Dear Granite Staters,
The Granite State News Collaborative is once again participating in NH Gives, the Granite State's largest day-of-giving - bringing together nearly 600 nonprofits and tens of thousands of donors to raise as much money and awareness as possible for the causes they care about.
A $240,000 bonus pool made possible by the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation and its donors, will stretch every dollar donated during NH Gives. The bonus pool is awarded to all participating nonprofits who raise at least $300 online and is based on the percentage of the online total they raise.
This year, GSNC is hoping to raise a minimum of $5,000 in 24-hours. The money we raise during NH Gives will support our efforts to gather and analyze data relative to our multi-year examination of race and equity issues in New Hampshire.
Who we are and what we do:
The Granite State News Collaborative is a collective of more than 20 local news organizations stretching across the state of New Hampshire who have agreed to work together to bring their communities more news and information they can trust.
We know that when people have access to news and information about their towns, cities and state, they can hold the powerful accountable, advance solutions and work with one another to build the communities and future they want to see.
The Collaborative (which is a fiscally sponsored nonprofit) as an organization helps its member outlets share news of statewide impact with each other that can then be distributed across the state and out to you.
Our team of freelance reporters additionally help fill in reporting and data gaps by providing in-depth and investigative stories, series and projects for our local news members to publish and broadcast for their communities. Many of our reporters work directly with your local news editors to make that happen.
Since March of 2020, The Granite State News Collaborative partners have published more than 2,700 shared news stories. Of those, Collaborative reporters have contributed nearly 700 in-depth and investigative pieces that have included single stories, series and projects.
That means more people have more access to more news and information they need and can trust.
Where Your NH Gives Donations Go:
This year, the money we raise during NH Gives will support our efforts to gather and analyze data relative to our multiyear examination of race and equity issues in New Hampshire.
Our Race and Equity Initiative aims to: highlight the stories of people of color in New Hampshire, partner with them to amplify their voices, investigate the policies and systems in place that have had disproportionately negative impacts on these members of our New Hampshire community and surface potential solutions.
Our areas of focus include access to civic engagement, affordable housing, economic opportunity, education, environmental justice, health equity and policing/criminal justice.
To do this, we need data.
What’s the Deal with Data?:
Reliable data is critical to communities making informed decisions and lawmakers making good policy. But in New Hampshire, data is often siloed, hard to find and even harder to understand. Drawing our inspiration from ProPublica and Big Local News, we started a public Data Library to address both these issues – first, by sharing the data that we collect during our reporting, and second, by offering it in formats that make it easier to understand. We offer both the stories and the data to the public and policymakers to download for free.
This work is time and resource intensive. Our Collaborative relies on the generous investments of foundations, donors and individuals to be able to provide this service to fellow reporters and the public.
Impact so far:
Last year we found that a trove of data on police interactions going back to 1994 was buried in a subdomain of the Department of Safety’s website – so deeply buried that even members of a state commission on police transparency did not know that it existed.
Recently, we’ve been slowly downloading and cleaning datasets from city and state websites to help our reporters make sense of the state’s housing crisis. Finding the data took less than 30 minutes. Making those hundreds of thousands of data points ready for analysis has taken months. But because we had the resources to do it, we were able to report the impacts of exclusionary zoning on some of the most vulnerable communities in New Hampshire. This investigation alone prompted city officials to reach out to our data reporter to learn more so that they could use that input in future zoning policy decisions.
Through data gathering for our environmental justice project, we were able to show in maps and graphics intense heat islands in the city of Manchester as well as lead poisoning data which allowed us to more fully report the impacts these environmental hazards have on the elderly, children, poor and people of color living in these communities.
Let’s Collaborate:
These are just a few of the projects we’ve been able to do because people like you are willing to partner with us.
When you invest in us, you get the hard work and dogged reporting it takes to bring to light the data and information you need to make important decisions for yourselves and your community.
News we can trust is not a luxury item. It’s not the coffee we can skip on the way home from work. We have to have it. Let’s partner to keep it accessible to everyone.
Visit https://www.nhgives.org/organizations/granite-state-news-collaborative to make a donation today. Every little bit helps. Thanks so much!
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 Equinox, 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, The New Hampshire, New Hampshire Press Association, New Hampshire PBS, NH Public Radio, The Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, The Pierce Arrow, Seacoast Media Group and The Valley News.
These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative as part of our race and equity project. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.