For community. For Democracy. KUOW Impact Update April 1–June 30, 2021

From our Membership Director

KUOW is a nonprofit newsroom with a singular mission: to create and serve a more informed public. We do that by producing in-depth, timely, and trusted local journalism that has real impact in our community and our democracy.  

Recently, I’ve been reflecting on how many different communities we can be transported to in just one hour of public radio programming. Since 1952, KUOW has reported stories from Puget Sound neighborhoods, and shared voices and perspectives from communities around the country and the world. At its core, public media brings us together, and lately, that’s never felt more important. It’s a remarkable system powered by people who believe journalism is crucial to our democracy. Our supporters know that storytelling based in facts and connectedness is the pathway to a better future. 

We’re proud of our work and its importance in our community — and thankful to the 52,000 donors that support it. Four times per year, we take a moment to reflect and share the results of our coverage. We hope you’ll take a moment to look through (and listen!) to these remarkable stories, from our neighborhood to yours.  

Rashad Brown
Membership Director and fellow KUOW supporter

Stories With Impact

An informed public makes our community stronger. Here's a look at some of KUOW's recent local reporting and the impact it has had on our community — whether it's driven policy change, helped our community navigate important events, or amplified voices previously unheard.

The exterior of the Seattle police department's East Precinct building is shown on Saturday, June 13, 2020, in Seattle.

Identifying who made the call to leave the East Precinct last summer   

On June 8, 2020, Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct emptied, following eleven days of protests outside the building. The move surprised even the Seattle police chief and led to the formation of an “autonomous zone” in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Since then, the question of who made the call to abandon the precinct went unanswered. KUOW combed through nearly two thousand pages of public records and interviewed people across city departments with intimate knowledge of the events. In July 2021, KUOW’s Isolde Raftery finally broke the story of who made the call to abandon the precinct, providing the public a first-look at exactly what had transpired inside the department and why.

KUOW Photo/Megan Farmer
Kaio Bispo at the Cowlitz County Youth Services Center in December 2020, days before his 18th birthday. Shortly afterward, Bispo was transferred to an adult detention facility, the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Wash.

Investigating an ICE youth detention facility shrouded in secrecy 

For 20 years, the Cowlitz County Youth Services Center had been one of a handful of facilities that contracted with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold a small number of immigrant youth who were living in the U.S. without legal permission and who ICE had determined pose a significant threat to public safety. The program had always been shrouded in secrecy and faced questions about its legality. Former KUOW reporter and Reveal investigative fellow Esmy Jimenez spent months working on an investigation into how children were ending up in this rare ICE youth detention facility, how long the children stayed there and why they weren’t released to their families pending the resolution of their immigration cases. 

Credit: Courtesy of Kaio Bispo

Photo of a forested, mountainous area under grey, clouded skies and dense, ominous fog.

Highlighting the impact of conspiracy theories on small town politics  

Last year, right wing conspiracy theories from QAnon were injected into the U.S. Presidential race. This year conspiratorial thinking is creeping into small town races around the country, including several on the northern Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. KUOW reporter David Hyde shed light on the impact conspiracy theories, including QAnon, are having on local governments – and the ways in which persistent misinformation makes real issues community members are facing, including unaffordable housing, addiction, and recovery from the pandemic, more difficult to address.
   
Credit: Unsplash Photo / Peter Lloyd
 
Third-grade student Maliyah Ouk, 8, stands with her mother Victoria Saetern before the first day of school begins at Wing Luke Elementary School on Wednesday, September 1, 2021, along Kenyon Street in Seattle.

Helping parents and students navigate the return to school 

Amidst another surge in Covid-19 cases, Washington schools resumed in-person learning for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. KUOW was there to help parents and students navigate the changing rules as the first day of school approached. Reporter Kate Walters broke down what to expect on the first day of school with the Seattle Now podcast team, and also covered the bus driver shortages that complicated the reopening with Noel Gasca. Visual journalist Megan Farmer documented the first day of school at Wing Luke Elementary. These stories brought insight and clarity into a complicated moment.       

KUOW Photo / Megan Farmer
Tony Nguyen takes a break from skateboarding in 100-degree heat on Sunday, June 27, at Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill. Seattle dealt with record-breaking temperatures all weekend and into Monday.

Analyzing the impact of this summer’s heat wave 

Between June 26 and July 6, the Pacific Northwest was hit with a historic heat wave now believed to be one of the deadliest weather-related events in Washington state history. As temperatures soared well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, roads buckled, crops shriveled, forests turned to tinderboxes, and shellfish cooked and died by the millions on Puget Sound. Nearly 800 people are believed to have died across the Northwest during the heat wave. KUOW reporters worked to provide our community with essential information throughout the event and as things cooled down, analyze the impacts and what lessons we can draw from it. 

KUOW Photo / Genna Martin
GOP State Rep. Jesse Young speaking at a One Washington event at Island Church on Bainbridge Island, Sept. 8, 2021.

Digging into vaccine hesitancy, avoidance and misinformation across Washington State 

Amidst the surge in Covid-19 cases related to the Delta variant, KUOW reporters dug into vaccine hesitancy, avoidance and misinformation across the state. Eilis O’Neill traveled to Walla Walla with reporting that highlighted how a lack of health information on masks, vaccines and the spread of the Delta variant is contributing to the city having one of the highest per capita Covid-19 rates in the country. Deborah Wang shed light on the group One Washington, who is holding seminars around the state to instruct people on claiming religious exemptions from covid-19 vaccine mandates. She joined a seminar on Baindbridge Island, reporting that much of the talk was focused on civics rather than religion. 

KUOW Photo / Deborah Wang
 

Stories To Catch Up On

Here are three recent, impactful stories from KUOW's newsroom and our youth media program.

A welcome sign to Malden, WA. Founded in 1906.

A wildfire burned 85% of this Washington town. This is their recovery story.

By Brandi Fullwood, Alec Cowan, Sarah Leibovitz and Zaki Barak Hamid 
KUOW Photo/ Alec Cowen
The towns of Malden and Pine City burned to the ground on Labor Day 2020 — 85% of buildings were gone. Residents were displaced. And federal relief was delayed for months. A team of KUOW journalists produced an hour-long Labor Day special for the one year anniversary of the fire, documenting both the impact of the fire and the complicated recovery process.  
How We Adapt: Climate Change on the West Coast

How We Adapt: Climate Change on the West Coast with Marketplace’s Molly Wood 

By KUOW, OPB, KPCC, KQED and American Public Media
KUOW Graphic / Teo Popescu

This July, west coast public media stations joined forces with American Public Media for a discussion on how the west coast is responding to climate change. The conversations highlighted the work of communities across three states – and provided a solutions-oriented look at how we might turn things around. 

Three teens get ready to record an interview in the library at the Judge Patricia H. Clark Children and Family Justice Center during a RadioActive podcasting workshop on April 15, 2021.

'They can never lock your mind up.' Three stories from juvenile jail 

By RadioActive Youth Media
Photo Courtesy of Megan Sobchuk

Since 2015, KUOW’s RadioActive Youth Media program has hosted workshops for youth in King County juvenile detention centers. This summer was the first time we’ve been allowed to distribute the stories publicly. Since the workshop, one of the youth we worked with went on to start his own podcast that he’s been producing from detention.  
 

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