Ariel Boone

Reporter

Ariel Boone is a print and radio journalist in Oakland, California and reports primarily on housing rights and homelessness. Ariel was a 2021 Center for Health Journalism 2021 California Fellow whose project reported on opioid use, overdoses, and harm reduction in Alameda County during the Covid-19 pandemic. From 2015 to 2019, Ariel worked in New York City covering global grassroots movements as digital editor for Democracy Now!, the daily independent TV and radio news show hosted by journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Afterward, Ariel found a home at KPFA Radio as a news reporter, producer, and sometimes co-host of the morning public affairs show UpFront. Ariel's work has aired on KPFA Radio and Democracy Now! and appeared in Capital and Main, The Indypendent, Law @ The Margins, and Street Spirit News, and Ariel has done research for projects for The New York Times and ProPublica.

Articles

(Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy via Flick/Creative Commons)

Where the opioid crisis and homelessness meet, you'll find resilience and community care

What I learned during the process of reporting my series on the opioid crisis in unhoused communities in the East Bay was just how many lives are saved each day by the people at the center of the crisis — like Thad.

Nasal spray Narcan, used to reverse opioid overdoses

Health Equity & Social Justice

Environment & Climate

Healthcare Systems & Policy

Mental Health & Trauma

Community & Public Health

Special report on opioid crisis in Oakland’s unhoused community: Voices of overdose and survival

Unhoused people who use drugs are reversing overdoses and saving hundreds of lives each year.

Race and Equity

Poverty and Class

Environmental Health

Health Insurance and Costs

Housing and Homeslessness

Community Safety

Candles create a vigil outside the tent of an unhoused community member who was shot in West Oakland

Health Equity & Social Justice

Healthcare Systems & Policy

Mental Health & Trauma

Community & Public Health

Alameda County doesn't track deaths of unhoused people — here's why that impacts the opioid crisis

Unhoused people are reversing overdoses and saving lives on the street, but these efforts aren’t showing up in official counts.

Poverty and Class

Healthcare Regulation and Reform

Health Insurance and Costs

Community Safety

Michaella Jones hands out sterile supplies from the HEPPAC mobile outreach vehicle in April 2020.

Opioid Overdoses Are At Record Highs. It Doesn't Have To Be This Way.

As the pandemic intensifies the overdose crisis in Alameda County and elsewhere, harm reduction advocates step in where government lags.

Michaella Jones of the HIV Education and Prevention Project of Alameda County holds up a Narcan overdose reversal kit in April 2

While the pandemic raged, overdose deaths spiked in the Bay Area

A new project tracks the deadly trajectory of the opioid crisis during the pandemic in the Bay Area.