Rory Winters

Investigative journalist Rory Winters and housing rights activist Elfie Seymour applied for the Bertha Challenge Fellowship as a pair and established an exciting and interesting journalist-activist team. They collaborated without compromising each other’s professional codes or organizational conduct.

“We would meet weekly and discuss Elfie’s campaign and my research focus. We brainstormed and checked in with each other and our respective host organizations about how our work was developing. My work amplified Elfie’s work, and Elfie could use my research and articles and the traction they got locally.”
^{Rory Winters, The Detail}

The youthful passion the two brought to their work was reflected throughout the Fellowship. Rory’s investigations got local politicians to sit up and take notice of housing inequality in north Belfast in the last two decades.

Elfie and her host organization – Participation and the Practice of Rights (PPR), which coordinates a campaign called Build Homes Now – in turn amplified and drew attention to Rory’s journalistic work in their online activism.

Lifting directly from Rory’s published work, PPR published the following on their website:

Rory’s in-depth investigative pieces and short video dovetailed perfectly with Elfie’s activism. Together they managed to place stories about the desperate need for social housing in major newspapers in Belfast during their Fellowship year.

Through meticulous scrutiny of official statistics, Rory’s work showed that the need for social housing in north Belfast’s mainly Catholic areas is 26 times higher than in other areas in the city.

When confronted with this, local minister of housing Deirdre Hargey acknowledged that there is indeed inequality regarding social housing in Belfast. It was the first time since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that a politician had admitted to this.

“My relationship with Elfie automatically gave me credibility when dealing with people she works with on a daily basis and who are affected by poor housing policies in Northern Ireland that are not based on equality. These people have been let down by the system around them and often feel like society at large doesn’t care... It’s understandable how they could feel that the media would attempt to behave in an exploitative way towards them. My working relationship with Elfie gave credibility to PPR’s campaigning around inadequate accommodation conditions and racial intimidation from poor housing policies. Our collaboration also allowed me to critically assess PPR’s campaign messaging and statements through a journalistic lens, which gave more weight to our joint work.

The fact that we worked together so closely and always questioned how our combined work could have maximum impact was a great learning curve for me and had a huge influence on me and my work. Without Elfie and PPR’s network, my stories and video work would have been read and consumed by a much smaller group of people. I am dead certain about that.”
Rory Winters, The Detail

Find out more about Rory's Bertha Challenge project.