2023 Highlights and Exciting Changes Ahead

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Highlights From Our Annual Report, and Announcing Our Focus Areas 

As we look back on a year that was exceptionally dark, and brace ourselves for a 2024 that many fear will be bleaker still, it’s a pleasure to share that our work in 2023 included a report by The Christian Science Monitor that Apple News picked as the best “feel-good” story of the year. 

The Climate Generation featured in-depth portraits of young activists from across the globe, each inspiring in their determination to forge a better future, from the northernmost Indigenous community in Canada and the flood-prone streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh, to communities in Montana where young people sued for the right to a more stable climate—and won. 

Pulitzer-style journalism was evident in the projects we supported in 2023, from exposés of gang-style corruption in Serbia and underreported violence in Ethiopia to the unspeakable brutality of a self-styled “goon squad” in a Mississippi sheriff’s department and the health impacts of plastic chemicals in the Global South. 

Our colleagues and grantees shared the Pulitzer Center approach in K-12 classrooms, college campuses, and journalism conferences around the world, from São Paulo and Perugia, Italy, to Stockholm, Johannesburg, Birmingham, Alabama, and Abu Dhabi. 

Explore more highlights in our 2023 annual report, and meanwhile, exciting changes to the website that feature our new strategic framework, one that champions the power of stories to make complex issues relevant and inspire action. We’re emphasizing five broad focus areas—human rights, global health, climate and environment, peace and conflict, and information and artificial intelligence. In each of these focus areas, we’re combining collaborative enterprise journalism with communities of learning and audience-centered engagement. 

With Pulitzer Center staff now based in 14 countries, collaboration across borders is easier than ever, and so, too, your opportunities to engage with our work, as journalists and educators and as donors, readers, and active citizens. Here’s to making constructive engagement with issues that matter the “feel-good” story of 2024. 

Best,

EMILY RAUH PULITZER, Board Chair
JON SAWYER, CEO and President

IMPACT

In October 2023, Pulitzer Center grantee Bukola Adebayo uncovered water contamination issues in Baruwa, a district in Lagos, Nigeria. Oil pipelines have contaminated the water sources for nearly three decades, and community members have complained of pollution since the 1990s. 

Dr. Tunde Ajayi, the Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency general manager, recently announced that the agency is working with the state’s water corporation to channel clean water to Baruwa. He told The Nation, “I’ve seen research publications about it (pollution) and indeed I’m worried.” 

According to Ajayi, efforts to clean up contaminated water sources will be made in the future. For now, the state’s water corporation is laying pipes from the closest water sources to the community to provide residents with clean water. 

This message first appeared in the January 19, 2024, edition of the Pulitzer Center's weekly newsletter. Subscribe today. 

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