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East Orosi's Long Struggle for Water Part 2: The Role of Community Utility Districts

A person holding a “Justicia para East Orosi” sign. Credit: Sandra Tsang In Part 1 of our series on water in the Central Valley of California we visited a town called East Orosi, which has been fighting for clean water for over 20 years. This week we turn our attention to their sewage system, which is also falling apart. Why has it been so difficult for East Orosi to get clean drinking water and…

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An Interview with Summer Intern Alex Corey

This was an exciting and eventful summer at Making Contact, especially as we had Alex Corey join us as our summer intern! Like the journalists we are, we had to interview him about his time at Making Contact. Be sure to check out his answers below! 1.Tell us about your journalism background. How’d you get into it and why? Well in the past I’ve done a wide variety of reporting, from in-depth…

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East Orosi's Struggle for Clean Drinking Water

A person holding a “Justicia para East Orosi” sign. Credit: Sandra Tsang East Orosi hasn’t had safe drinking water in over 20 years. The water is full of nitrates, runoff from industrial agriculture, which is harmful to human health. The community has taken action to find a solution, from lobbying at the state capital to working with neighboring towns.  And they may finally have one. New…

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The Healing Project: An Abolitionist Story (Encore)

The Healing Project, Installation View, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2022. Credit: Photograph by Anita Johnson Composer, pianist, and vocalist Samora Pinderhughes tells us about The Healing Project. The Healing Project, a fundamentally abolitionist project, explores the structures of systemic racism and the prison industrial complex. This story first aired February 2023. The Healing Project…

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Caring Relationships: Negotiating Meaning and Maintaining Dignity (Encore)

Photo of Alice Wong, Stephanie Guyer-Stevens Credit: Alice Wong, Stephanie Guyer-Stevens The vast majority of care recipients are exclusively receiving unpaid care from a family member, friend, or neighbor. The rest receive a combination of family care and paid assistance, or exclusively paid formal care. Whether you’re a paid home care provider, or rely on personal assistance to meet your daily…

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Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice (Encore)

Book cover of “Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice.” Credit: Macmillan Publishers Inflammatory diseases are on the rise around the world, and when left unaddressed can turn chronic. Now, doctors are finally starting to pay more attention. But why & when does a beneficial part of our immune system turn against us? Raj Patel & Rupa Marya think it has a lot to do with the world we…

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Family Matters: What Helps Black Trans Kids Thrive

Original Art featuring an illustration of two people of color, an adult comforting/embracing a child/young adult. Credit: Courn Ahn Kids are coming out as LGBTQ+ younger than ever before, making their identities more politicized than ever before. Hateful political rhetoric and discriminatory laws are likely contributing to the poor mental health documented among LGBTQ+ kids. In an effort to…

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Family Matters: How Communities Support Trans Kids in Conservative States

Original Art featuring an illustration of two people of color, an adult comforting/embracing a child/young adult. Credit: Courn Ahn In 2011, Kirin Clawson’s endocrinologist placed a puberty-blocking implant in her arm, a medical intervention that is associated with improved mental health for many trans kids with gender dysphoria. In February, Indiana joined several other conservative states…

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The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation

Book cover for “The Trauma of Caste” Credit: Penguin Random House Caste—one of the oldest systems of exclusion in the world—is thriving. Despite the ban on Untouchability 70 years ago, caste impacts 1.9 billion people in the world. Every 15 minutes, a crime is perpetrated against a Dalit person. The average age of death for Dalit women is just 39. And the wreckages of caste are replicated here in…

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Disclose! Divest!: Behind the Fight Over College Endowments

A child running through the Stanford Divestment Encampment. Credit: RJ Lozado. As graduation approached this year, students around the country began protests after calls for divestment from Israel were initially ignored by university leadership. The campus encampments were met with physical violence and the mainstream press dismissed the students’ demands as naive and immature. But, it turns out…

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Borders: What are they good for?

White text reading “Borders: What are they good for?” superimposed on top of a greyscale background showing the jagged border between two sides of a sand dune. Credit: Original photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash. Digitally altered by Lucy Kang. What are borders, and why do we have them? And how is violent border enforcement at the US-Mexico border connected to Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza?…

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The Art of Healing: Finding Strength Through Frida Kahlo

Caption: Outdoor mural featuring Frida Kahlo, Credits: In Confianza, with Pulso This week on Making Contact we take a look at one of the most prolific Mexican artists, Frida Kahlo, and how she inspired the Latina artist collective, “The Phoenix Fridas.” “In Confianza, with Pulso” producer Anthony Wallace brings us the story of Thania Betancourt Alcazar. A member of  “The Phoenix Fridas,” Alcazar…

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Jenny Odell and Discovering Life Beyond the Clock (Encore)

Excerpt from the book cover, reading “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock” superimposed on top of orange and pink geological features. Credit: Penguin Random House Have you ever really considered how we view time as a society? From work to leisure to appointments, we schedule every minute of our days, but how often do we think about why we treat time the way we do, our relationship…

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Uncovering the Refugee Experience & Healing Through Storytelling (Encore)

Wilson Dairy Restaurant (Left), Helen Zia as a baby with mom (Right). Credit: Photo copyright Helen Zia used with permission. This week’s Making Contact episode is about two strong women who survived historic trauma, and the stories they later told their families.  We start with the story of Katie Wilson. Born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Kiev, Ukraine, she grew up safe and comfortable – until…

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Survival for All: Securing Vaccines for the Global South

July 14, 2021 – Mass vaccination tent at Treichville Stadium, Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. The World Bank Group provided technical and financial support to vaccination campaign. Note: these vaccines were not directly World Bank Group funded. Photo: Erick KAglan / World Bank At the beginning of the pandemic we reported on the extremely unequal rollout of vaccines to low income countries. They were…

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The Coast Miwok Peoples, Colonization, and the Preservation of Indigenous History (Encore)

Caption: A tule elk in Point Reyes in 2015. Credit: Austlee via Wikimedia Commons, under a CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed license. Image is unaltered. Dive into the history of Point Reyes National Seashore, one of the most iconic national parks in northern California, with us. Known for rugged sweeping beaches and the famous tule elk, we’ll recount the waves of colonization that violently upended the lives of…

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America's Black Capital

Cover of the book, “America’s Black Capital.” Credit: Hachette Book Group “America’s Black Capital: How African Americans Remade Atlanta in the Shadow of the Confederacy” chronicles how a center of Black excellence emerged amid virulent expressions of white nationalism as African Americans pushed back against Confederate ideology to create an extraordinary locus of achievement. Alongside author…