The Granite State News Collaborative is excited to announce it has been awarded a $10,000 grant from the Couch Family Foundation.

In addition to working together to produce and share reporting on the most important issues facing Granite Staters, in April The Collaborative and its partners launched a multiyear initiative to examine race and equity in New Hampshire. The Collaborative applied for the Couch Family Foundation grant to help support that work. 

The funds will be used to pay for reporting, editing, data research and analysis and project management. The resulting journalism and data will be shared with and distributed by The Collaborative’s statewide network of local news partners.  The Collaborative and its partners maintain their editorial independence.

“We are so grateful for the Couch Family Foundation’s support,” says Melanie Plenda, director of The Granite State News Collaborative. “Because we are working together with our partners, contributions like these to The Collaborative really do have a multiplier effect. We are all able to produce more trusted information and accountability reporting and provide it to more people who need it across our state and region.”

The Couch Family Foundation:

The mission of the Couch Family Foundation is to be a catalyst for change in the lives of children and their families by creating quality and equitable opportunities to help them learn, thrive, and lead healthy, fulfilling lives.

The Couch Family Foundation partners with organizations serving the Upper Valley Region of New Hampshire and Vermont. We support people and programs working to improve children’s health and well-being, early learning and development, family resiliency, and community vibrancy.

How The Collaborative Works:

The Granite State News Collaborative is a collective of more than 20 local media, education and community partners working together to produce and share news stories on the issues that most impact New Hampshire. The hope is that by working together the partners can provide more information to more communities across New Hampshire than they could individually. 

They do this by sharing partner-generated news, coordinating coverage on statewide events and issues and co-producing project-based series and stories.

In addition to coordinating this effort, The Collaborative fills in reporting gaps by contributing in-depth and investigative reporting Collaborative partners can publish on any of their platforms. Collaborative reporters also work directly with outlets on investigative projects. Those stories are also shared with all the partners for publication. 

This structure allows the partners to provide more rigorously reported news to their communities than their own limited resources would otherwise support.

About the Project:

As “day to day” sharing and coordination of coverage on emerging issues continues, The Collaborative and its partners have also collectively launched a multi-year examination of race and equity in NH. 

Through this initiative, the Collaborative and its partners  highlight the stories of people of color in New Hampshire and work with them to amplify their voices. They also are investigating the policies and systems in place that have had disproportionately negative impacts on communities of color.  

As part of the project, The Collaborative and its partners are also gathering the data that will help them analyze where disparities exist, rigorously report the impact of those disparities on communities and the solutions that may address those areas of concern.

“With all of these investigative series,” says Plenda, “the goal is to shine light on the systemic issues that exist, amplify the voices of the people impacted by systemic injustice, and move the public conversation forward by also rigorously reporting potential solutions to these problems.”

The Initiative’s areas of focus include access to civic engagement, affordable housing, economic opportunity, education equity, environmental justice, health equity and policing/criminal justice.

“The most resource and time intensive portion of our project is the investigative and data journalism work we are doing,” Plenda says, “that’s why support like this is so critical to the work we’re doing with and for our partners and the communities they serve.”

As a public service, The Collaborative has launched a Data Library where all of the data sets it  compiles and analyzes will be available to the public to download for free. The goal of the library, which is available on The Collaborative’s website, is to help generate new knowledge for communities and assist reporting at local news organizations.

To see the work The Collaborative has done so far, visit the project page. To keep up with the latest stories as they are released, subscribe to GSNC’s newsletters: This is New Hampshire and Meet the Media, a behind the reporting look at the work of local journalists.

Interested in supporting The Collaborative’s investigative reporting? Donate now or contact Collaborative Director Melanie Plenda at melanie.plenda@collaborativenh.org or (603) 762-3302.

Our partners include: 603 Diversity; The Berlin Daily Sun, Business NH Magazine, The Business Journal of Greater Keene, Brattleboro and Peterborough, The Concord Monitor, The Conway Daily Sun, The Eagle Times, The Eagle-Tribune, The Keene Sentinel, The Laconia Daily Sun, Manchester Ink Link, The Marlin Fitzwater Center at Franklin Pierce University, The Nashua Telegraph, NH Bar News, NH Business Review, New Hampshire Press Association, New Hampshire PBS, NH Public Radio, The Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, Seacoast Media Group and The Valley News.