Upcoming fellowship dates
Summer 2025
Description
Our National Fellowship helps journalists and their newsrooms report deeply and authoritatively on the health, welfare and well-being of children, families and communities. The program prepares fellows to report a major enterprise health or social well-being reporting project in the months that follow our initial week of intensive learning in Los Angeles.
The National Fellowship provides journalists a chance to step away from breaking news to take a deep look together at pervasive social and economic inequities in the United States, and the lasting health effects of systemic racism and exclusion on families and communities. Our program places strong emphasis on the ways in which environmental and community conditions can influence how long and how well we live. The program helps Fellows craft projects that engage communities from the start and shares hard-won insights on how to land big projects that deliver maximum impact on the health and well-being of communities. These are projects that change laws and change minds.
Fellows join us for a busy in-person learning intensive, where they have many opportunities for conversations with nationally renowned health experts, policy analysts and community health leaders; with top journalists in the field; and with each other. That’s followed by ongoing mentoring and virtual meetings to support Fellows across the finish line.
Admitted Fellows receive:
- Reporting grants of $2,000-$10,000
- Five days of informative and stimulating discussions
- Five months of professional mentorship, including skills-building workshops
Fellows also are eligible to apply for five months of professional mentorship in engaged journalism and $1,000-$2,000 to support those creative efforts.
Reporting themes we support
We embrace a broad view of health that focuses on how conditions for good health are shaped by what happen outside of doctors' offices and hospitals. Health is shaped by our environment — our schools, our neighborhoods and our communities. We strive to admit Fellows whose work reflects that.
Here are a few broad reporting themes we support in Fellowship proposals:
- Child, youth and family well-being
- Systemic racism and root causes of health inequities
- The school-to-prison pipeline (including juvenile justice) as a health issue
- Maternal and infant health and intergenerational trauma
- The mental health of children and families
- How conditions in schools, communities, and the environment shape health
- Systemic barriers to health tied to race, poverty, and economic opportunity
- Healthcare and public health systems and design and inequitable outcomes
Interested in applying? The application deadline for 2024 has passed. If you would like to apply for 2025, please fill out the contact form below and somebody from our Center will reach out to you.
Sign-up for our newsletter as well for updates and deadlines for future opportunities to apply.
Don’t see your question answered there? Reach out to us at chj@usc.edu.
San Antonio native Laura Garcia had a keen sense of the health inequities dividing her hometown. The National Fellowship helped her tell that story in a way that led to major changes in the city's health care landscape.