most impacted. You have to reach people where they are — just like Martinez and Pérez did.”

Lion stands for Local Independent Online News. The Lion Awards recognize outstanding local journalism that focuses on the organization’s three pillars of sustainability: operational resilience, financial health and journalistic impact. Univisión and the local news site La Esquina Texas republished the story in Spanish. An audio version of the story was also produced for Radio Bilingüe. These local and national partnerships expanded the reach of the project.

“A lot of the credit for starting the collaboration goes to Alejandra Martínez and Wendy Selene Pérez, who are a formidable team reporting from the ground and getting even closer to their communities,” said Valeria Fernández, founder of Altavoz Lab. “There is a lot that local journalists can teach us about how we can work together as publications.”

“By partnering with Environmental Health News, Altavoz Lab created a model for operational collaboration that goes beyond providing a fellowship,” the judges said of the collaboration. “The organizations worked together to amplify the impact of the fellows’ projects by coordinating participating organizations that provided editorial, audience, and financial support.”

Read, listen and watch the Altavoz Lab story in English and Spanish.

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