Project Information
The Bertha Challenge is an opportunity for activists and investigative journalists to spend a year focussing on one pressing social justice issue.
Successful applicants receive a non-residential paid fellowship and a project budget to work independently and together to:
Investigate the causes of and solutions to the annual
Bertha Challenge question
Amplify their findings to a wider targeted audience
Connect with diverse stakeholders for information, support and sustainable impact
At Bertha we know that many activists and investigative journalists are already doing ground-breaking work to investigate social justice issues, to amplify their work and to connect with audiences. The Bertha Challenge aims to support this by providing time to work exclusively on projects, the spaces in which to connect with a diverse global cohort of Bertha Fellows, and the resources to develop tangible products speaking directly to the Challenge question.
How is the relationship between politics and corporate control of our food systems contributing to environmental devastation and hunger and how can food production center people and nutrition rather than profit?
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Guardians of Mother Language
The Indigenous language is among the forms of expression of intangible heritage in the world. It is therefore important to be aware that as Indigenous languages disappear, the culture and identity of large numbers of Indigenous people also disappears. The main objective of this project is to make a series of portraits, and audio postcards as well as a documentary record that shows the environment of these communities and preserve the identity of the inhabitants. Indigenous people who fight not to let their mother tongue die.
Juan Carlos Reyes García is a Oaxaqueño documentary photographer with more than 30 years of experience, specializing in photo-documentation of interculturality in traditional Indigenous and community practices of Mexico, mainly in Oaxaca.
For Juan Carlos Reyes, photography is a way to connect with the vulnerability of others in order to discover human strength.
Juan Carlos Reyes is a member of the National System of Art Creators in Mexico.
Instagram: @aluro30, @aluro30_portraits
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Yalalteca, Mexican Indigenous documentary photographer, Citlali Fabián uses photography to explore ways of addressing identity and its connections with territory, migration and community bonds. Fabián is a 2020 Visura mentee, Magnum fellow, England Art Council Grantee, National Geographic Society explorer and a 2023 World Press Photo Contest jury member.
Her work has been shown in solo and collective exhibitions in Mexico, the U.S., Spain and Argentina. Her work has been covered at the New York Times and it also has appeared in different media like LA Times, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, Remezcla, Revista Cuartoscuro and IM Magazine among others.
For her Bertha Artivism Awards project, Citlali is co-creating a series of portraits with her birhas, to reflect and visualize the roles of contemporary Indigenous women in their communities. The project will create a series for girls in Oaxaca state, to expand their horizons and get inspired by women with their backgrounds.
“Birha is a concept in Zapotec, the native language of my ancestors, used by women to refer to other women in their lives; the ones with whom we have emotional connections. It can be used from aunties to nieces and back, between cousins, and sisters, but also between friends. The concept obliterates hierarchies and reaffirms sorority as an intrinsic part of our worldview.“
Website: www.citlalifabian.com
Instagram: @citlalifabian
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Collective DePART / audio installation: IF ALL EARS COULD HEAR
The Collective DePART – Decentralized Practices of Active Remembrance and Theatricalization – is a transdisciplinary collective of international artists and facilitators playing with the intersection of art, activism and research. Anna Szepes (HU/AT), Cat Jugravu (DE/RO), Jonas Baur (AT/DE) and Dominik Jellen (AT) began their collaboration during their master’s degree studies in Applied Theatre – Artistic Theatre Practice & Society at Mozarteum University in Salzburg, Austria. Their political working themes and their research-oriented formats emphasize community building, the involvement of local partners and the exploration of untold stories and forgotten shadow histories. The collective aims to question the dominant narratives that shape our understanding of the past, seeking a more nuanced and inclusive perspective on remembrance.
DePART created its core project IF ALL EARS COULD HEAR in 2021. The audio installation was developed with international collaborators and has so far been presented in four cities in three European countries. It is a participatory and performative piece focusing on the practice of active remembrance. As a temporary, wandering and tender memorial, the installation marks erased and forgotten sites of oppression. Through the creation of witness partnerships, letters are written to individuals, Rom*nja and Sinti*zze, who were murdered during Porajmos, the genocide of Roma people during fascism in World War II. As only biographical fragments remain, the installation aims to reclaim their memory and give voice to their imagined stories. The letters are written and then recorded by authors who are activists and creators from Roma communities as well as supporters. The growing archive of letters marks the past as present and creates a space for mourning. By imagining the individual stories of the addressed persons and by highlighting the practices of resistance of those addressing, the installation offers gentle, loving, empowering as well as angry and demanding counter-narratives to erasure and forgetting. Growing out of the ground and sending the voices of the authors across the field, the installation asks the audience to become accomplices by acknowledging the inescapable relevance of the past and by taking personal responsibility for solidarity. The letter archive’s narrative of care is honoring the soil as the source and bearer of memory and history, and describes listening as a beginning.
With the support of Bertha Foundation, DePART will continue its work dedicated to the local specificities of Porajmos in Hungary. By developing a methodological toolkit and training multipliers, the collective aims to make their practice of Active Remembrance accessible to communities everywhere. By developing an online version of the installation, the archive of letters will be accessible around the world.
Website: www.depart.community
Instagram: @depart.collective
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Photo Credit: Márton K. Takács
Runa Kawsay is a collaborative transmedia project that centers the experiences of the Kichwa diasporic community living in North America. Through community building, regenerative storytelling and collaborative photo practice, this project seeks to drive new narratives around indigeneity, particularly from a Kichwa lens.
By leaning on traditional Kichwa practices of gathering and storytelling, Eli will host photo education workshops with the people she has photographed for this series. Eli will develop community photo education workshops where those she has photographed will be directly involved in the construction of a visual narrative.
Eli Farinango is a Kichwa artist and visual storyteller, born in Quito, Ecuador and raised in Ottawa, Canada. Through her practice she explores the vastness and beauty of the healing journey while making intentional space to reclaim personal and ancestral memory through image-making and collaborative processes. Her work appears in the Women Photographers International Archive, British Journal of Photography, The New Republic, NPR, Where The Leaves Fall, Terremoto Magazine and has been exhibited in various venues across North America including Photoville, Toronto Media Arts Center, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, the International Center of Photography and Leica Gallery Miami.
Eli has received grants and awards from Women Photograph, Indigenous Photograph, National Geographic Society and Ontario Arts Council and most recently (2022) she was awarded the Leica Women Foto Project Award.
Website: Elifarinango.com
Instagram: @elifarinango
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POSÁ SUTO (Our House in Palenque language) is an Afrocentric and anti-racist space by and for black, queer, trans, diverse people seeking freedom, healing and justice. Our House, a deeply spiritual and ancestrally artistic space which finds through art, collectivity, the resignification of love, ancestral medicine and all the magic of queerness, the paths to heal and strengthen our existences. Our tools to celebrate black queer lives are the Maricrófonos where we display the art of maricas Negras (black queer folks), the spiritual healing sessions to vindicate our afrodiasporic ancestry, as well as the school for body knowledge and empowerment for afro kids.
The Afrojuvenil Matamba Foundation is an alternative and popular media. With an ethnic/racial focus that revolves around a policy of anti-racist action, sexual and gender dissidence; we seek to make visible the realities of black communities in Colombia. Matamba produces; a biannual digital magazine, audiovisual productions, research and intervention projects, On-site/virtual forums and a wonderful group called: “Negrxs, Maricas y Disidentes” (Black, Queer and Dissident).
AFROFUTURISTIC ARTIVISM
Artivismo Marica Afrofuturista
POSÁ SUTO and Matamba will gather more than 20 black queer artivists to share knowledge, tools, strategies and life experiences in order to strengthen and promote gender queer black artists in Colombia, through a platform for training and content creation and dissemination. We will work on topics of our interests such as Blackness and Racial Justice, Identity and Gender Diversities, Afrofuturism, Black Artivism, Mental Health and Spirituality with Afrodiasporic approach, Digital Marketing and Organizational Strengthening. The project aims to be a space for collective artivist creation that can recognize the voices, experiences and actions of resistance and re-existence from art and social advocacy of young black sexual dissidents in Colombia.
Posá Suto
Instagram: https://instagram.com/posa.suto?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/posasuto
Fundación Afrojuvenil Matamba
Instagram: https://instagram.com/matambarevista?igshid=NzZlODBkYWE4Ng%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@revistamatamba3407
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MatambaRevista/
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The Javaad Alipoor Company is a contemporary theater company that makes work for a changing world and a global audience. Rooted in experimental and multi-platform practice the Company’s work asks the most pressing questions we all face, with a commitment to internationalism, complexity, diversity and fun. We make work for the 21st Century, transforming what people think theater can be and what it can do.
The Javaad Alipoor Company (TJAC) will lead a unique community engagement project focused on empowering the Gypsy Roma and Traveller (GRT) community in North West England through skills development and artist workshops and performances from March – May 2024, delivered in close collaboration with KaskoSan. KaskoSan are founded by East European Roma living in the UK, who’ve grown a proactive and self-assertive community that is proudly reclaiming its culture to erase centuries of misinformation about Romani speakers and their descendants.
Website: https://javaadalipoor.co.uk
Instagram: @javaadalipoor
Facebook: @TheJavaadAlipoorCompany
X: @javaadalipoor
Photo credit: Chris Payne
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Raam is an Iranian musician, writer, actor and podcast host. He started his musical career in the undergrounds of Tehran. With a great deal of international press behind his band, including features in New York Times, MTV, Billboard, NPR, CNN, VICE, NME and Vanity Fair, Raam paved the way for a new generation of aspiring underground Iranian artists. In January 2018, Raam’s father, Kavous Seyed Emami, a prominent environmentalist, was arrested in Tehran under false charges of espionage. Two weeks after his arrest he was killed in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison. Raam and his family attempted to flee Iran, but the authorities detained his mother and confiscated her passport. Raam and his brother were allowed to leave, but his mother was held hostage in Iran for 582 days. Besides his live shows with his band, Raam has also channeled his creative energy into a one man storytelling performance called “Departure” about his family’s experience and his father’s legacy, woven together with his music. He also has a podcast in Persian called “Masty o Rasty,” since its inception in 2020 the show has had over 40 million streams.
As an expatriate artist grappling with the ramifications of political violence, Raam has consistently employed his artistic endeavors and platforms to articulate solidarity and amplify the voices of those relegated to the margins or forcibly silenced. The inception of the Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran served as a catalyst, sparking a formidable uprising led by the courageous women of the nation, galvanized by the tragic death of Mahsa Amini. During this pivotal movement, Raam engaged with numerous women, each sharing poignant narratives of their struggles for freedom, their fundamental human rights and, notably, autonomy over their own bodies. Motivated by a desire to document the life experiences of those courageously risking everything, Raam initiated a project for the Bertha Artivism Awards wherein he undertook the composition and production of songs using the poems of Iranian women. These women, constrained by the looming specter of reprisal, are denied the privilege of publicly expressing their experience and writings through song. To circumvent this suppression, Raam enlisted singers from countries enjoying the liberties of a more emancipated society, tasking them with bringing to life the poignant verses crafted by these Iranian women. This creative initiative thus seeks to bridge the gap between disparate societal freedoms, fostering a cross-cultural exchange of voices and narratives that transcend the limitations imposed by political constraints.
Website: www.kingraam.com
Instagram: @kingraam
Photo Credits: Tori Ferenc, Hami Roshan
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Makani works with refugee women to overcome trauma, fight for their rights, and to change their lives and the world around them – all through the transformative power of the arts. Makani were originally founded to work with Syrian and Palestinian refugee women in Lebanon, where they have put on a reimagined production of Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’, worked with refugee women to make films about their lives, and run Oshana, a long-term craft therapy project that also helps women win financial independence. Makani now also work in London with refugee women from all over the world, where they are putting on a reinterpretation of an ancient Greek comedy about women going on strike to end a war.
Film for Freedom: filmmaking with refugee and asylum-seeking women
The Bertha Artivism Award will enable Makani to start their second UK project, training ten refugee and asylum-seeking women in the fundamentals of filmmaking, mentoring them as they make films on the issues of their choice, connecting them with organizations working on these issues and supporting them to use their films in campaigning and awareness-raising. This project comes at a time when refugee rights are severely under threat in the UK with the government’s proposal to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, and the general inhumanity of the asylum system. Refugees and asylum seekers are facing increasing scapegoating and xenophobia, and forced to live in dire poverty in shocking conditions. Creating space for empathy and understanding, and creating films that can be used in campaigning, could not be more timely or more needed.
Website: www.makani.org.uk
Instagram: www.instagram.com/makani_org
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DJ Kamakani is an Artist whose chosen canvas for the past decade has been Institutional Transformation. He has worked to create conditions that are conducive to catalyzing transformation within legacy institutions such as Higher Education and Executive Leadership across sectors. Now he is working through the universal language of music to move hearts and minds towards reconnection with our Grandmother Earth.
DJ Kamakani has been working with a collective of leaders from Molokai to create and curate a multi-genre compilation album to raise global awareness of Molokai’s efforts to buy back their ancestral lands from the absentee, billionaire landowners who have neglected and mismanaged these lands for too long. The Artists selected are / will be Indigenous and Indigenous-ally Artists from across the Hawaiian islands and beyond. Through this project, the collective seeks to uplift the global LANDBACK movement of returning entire landscapes to Indigenous stewardship in exciting and inspiring ways.
Website: Molokai Heritage Trust: https://www.molokaiheritagetrust.org/
Instagram: @the_real_dj_kamakani
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Michael Jabareen is an artist, designer, architect and performer from Palestine. He was born in occupied Palestine in the city of Nazareth and grew up in Jenin with two parents whose families were forcibly displaced by the Zionist militia during the Palestinian Nakba around 1948, from Beit Jebrin-AlKhalil (Hebron) and Yafa (Jaffa). Michael, with an academic background in architectural engineering and visual and experience design, works in the intersections between visual arts, graphics, videography, theatrical performance and spatial and architectural design. In his projects and collaborations, Michael, through his art, aims to expose the atrocities and crimes of global colonial structures, and hopes to guide the public to act for change rather than stand by and watch.
Ramez Melhem is a multimedia artist. He was born in Homs-Syria, and he has been based in Berlin since 2014. Ramez has professional experience that varies between logistics and studio management, production, visual design and photography. He works on a diverse range of artistic projects using photography and digital collages tackling social and political causes.
The Terminal is a mobile periodical event that focuses on displaying the artwork (visual art, video, audio, performance, etc.) of artists from migrant, refugee, marginalized and discriminated backgrounds who face hardships and difficulties in traveling from their current geographical locations to places with artistic production capacities and audience. With Berlin as the base of the project, as one of Europe’s arts hubs, the audience/public will be part of a performative, interactive experience that switches the privileges of freedom of movement between the artists and the audience, believing that a simulation to reality and creating a memorable personal experience with it will help the audience to better understand it and act to change it.
Instagram: @michaelmjabareen, @ramez_melhem
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Rawz is a Multidisciplinary Artist from Oxford. His practice centers around words and music, and is rooted in social justice and the exploration and understanding of our interconnected worlds. Growing up in one of the UK’s most under-served areas, Greater Leys in Oxford, he first discovered lyric writing in his early teens, finding it an essential way to channel his emotions and organize his thoughts. Since then, Rawz has performed his craft all over Europe, collaborated with musicians from all over the world, and shared stages with some of his childhood heroes. As his practice as a Poet and Musician developed, Rawz explored other means of expression; bringing these skills together with his poetry and music to create projects which combine a range of media. Through Art, Rawz shares his exploration of interconnection and interdependence. His responses often promote outer change and advancement through inner reflection, and positive action. From leaving school with no GCSEs, to becoming Resident Sound Artist at one of the world’s most prestigious learning institutions, his personal journey stands as testament to his resilient character, and strong work ethic.
ArtUnity is a project rooted in the power of art to break down barriers and initiate social change. It incorporates various artistic mediums, genres and narratives to address the divides and disparities within the UK city of Oxford, which contains some of the starkest contrasts in the country, particularly in the context of socio-economic and racial inequalities. Throughout the year, the project will commission work from artists with a diverse range of life experiences, curate and facilitate exhibitions, events and happenings that encourage networking and collaboration among activists, artists and community members, with the aim of creating a strong and unified movement for social change. The project’s events provide opportunities for art appreciation, ideation, networking and collaborative action. The ultimate aim is to foster understanding, collaboration and solidarity between various intersecting groups in the city, by bringing them to the same table and creating shared identity through storytelling and art.
Facebook: @realrawz
Instagram: @rawz_official
Twitter: @realrawz
Bandcamp: www.InnerPeaceRecords.bandcamp.com
Grid Photo Credit: Oxford Atelier
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Shinji spent their Fellowship year traveling between Indigenous communities, urban peripheries and small farmers in Brazil, who face extreme threats from land grabbing, mining, logging and the hostile political environment. They wrote a book documenting the water challenges that communities face.
With Jelena Prtorić (journalist Fellow, Germany), Jelena conducted an in-depth investigation into the quality of water in the EU, focusing specifically on agricultural pollution by pesticides and nutrients. Together they created a ‘water hub’ website housing their investigations and activist resources.
Pascalinah spent her Fellowship year investigating the devastating impact of mining on water in Lesotho. She focused on the Lesotho Highlands Water Project and the imbalance between the development of water resources for commercial and mining industries with community water priorities. In addition to her articles, Pascalinah wrote a book on her investigations, and produced a short film and podcast.
Fredrick wrote a series of articles and created a short documentary on the impact of plastic pollution on Uganda’s Rift Valley lakes. He wrote about sources of plastic pollution, the companies responsible for manufacturing single use plastic bottles and the failures by local authorities to enforce environmental standards.
Musuk traveled to different territories in Peru to photograph communities’ relationships to water. He organized a workshop and exhibition with young people in Belén, where communities live on raised buildings above contaminated river water for eight months of the year. Musuk published his work as usable art in the form of poster books.
With Luisa Izuzquiza (activist Fellow, Belgium), Jelena conducted an in-depth investigation into the quality of water in the EU, focusing specifically on agricultural pollution by pesticides and nutrients. Together they created a ‘water hub’ website housing their investigations and activist resources.
AnuOluwapo is a journalist, documentary filmmaker and director of video productions at The Cable Newspaper Journalism Foundation.
Living in the most densely populated country in Africa, AnuOluwapo’s Fellowship work is framed by her first hand experience of erratic and highly unreliable water supplies. She produced a documentary series about the dynamics behind the lack of access of many Nigerians to clean water. She traveled to five different states in Nigeria, investigating gold mining and industrial water pollution, and failed government drinking water projects. Her documentary presents the connection between water, politics and corruption across Nigeria and its effects on people and the environment.
AnuOluwapo holds an MA in Journalism & Documentary Practice from the University of Sussex. She is a founding member of the Women’s Economic Imperative, a UNICEF Voices of Youth alumni, Carrington Youth Fellow, U.S. Consul General Award Recipient, UN WOMEN/Empower Women Global Champion for Change, Chevening alumni and USGEEA Women achievers awardee.
Film: ‘The Water Manifesto – trailer’ [December 2022]
Film: ‘The Water Manifesto, episode 1’ [December 2022]
Film: ‘The Water Manifesto, episode 2’ [January 2023]
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Shinji works with groups led by women and LBT+ people throughout Brazil, especially in their activities related to the environment and conflicts. Shinji’s work includes supporting mobilization efforts, fundraising, building networks and participating in joint efforts to protect rights.
Shinji spent their Fellowship year traveling between Indigenous communities, urban peripheries and small farmers in Brazil, including in the Amazon and Cerrado regions, who face extreme threats from land grabbing, mining, logging and the hostile political environment.
Shinji wrote a book documenting the water challenges that communities face, and used these to tell stories of their wider struggles for existence.
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Fumba, known professionally as Pilato, is a recording artist and social activist. The name Pilato is an acronym for ‘People in Lyrical Arena Taking Over.’ Born and raised in Zambia’s Copperbelt Province, Fumba commenced his career as a poet and in 2010 he launched into music. With four studio albums, Pilato has continued to inspire political debates and conversations, while championing a more equal and fair society. As a result of his critical political standpoint, he has endured fierce political threats and been arrested several times. In 2020, he founded an organization called People’s Action for Accountability and Good Governance (PAAGZ), a local CSO promoting good governance and accountability, where he currently serves as the Executive Director.
During his Bertha Challenge Fellowship, Fumba worked intimately with grassroots and community groups, producing a music album on water access and political power in Zambia. Fumba’s project is called ‘LIFELESS.’ His ten songs are accompanied by powerful music videos.
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Tommy is a freelance investigative journalist who writes about the environment, health and politics from Ireland, the UK and Spain.
Tommy used his Bertha Challenge Fellowship to investigate industrial scale sand dredging in Lough Neagh, one of biggest freshwater lake systems in north-western Europe. The lake is owned by the Earl of Shaftesbury, an English aristocrat, who has overseen decades of unregulated extraction whilst raking in massive profits.
Tommy used a lidar survey to publicly document, for the first time, the extent of damage caused to the lake bed. He uncovered apparently illegitimate tax breaks awarded to a number of the biggest Lough Neagh extraction firms, prompting a government investigation, and he traced the end point for sand taken from the lough, uncovering devastating environmental damage and destruction.
His Fellowship project also investigated the Shaftesbury Estate’s profiteering at Lough Neagh, questions over its historical claim to the lake and surrounding hinterland, as well as previous failed attempts to bring the lough into public ownership.
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Interview: ‘Earth Matters – Fumba Chama’ [September 2022]
Article: ‘Probe launched into tax credits scheme which campaigners claim ‘brought planning system into ridicule’ [October 2022]
Article: ‘Investigation opened into NI tax scheme described as ‘rehearsal’ for cash for ash scandal’ [October 2022]
Article: ‘Departmental probe into tax relief scheme was ‘inadequate’, campaigner claims’ [November 2022]
Article: ‘Lough Neagh sand a ‘diminishing resource’, experts warn’ [December 2022]
Article: ‘Lough Neagh goes ‘back into the imagination and the history of Ireland’’ [December 2022]
Article: ‘Lough Neagh: New research reveals scarring caused by sand dredging’ [December 2022]
Article: ‘Lough Neagh: Scars from dredging will take ‘decades if not centuries’ to recover’ [December 2022]
Article: ‘Management of Lough Neagh a ‘civil rights issue’’ [December 2022]
Film: ‘Lough Neagh’ [December 2022]
Article: ‘Lough Neagh: Sand dredging must be better monitored, UN experts warn’ [January 2023]
Article: ‘Lough Neagh: Facts on sand dredging’ [February 2023]
Article: ‘Lough Neagh: Year-long investigation exposes serious issues with management of the lake’ [February 2023]
Maria is a CHamoru environmental and cultural rights activist. She is also a lineal descendent of ancestral land in Guam called Ritidian, which is proposed to be used as a buffer zone for a U.S. Marine Live Fire Training Range Complex. She organizes with Hita Litekyan, a coalition of CHamoru families pushing back against the firing range complex.
Maria’s Fellowship project focused on how relationships between politics and profit are contributing to the degradation of Guåhan’s (Guam) main freshwater aquifer and the contamination of the island’s coastal waters. She had a particular focus on a massive U.S. Marine Live Fire Training Range Complex spanning 700 acres that is being built above the island’s primary water source.
Maria created three short films about her year’s investigations, with the first film highlighting the risks to Guam’s water resources by U.S. military projects and how Guam’s political status as an unincorporated territory of the U.S. makes the island vulnerable to projects that harm its natural and cultural resources. The second film looked at the impacts to water from U.S. imperialism and hyper militarization of the Pacific region; and the third film placed a spotlight on historical contamination in Guam’s wetlands and lagoon and links to health problems within the community including devastating testimonies of death and sickness of local inhabitants of Guam. Maria’s films were shown at community screenings on the island.
Maria serves as a board director of Micronesia Climate Change Alliance, a grassroots network of individuals and organizations dedicated to creating community-centered solutions to climate change; an organizer with I Hagan Famalao’an Guahan, a CHamoru Women’s Association of Guåhan founded on the collective mission to enhance, promote, protect and foster the social, economic, cultural, spiritual and political well-being of CHamoru women, girls and gender-diverse people within the overall Guåhan community.
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Luisa is a freedom of information activist and campaign coordinator with Open Knowledge Foundation Germany. Luisa uses European freedom of information laws to conduct investigations, campaigns and litigation for greater transparency and accountability. Luisa’s work has a specific focus on European border control policies, EU lobbying and EU climate policies.
For her Bertha Challenge Fellowship, Luisa worked with investigative journalist Jelena Prtorić (journalist Fellow, Germany). Luisa and Jelena conducted an in-depth investigation into the quality of water in the EU, focusing specifically on agricultural pollution by pesticides and nutrients. Luisa used freedom of information requests and interviews with activists and communities to build a database of information about pesticide pollution of water sources in four European countries, including her native Spain. The database is held on a ‘water hub’ website, along with Jelena’s investigative stories.
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Website and resource hub: Troubled Waters
Website chapter: Invisible Pollution
Website chapter: Smelly Algae and Tap Water
Website chapter: What the Future Holds
Website chapter: Toxic Green Tides of Brittany
Through her Bertha Challenge investigation, Pascalinah has become the first Lesotho female investigative journalist to publish a book. She has a keen interest in science related issues, gender and politics. She serves on the MNN Centre for Investigative Journalism Board of Directors and is the Federation of International Journalists’ Trainer of Trainers on Gender Safety in the Newsroom.
Pascalinah spent her Fellowship year investigating the devastating impact of mining on water. She focused on the Lesotho Highlands Water Project and the imbalance between the development of water resources for commercial and mining industries with community water priorities, in the face of acute and increased droughts.
Her investigations uncovered that the British controlled Letšeng Diamond Mine was knowingly responsible for polluting drinking water, despite previous public claims by both the mine and the Government that this wasn’t the case. She also revealed a confidential report showing that a number of mines were contaminating rivers in the Lesotho Highlands Water Project catchment area (a source of drinking water for Lesotho and South Africa) with dangerous levels of nitrates.
Pascalinah is an award-winning journalist, and has been awarded reporting grants administered by University of Witwatersrand’s Department of Journalism (Africa-China Investigative Reporting 2018 and 2021), the Centre for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (2021) and Internews’ Earth Journalism Network (2021). She was commissioned by Euronews to investigate and produce a Lesotho segment of Cry Like a Boy – an original series on men challenging stereotypes and fighting for gender equality.
Article: ‘Exposed: Letšeng Secretly Admits Contaminating Water Sources’ [May 2022]
Article: ‘Lesotho communities blame diamond mine pollution for trail of sickness, death and ‘poisoned pasture’ [May 2022]
Article: ‘How South Africa’s Water Needs Plunged Lesotho Into Food Insecurity’ [August 2022]
Article: ‘Govt Departments In Blame Game Over Water Pollution’ [October 2022]
Article: ‘Lesotho’s Dangerous Water Gamble’ [October 2022]
Article: ‘Matekane’s M6.7b Letšeng Contracts Raise Alarm On Water Pollution’ [December 2022]
Film: ‘Lesotho’s Poisoned Water’ [December 2022]
Audio: Podcast recording [December 2022]
Document: Podcast transcript [December 2022]
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Abdikhayr works with the Somali Government and local and international organizations in humanitarian assistance, peace-building and development for displaced and rural communities in Somalia.
During his Fellowship, Abdikhayr worked with various clans among rural communities affected by severe drought and prolonged water conflicts. He organized consultation meetings with community elders and women’s groups across five different states.
The consultation meetings were structured as mediations that Abdikhayr used to develop a guidance handbook for the fair and sustainable management of shared water sources in Somalia’s rural valley areas. He also produced an accompanying set of short films documenting the mediation and conflict-resolution processes among the communities that he worked in.
Film: ‘Mediation of Water Conflicts in Galmudug State in Somalia’ [October 2022]
Film: ‘Mediation of Water Conflict in Gumburka Cagaare’ [November 2022]
Film: ‘Water Crisis in Puntland’ [February 2023]
Film: ‘Water Conflicts in Hirshabelle State in Somalia’ [March 2023]
Manual: Somali Rural Community Water Management Manual [January 2023]
Article: ‘Pastoralists In Jariiban Are Heavily Indebted By Water Scarcity In The Face Of Worst Drought Conditions In Somalia’ [April 2022]
Article: ‘How Rural Communities In Galmudug And Puntland Are Going To Overcome Water-Based Conflicts’ [April 2022]
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Fredrick is an award-winning water and climate change journalist, media trainer and communications specialist. He founded Water Journalists Africa, a non-profit media group that brings together over 700 journalists in 50 African countries to report on water-related issues. He is also co-founder of InfoNile, a platform that maps data on water issues in the Nile River Basin and overlays them with journalism stories to promote transboundary peace.
For his Bertha Challenge Fellowship project, Fredrick investigated the impact of plastic pollution on Uganda’s Rift Valley lakes. He wrote about sources of plastic pollution, the companies responsible for manufacturing single use plastic bottles and the failures by local authorities to enforce environmental standards. As part of his Fellowship, he also created a short documentary, and organised a community exhibition of photographs taken during his investigations.
Fredrick has an MA in Communication for Development. He also studied a PGD in Environmental Journalism and Communication and has a BA in Mass Communication. A National Geographic Storytelling explorer, and a Pulitzer Center Grantee, Fredrick has reported from various countries in Africa, Europe, Asia and the United States of America.
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Article: ‘From source to water bodies and dining table: Tracking the journey of plastics in Uganda’ [April 2022]
Article: ‘The enemy within: Fishers pollute African Great Lakes with plastics’ [July 2022]
Article: ‘Rural schools in western Uganda transform used plastic bottles into value’ [July 2022]
Article: ‘River Nile, a freeway of plastics from African great lakes to Mediterranean Sea’ [August 2022]
Article: ‘Uganda’s Fort Portal city takes steps to tackle plastic waste as its only source of water chocks on plastics’ [August 2022]
Article: ‘Investigation raises concerns over plastic waste accumulation on the shores of Africa’s Rift Valley lakes’ [November 2022]
Website: Lakes of Plastic
Musuk is a photographer who works on documentary projects regarding human rights, Indigenous communities and environmental issues.
For his Bertha Challenge project, Musuk traveled to different territories in Peru – Iquitos, Belén, Cusco and Puno – to investigate access to drinking water and communities’ relationship to water. He photographed communities and their responses to water scarcity and water pollution.
In Belén, communities live on raised buildings above contaminated river water for eight months of the year, worsened by illegal mining in the river basin. Musuk worked with a group of young people who took powerful portraits of one another in a local lagoon for a community action.
Musuk’s project culminated in the production of a photo essay book, with posters of a selection of his photos – usable art that he distributed among those that he worked with during the year.
A Magnum Foundation and Pulitzer Center Grantee, as well as a National Geographic Explorer, Musuk is also founder and editor of “KWY Ediciones”, an independent platform for the collective editing and learning of visual narratives for authors in Latin America. He is also part of the urban lighting action collective, Grita Luz.
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Article: ‘Seeds of water: planting queñuas in the Andes’ [March 2022]
Article: ‘Titicaca: la contaminación está matando una de las cuencas del lago más alto del mundo’ [August 2022]
Article: ‘Portraits of a Thirsty Country’ [September 2022]
Podcast: ‘Sed en los Andes – Musuk Nolte’ [October 2022]
Article: ‘Los niños de los ríos de colores: la contaminación en las cuencas del Titicaca’ [November 2022]
Jelena is a freelance journalist who has reported for a wide variety of publications in English, French, Italian and her native Croatian. Her work has focused on gender and human rights, migration, the environment/ climate, culture and social movements, through an investigative and often cross-border lens. As of 2020, Jelena is the Arena Climate Network coordinator for Arena for Journalism in Europe. She is also an occasional podcaster and translator of graphic novels.
For her Bertha Challenge Fellowship, Jelena worked with Luisa Izuzquiza (activist Fellow, Belgium). Jelena and Luisa conducted an in-depth investigation into the quality of water in the EU, focusing specifically on agricultural pollution by pesticides and nutrients. Jelena produced stories on specific water-related issues in the EU, France, Spain, Italy and The Netherlands. With Luisa, she created a ‘water hub’ website housing their investigations and a database of information about agricultural pollution of water bodies.
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Website and resource hub: Troubled Waters
Website chapter: Invisible Pollution
Website chapter: Smelly Algae and Tap Water
Website chapter: What the Future Holds
Website chapter: Toxic Green Tides of Brittany
Article: Can the Netherlands stop polluting its own waters to feed the world? [November 2022]
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Abiose works at the Cable Newspaper Journalism Foundation, where she coordinates a program that focuses on using the tool of investigative reporting for accountability and transparency. As a recipient of the Red Ribbon Award, and a fellow of the World Federation of Science Journalists, she has been at the forefront of reporting on science and development issues.
During her Fellowship year, Abiose published a series of articles and video reports about the social and economic failures that have contributed to the environmental degradation of the Niger Delta region. She visited illegal oil refineries, stalled oil-spill clean-ups and gas flare sites, to show the extent that communities have been affected by oil extraction in the region.
Abiose used these experiences from her investigations to write and stage a play in Ogoniland, in the Niger Delta in an attempt to reach a wider audience. The play, Environmental Refugees, confronted issues such as the lack of drinking water, lack of secure employment and health problems caused by oil extraction in Ogoni and other oil-rich areas. It was attended by over 300 residents from 17 local communities and was so well-received, a production company is talking to her about turning her play into a feature film.
Article: ‘Ogoniland residents demand quick action on N6.4bn water projects’ [May 2021]
Article: ‘How Delta women use heat from gas flaring sites to dry tapioca’ [March 2021]
Video: ‘Abandoned Garri factory in Ogoni land’ [Februarys 2021]
Article: ‘Nigeria spends millions cleaning oil spills — but illegal refiners are still in business’ [February 2021]
Article: ‘Inside Niger Delta creeks where the youth are raking in millions through crude oil theft’ [December 2020]
Article: ‘Unpaid salaries, communal conflict slowing down Ogoni clean-up exercise’ [October 2020]
Article: ‘Poisonous water still sending Ogoni residents to early graves — despite clean-up promise’ [September 2020]
Article: ‘Interview: ‘Clean-up is a cover-up’ — Ledum Mitee, Ogoni activist, speaks on the Niger Delta struggle’ [September 2020]
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LJ is an organizer, direct action trainer and a dancer. Over the past decade she has worked with resettled refugees, opiate users, families fractured by mass incarceration, homeowners in foreclosures and Indigenous communities on the frontlines of climate change. LJ is a Collective Member of Mayday Space, an organizing center and social movement hub in Brooklyn, a trainer for The Center for Story-Based Strategy and The Ruckus Society and the civilian-ally board member of About Face: Veterans Against the War.
LJ used her Fellowship to create a nonviolent direct action incubation and experimentation lab. She organized a series of ‘tac hacks’ – spaces for activists and professional makers such as electricians, designers and carpenters to come up with new and imaginative direct-action tactics. LJ’s final workshop was a climate justice ‘training of trainers’ using the tac hack methodology.
LJ also built a digital resource commons for activists. The site includes a library of activist books, manuals and videos, alongside a database of physical organizing tools that New York-based activists can borrow from the Mayday space.
Website: Mayday Resource Commons
Manual: ‘Tac Hack Manual’
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Yasna is a freelance Chilean reporter, based in Santiago de Chile. For a decade she has worked as an international correspondent for various written and radio media, reporting from Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Her work has been published in La Tercera (Chile), The New York Times, Vice (Mexico) and Mediapart (France). She is co-founder of Late Magazine, where she is currently working as Editor and mediambiente.cl, a site committed to climate change.
During her Bertha Challenge project, Yasna worked with Juan Donoso (activist Fellow), to investigate the extraction of lithium from the ‘lithium triangle’ covering Chile, Argentina and Bolivia for electric cars marketed in Europe. Yasna visited sites of lithium mining to explore how the mining is affecting local ecosystems and communities, including the Atacama salt plains, home to one of the largest lithium mines in South America.
Website: The Lithium Triangle
Article: Lithium’s Grays [February 2021]
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Linh has spent the last decade in climate action, across advocacy, media and social enterprise. She is passionate about strengthening civic institutions to achieve climate justice through tackling social inequality. Linh led the Australia and Pacific office for Climate Reality, Al Gore’s leadership program. She previously served as the editor-in-chief at The Verb, an environmental newswire service, where she covered the Paris Agreement negotiations. She is currently a board member at Climate Action Network Australia.
Linh worked with a number of campaign groups to design tailored engagement strategies on supporting and cultivating climate activism. She published a report on cultural adaptation of climate campaign resources for activists in Asia with The Campaign Strategy Fellowship. She also wrote a research paper on upcoming opportunities for public engagement with Climate Action Australia. Linh organized a series of roundtable events to present her findings to participants from various Australian climate organizations.
Throughout the Fellowship year, Linh was a guest co-host on the Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, a monthly podcast by Dan Ilic (journalist Fellow) that aimed to bring discussions on difficult climate topics to new audiences through comedy.
Podcast: Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, 9 October 2020
Podcast: Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, 12 November 2020
Podcast: Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, 17 December 2020
Podcast: Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, 14 March 2021
Podcast: Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, 23 April 2021
Podcast: Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, 28 May 2021
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Fede is a storyteller and land defender. He works with social movements and communities to develop narratives that respond to day to day struggles, and that dismantle oppressive structures.
During his Bertha Challenge Fellowship, Fede worked with Andrea Isabel Ixchiú Hernández (journalist Fellow) to share three stories of resistance told by women. Their work focuses on the intersection of organized women, Indigenous rights and territory with an emphasis on water, land and governance.
Along with the three films, Andrea and Fede also organized ‘Curra da Terra’, an online gathering of more than 267 Indigenous women from 116 Indigenous nations in 37 different countries. The event called on Indigenous women from around the world to share their experiences of resisting profit-driven destruction of Indigenous territories, and the violence that accompanies it.
Website: Cura da Terra
Film: ‘#CuraDaTerra Thelma Cabrera: curar el territorio’
Film: ‘#CuraDaTerra Maria Choc: curar el cuerpo’
Film: ‘#CuraDaTerra Maggie García: curar el espíritu’
Podcast: ‘#CuraDaTerra Thelma Cabrera: cure of the territory in times of climate crisis’ (English) [October 2021]
Podcast: ‘#CuraDaTerra Thelma Cabrera: curar el territorio’ (Spanish) [October 2021]
Podcast: ‘#CuraDaTerra Maria Choc: cure the body in times of climate crisis’ (English) [October 2021]
Podcast: ‘#CuraDaTerra Maria Choc: curar el cuerpo’ (Spanish) [October 2021]
Podcast: ‘#CuraDaTerra Maggie García: cure the spirit in times of climate crisis’ (English) [October 2021]
Podcast: ‘#CuraDaTerra Maggie García: curar el espíritu’ (Spanish) [October 2021]
Webinar: ‘The Future is a Territory We Must Defend’ (September 2021)
Report: ‘The Future is a Territory We Must Defend’
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Juan is a climate justice organizer, campaigner and writer based in Berlin. He seeks to foster dialogues between anti-capitalist movements and community building networks. In recent years, Juan has been working with Bloque Latinoamericano, a collective of people and organizations of the left in Berlin. His work focuses on the defense of nature and territories, while highlighting the role that European transnational companies have in Latin America.
During his Bertha Challenge project, Juan worked with Yasna Carolina Mussa Valenzuela (journalist Fellow), to investigate the extraction of lithium from the ‘lithium triangle’ covering Chile, Argentina and Bolivia for electric cars marketed in Europe. Together they visited the Atacama salt plains, home to one of the largest lithium mines in South America, to understand the effects of lithium extraction on the local ecosystem and communities.
Juan used the community interviews, along with the work published by Yasna, to develop an educational curriculum for young people in Germany on lithium extraction. He also developed a series of short videos and animations for young people and teachers to explore alongside the curriculum.
Website: Shaping Pathways
Video: Sacred Salt Flats [June 2021]
Video: The Grays from Lithium [June 2021]
Video: Green Colonialism [June 2021]
Video: Revaluing Practices and Knowledge [June 2021]
Video: Tesla and Co. [June 2021]
Video: Collective Forces [June 2021]
Video: Just Mobility [June 2021]
Video: A Democratic Issue [June 2021]
Video: Climate Smart Mining [June 2021]
Webinar: ‘Lithium extraction in Latin America – hope for the “Green Economy” and threat to local communities?’ [May 2021]
Podcast: ‘Full speed ahead into the future: controversies about e-mobility’ [December 2020]
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Dan is one of Australia’s most prolific comedy filmmakers and radio journalists. Calling himself an “investigative humorist”, Dan has used comedy as an activist tool throughout his professional career in Australia and the U.S. He has performed in front of thousands of people across Australia, including sell out shows at the Sydney Opera House and on ABC Radio National.
Dan is the host of the award-winning podcast and live comedy show, A Rational Fear – a show that brings together journalists, comedians, experts and politicians and uses comedy to talk about climate issues that get overlooked in mainstream media. During his Bertha Challenge year, he used this weekly podcast to engage new audiences with the climate crisis through comedy. He launched a monthly climate focused podcast, Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, which was co-hosted by Linh Do (activist Fellow).
Dan’s Fellowship year culminated with live shows in two of Australia’s climate-vulnerable cities: Newcastle, a traditional mining area and home to Australia’s largest coal mines; and Bega, one of the areas worst hit by the 2020 bushfires, where promised emergency funds still haven’t been delivered.
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 10 July 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 31 July 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 7 August 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 14 August 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 21 August 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 28 August 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 4 September 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 11 September 2020
Podcast: Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, 13 September 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 18 September 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 25 September 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 1 October 2020
Podcast: Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, 9 October 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 22 October 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 30 October 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 6 November 2020
Podcast: Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, 12 November 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 20 November 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 27 November 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 4 December 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 11 December 2020
Podcast: Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, 17 December 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 22 December 2020
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 22 January 2021
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 29 January 2021
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 5 February 2021
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 11 February 2021
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 26 February 2021
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 5 March 2021
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 12 March 2021
Podcast: Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, 14 March 2021
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 19 March 2021
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 26 March 2021
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 2 April 2021
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 14 April 2021
Podcast: Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, 23 April 2021
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 30 April 2021
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 14 May 2021
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 21 May 2021
Podcast: Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, 28 May 2021
Podcast: A Rational Fear, 4 June 2021
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Andrea is a journalist, human rights activist and defender of the territory. She is a Nobel Women’s Initiative Fellow and was awarded the Sakharov Prize Fellowship, which honors individuals and groups of people who have dedicated their lives to the defense of human rights and freedom of thought. Andrea has also been an Indigenous authority in her hometown of Totonicapán.
During her Bertha Challenge Fellowship, Andrea worked with Federico Etiene Zuvire Cruz (activist Fellow) to share three stories of resistance told by women. Their work focuses on the intersection of organized women, Indigenous rights and territory with an emphasis on water, land and governance.
Along with the three films, Andrea and Fede also organized ‘Curra da Terra’, an online gathering of more than 267 Indigenous women from 116 Indigenous nations in 37 different countries. The event called on Indigenous women from around the world to share their experiences of resisting profit-driven destruction of Indigenous territories, and the violence that accompanies it.
Website: Cura da Terra
Film: ‘#CuraDaTerra Thelma Cabrera: curar el territorio’
Film: ‘#CuraDaTerra Maria Choc: curar el cuerpo’
Film: ‘#CuraDaTerra Maggie García: curar el espíritu’
Podcast: ‘#CuraDaTerra Thelma Cabrera: cure of the territory in times of climate crisis’ (English) [October 2021]
Podcast: ‘#CuraDaTerra Thelma Cabrera: curar el territorio’ (Spanish) [October 2021]
Podcast: ‘#CuraDaTerra Maria Choc: cure the body in times of climate crisis’ (English) [October 2021]
Podcast: ‘#CuraDaTerra Maria Choc: curar el cuerpo’ (Spanish) [October 2021]
Podcast: ‘#CuraDaTerra Maggie García: cure the spirit in times of climate crisis’ (English) [October 2021]
Podcast: ‘#CuraDaTerra Maggie García: curar el espíritu’ (Spanish) [October 2021]
Webinar: ‘The Future is a Territory We Must Defend’ (September 2021)
Report: ‘The Future is a Territory We Must Defend’
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Antonia Juhasz is an energy analyst, author and investigative journalist specializing in oil. Her investigations include the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, oil exploitation in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the Paris Climate Accord, the role of oil and natural gas in the Afghanistan war and resistance movements from Standing Rock to the Norwegian Arctic. Her articles and opinion pieces appear in numerous leading magazines and newspapers. Antonia is the author of three books: Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill, The Tyranny of Oil and The Bush Agenda.
For her Bertha Challenge project, Antonia published a series of articles analyzing the state of the oil industry through a critical period that included the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 U.S. election. She focused on groups that are challenging the power of oil companies, and the role of women and girls in leading those movements.
Article: ‘Exxon’s oil drilling gamble off Guyana coast ‘poses major environmental risk’ [August 2021]
Article: ‘A Court Ruled Shell Is Liable for Its Contributions to Climate Change. What Happens Now?’ [May 2021]
Radio: ‘(Un)Covering Oil: From Capitol Hill Riots to the Necessity of Environmental Justice, the Final Episode’ [January 2021]
Article: ‘How Women and Girls are Ending the Fossil Fuel Era’ [October 2020]
Video: ‘The End of Oil? Pandemic Adds to Fossil Fuel Glut, But COVID-19 Relief Money Flows to Oil Industry’ [September 2020]
Article: ’Bailout: Billions of Dollars of Federal COVID-19 Relief Money Flow to the Oil Industry’ [August 2020]
Article: ‘The End of Oil Is Near’ [August 2020]
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Alex is an organizer and artist based on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, ‘Australia’. She has worked in film, theater, communications and troublemaking in many forms. This includes taking part in blockades from Jabiluka in Australia to la zad in France, collaborating on the Indigenous language and theater project, ‘Ngapartji Ngapartji’, and curating the Something Somewhere Film Festival. As a Producer, Director and Impact Producer, Alex has worked on powerful documentary films including Queen of the Desert, THE ISLAND, Island of the Hungry Ghosts and In My Blood It Runs. Alex was also the Global Impact and Distribution Producer on Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything project.
For her Bertha Challenge project, Alex created ‘The Planting’, a speculative audio performance that invites audiences to imagine a more hopeful and just future, and the pragmatic steps needed to get there. Her narrative imagines the introduction of a large-scale ecological recovery, Indigenous-led, employment program in Australia. The experimental sound work is designed to be experienced in tandem with ‘noisy’ weather events such as hailstorms or high winds, bringing together an imagined future and present reality of the climate crisis.
Website: ’The Planting’ project profile
Audio: ‘The Planting’ audio sample [March 2021]
Audio: ‘The Planting’ – Subterrarium Podcast: The Frogs of Merri Creek [December 2020]
Audio: ‘The Planting’ – Community Care Supporter Employee Training Module 1 [December 2020]
Audio: ‘The Planting’ – Covid19 Through The Stories Of Survivors: Part 7 Cruise Ships, Coronavirus And Catastrophe [December 2020]
Audio: ‘The Planting’ – How To Resistance Walk [November 2020]
Audio: ‘The Planting’ Episode 9 – Blue Dissolution: Leaving Power Behind [October 2020]
Audio: ‘The Planting’ – Recovered Fragments from Files #2.2028, #5.4.2025, #6.2026, #21.10.2025 – AI in the Care Revolution [October 2020]
Audio: ‘The Planting’ – Creative Citizenry Soundscape [October 2020]
Audio: ‘The Planting’ – Node 47 Education Centre Good News Broadcast [October 2020]
Audio: ‘The Planting’ – Nurses Strike Tropical Diseases Ward [July 2020]
Audio: ‘The Planting’ – Care Protest [July 2020]
Audio: ‘The Planting’ – Mannginham Bushfire Respite Care [July 2020]
Audio: ‘The Planting’ – Collateral Damage – The Changing Birdscape Of Victoria [ July 2020]
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Narrira works as a UX researcher and technologist based in Brazil. She is a digital security trainer for social movements, activist organizations and third-sector organizations, aiming to strengthen privacy and security in collective actions and data uses. Narrira has also worked as a UX Researcher, examining technology products to improve privacy and engagement for human rights defenders. Previously, Narrira was a Mozilla Fellow embedded in the host organization Derechos Digitales.
As a Bertha Challenge Fellow, Narrira worked closely with environmental organizations, and climate and Indigenous activists to strengthen their digital security. She travelled to remote villages where a lack of internet access and digital skills have left activists vulnerable to security breaches and threats. Narrira conducted multi-day workshops, providing some basic steps that participants could use to increase their confidence in working with digital devices. In addition, Narrira ran a series of online tailored courses for activist organizations in Brazil and further afield.
Narrira used the workshops to develop a website with a series of public resources on digital security for activists and Indigenous land defenders.
Website: https://acaravana.tech/
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Mike is a photographer, filmmaker and environmental scientist who uses his knowledge of visual storytelling and conservation to create narratives that drive social change. He holds an MSc in Environmental Sustainability from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He has directed award-winning films in the Arctic, the Amazon, the Himalayas and East Africa. His work has been featured by National Geographic, The Guardian, Vox, the BBC and others.
For his Bertha Challenge project, Mike spent a month travelling around Chesapeake Bay, photographing and interviewing residents. The Bay is the U.S.’s largest estuary, and an important wetland habitat, facing rising sea levels that threaten the homes and infrastructure of local communities.
Mike used blue tape to physically mark where the coastline is expected to reach by 2100. His photos show the projected coastline cutting across play areas, roads and houses. He also took portraits of local residents standing in places of personal significance with a measurement stick showing how high the water is expected to rise in that location. The portraits are accompanied by interviews with people talking about the importance of the area and about the future of Chesapeake Bay.
Alongside these photos, Mike also produced aerial images showing how much land will be lost by the end of the century if nothing is done to address climate change, compared to how much land will be lost if immediate and radical action is taken.
Website: The Coming Coast (portfolio of photos)
Article: ‘This Ecologist Thinks Coastal Wetlands Can Outrun Rising Seas. Not Everyone’s Convinced.’ [June 2021]
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Bhrikuti is a multimedia journalist based in Kathmandu. During her decade-long career, she has reported extensively on environment, technology and human rights. Bhrikuti loves all things audio, and is co-creator of the feminist podcast Boju Bajai, which she started in 2016 with poet Itisha Giri. Her work has appeared in several Nepali and international media, including The Kathmandu Post, Nepali Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times and Buzzfeed News. In 2017, she won a Fulbright scholarship to pursue a Masters degree at Columbia University in New York, where she specialized in investigative journalism.
Bhrikuti used her Bertha Challenge Fellowship to investigate the extent of the ecological damage caused by illegal sand extraction from rivers across Nepal, and its impact on the most vulnerable communities. She investigated the collusion between business and politics, in particular connections between politicians with influence over Nepal’s ecological legislation, and the sand extraction and construction industries. Alongside her investigative stories, Bhrikuti developed a public database with records of Nepal’s public officials and their business interests.
Website: Searchable database of public officials and their business interests
Article: ‘Conservation in Chure takes a back seat’ [June 2021]
Article: ‘Environment, the biggest loser in Nepal’s expensive elections’ [June 2021]
Article: ‘A decade of environmental plunder’ [June 2021]
Article: ‘Environment conservation takes a back seat in the budget’ [May 2021]
Article: ‘Permit to plunder: How the environment is paying the price for Nepal local governments’ greed’ [April 2021]
Article: ‘Nepal breathes uneasy’ [April 2021]
Article: ‘Drawing a line in the sand: Part Two’ [January 2021]
Article: ‘Drawing a line in the sand: Part One’ [January 2021]
Article: ‘Across Nepal’s mid-hills, unplanned roads are leading to more landslides – and more deaths’ [November 2020]
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Charles is a Zimbabwean journalist and freedom of expression activist. He has a keen interest in community centric investigative journalism, with a particular focus on social justice and environmental management issues. In 2010, he was one of the founding employees of the Media Centre in Harare, where he was instrumental in establishing a resource centre for freelance journalists and promoting citizen journalism in communities across Zimbabwe. Charles is a Radio Netherlands Certified trainer of trainers in multimedia production and a Programs Officer and Editor at Community Radio Harare, a community radio initiative.
Charles’ Bertha Challenge project focused on the effects of corruption and mismanagement in the delivery of basic sanitation services for marginalized communities, in the context of an escalating climate crisis. He set up the website Dry & Dirty as a platform for news and resources about water pollution and political corruption in Harare and beyond.
In addition to his investigative stories, Charles created a documentary where he talked to communities affected by Harare’s water crisis, including communities whose water supplies have been cut off by illegal construction work on Harare’s wetlands. He also produced an e-book to present his year’s research.
Book: ‘Dry & Dirty’ [June 2021]
Documentary: ‘Dry & Dirty’ [June 2021]
Article: ‘Costly and deadly, Harare’s water pollution crisis’ [March 2021]
Article: ‘Policy Should Empower communities as Wetlands stewards’ [February 2021]
Video: ‘Residents challenge development on Sunningdale Wetland under unclear circumstances’ [January 2021]
Article: ‘Proposal confirms city of Harare water as toxic’ [January 2021]
Article: ‘Is Chitungwiza fast losing the Wetlands battle?’ [December 2020]
Film: ‘Now is the time to reclaim Chitungwiza’s wetlands’ [November 2020]
Article: ‘Authorities fail to rein in bulk water operators’ [October 2020]
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Angeles is Lead Organizer of the Workplace Justice Team at Make the Road New York. Make the Road New York is one of the largest membership led community organizations in New York, providing direct services and organizing for housing, labor, immigrant rights, police accountability, environmental justice and more. Angeles drives the organization’s campaigning against the damage Amazon is doing to communities across New York and the country.
For her Bertha Challenge project, Angeles led a team of graduate students at New York University Wagner Graduate School of Public Service to survey and analyze data from Amazon employees and community members capturing the labor, community and environmental impact of Amazon’s warehouse growth in Staten Island, New York. Angeles and a coalition of labor unions, community organizations and policy experts intend to release this report at the start of the New York session to build power in passing the first ever state level anti-trust legislation in the country to break up Amazon’s monopoly power.
Angeles and LJ Amsterdam (activist Fellow) collaborated on creating mass popular education materials, including an animated workshop guide highlighting Amazon’s exploitation of labor and land, and led direct actions with immigrant community members and Amazon workers.
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Sze Ning has been working with Indigenous communities in Malaysia for over 15 years, assisting in advocacy training, documenting and welfare aid.
Sze Ning worked with Elroi Yee (journalist Fellow) to focus on Malaysia’s Indigenous Orang Asli communities who are moving out of government resettlement schemes and returning to their customary lands. These lands are often exploited by the state and commercial enterprises for profit, leaving little resources for Indigenous communities.
Sze Ning and Elroi visited the Orang Asli villages several times during their Fellowship year to better understand what they need to organize against efforts to displace them. Sze Ning found that communities lack information on the most basic of public services. In addition to acting as a liaison point between the villages and healthcare professionals (a vital role during the COVID-19 pandemic), Sze Ning produced a short video toolkit that can be distributed over WhatsApp. She used humor and animations to provide accessible information on topics such as how to document customary lands and how to deal with land incursions by logging companies.
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Elroi is a multimedia investigative journalist, whose stories have ranged from Indigenous peoples and human trafficking, to refugees. His work has received numerous accolades, including being twice nominated for a Peabody Award, winning five SOPA Awards and seven Asian Media Awards. During his time at R.AGE, the team has won the Kajai Award twice, and was conferred the United Nations Malaysia Award in 2016.
Elroi worked with Puah Sze Ning (activist Fellow) to focus on Malaysia’s Indigenous Orang Asli communities who are moving out of government resettlement schemes and returning to their customary lands. These lands are often exploited by the state and commercial enterprises for profit, leaving little resources for Indigenous communities.
Elroi’s investigations focused particularly on the Orang Asli struggles against logging companies. He documented the detrimental impact logging has on the local environment – and by extension on the Orang Asli’s access to land, water and food, as well as on the health of community members. Alongside his stories, he worked with community journalists to set up a digital map where various Orang Asli villages shared photos, videos and geospatial evidence of logging activity, to submit as evidence of malpractice to the authorities.
Article: ‘The Village Journalists of Kampung Ong Jangking’ [January 2021]
Video: ‘Behind the Blockade’ [January 2021]
Article: ‘Logging has destroyed our land, say Orang Asli’ [December 2020]
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Yaşar is an Istanbul-based urbanist, activist and researcher. He is one of the Co-founders and the Director of the Center for Spatial Justice, a non-profit working towards fairer, more democratic, ecological urban and rural spaces. Since 2010, he has been teaching participatory planning and co-housing courses at Darmstadt Technical University (Germany) as a visiting lecturer. Yaşar is a voluntary consultant for Düzce Hope Homes, the first participatory social housing project in Turkey and one of the World Habitat Awards 2017 finalists.
Through his Bertha Challenge project, Yaşar published the Hope Archive – an interactive digital map that uses video and text to document stories of housing and land justice struggles. The archive aims to showcase alternative solutions to the housing crisis from around the world.
Alongside the archive, Yaşar took advantage of the Bertha Challenge Fellowship network to produce a journal on land and housing activism. The August 2020 edition of beyond.Istanbul, guest edited by Yaşar, included contributions from four other Bertha Challenge Activist Fellows and four Bertha Challenge Investigative Journalist Fellows.
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Leilani joined the Bertha Challenge in her final year as UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, a global watchdog on housing. In the role since 2014, Leilani presented reports to the UN on homelessness, the commodification of housing and its consequences for people who are poor as well as the middle class. A lawyer by training, Leilani has worked to advance the rights of poor and marginalized groups throughout her career. She is the Executive Director of the NGO Canada Without Poverty and was instrumental in launching a historic constitutional challenge to government inaction in the face of rising homelessness in Canada.
Leilani used her Bertha Challenge Fellowship to launch a new initiative called The Shift – a global movement which calls for housing to be approached as a human right, not a commodity. As well as producing a strategy for the organization and building content for the website, Leilani also worked on a number of papers on housing provision for policy makers. At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Leilani created a series of practical guidance notes and video introductions on prioritising the right to housing in government responses to the pandemic.
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Website: https://www.make-the-shift.org/covid19/
Article: ‘Housing is Both a Prevention & Cure for COVID-19’ (May 2020)
Article: ‘How can billions of people ‘stay home’ to beat Covid-19 without a safe place to live?’ (April 2020)
Press release: ‘“Housing, the front line defence against the COVID-19 outbreak,” says UN expert’ (March 2020)
Article: ‘They allowed the perfect storm’: UN expert damns New Zealand’s housing crisis’, by Eleanor Ainge Roy (February 2020)
Article: ‘When governments sell out to developers, housing is no longer a human right’ (February 2020)
Glenda is a Salvadoran journalist specializing in public health, gender equity, environmental issues, education, migration, violence and citizen participation. She has been the editor of the Sunday magazine Séptimo Sentido and part of La Prensa Gráfica since 2009 and a distinguished member of the CONNECTAS Community.
During her Bertha Challenge Fellowship year, Glenda investigated the shocking, but underreported, link between large scale agricultural plantations in Central America, and epidemic levels of chronic kidney disease among farmers and their families who live and work around the plantations.
Glenda’s investigation took her into rural farmlands in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica. Chronic kidney disease is now the second most common cause of death among men in Nicaragua. Within the wider region, it is estimated to have caused over 20,000 premature deaths. Glenda has worked tirelessly to make these statistics public knowledge in the Central American countries affected.
Her investigation has been nominated for a 2020 Gabo Award.
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Nnaemeka is a farmer, community radio journalist and founder of The Smallholders Foundation, a rural development organization set up to inform, educate and improve the livelihood of rural small farmers, using educational radio programs. As a social entrepreneur and an outstanding communicator, Nnaemeka has received more than 30 local and international awards for his innovations that improve the yield and income of farmers.
Imo State, in south-east Nigeria, where Nnaemeka lives, contains the largest gas deposits identified to date in Africa. Gas exploration in the area has led to the forceful displacement of an estimated 25,000 smallholder farmers and their families across four communities.
During his Bertha Challenge Fellowship, Nnaemeka researched, wrote and produced a ten part radio drama series called When There Was No Land To Farm examining the relationship between oil and gas companies and the communities who live on the land that they extract from. The drama is set in Imo state, and aims to educate listeners about the exploitation of smallholder farmers to the detriment of the land and environment. Each episode was followed by a listener phone-in, where farmers could put questions about their rights to in-studio legal experts. The series was broadcast across 4 radio stations to 2 million listeners in Nigeria. It was also made available to international audiences through a dedicated website which contains the scripts and photos documenting the recording process.
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Dr. Monica Magoke-Mhoja is the Country Program Director of Landesa Tanzania, which works to secure land rights for the poorest men and women, especially in rural areas. She has more than 25 years of experience leading women’s and children’s rights programs. She is the first chairperson of Women in Law and Development in Africa –Tanzania, Founder of the Children’s Dignity Forum and, in 2007, initiated Tanzania’s first national forum to end child marriage. She is also the founder of the Women’s Legal Aid Center (WLAC) and a 2003 recipient of the American Bar Association’s International Human Rights Award for significant contribution to human rights, rule of law and access to justice.
In Tanzania, despite having some of the most progressive legislation in the region, only 16% of land is owned by women. Dr. Monica Mhoja’s Bertha Challenge project addressed the cultural and social barriers that prevent women, particularly those in rural areas, from owning land. She applied for a Bertha Challenge Fellowship to pilot an original module – ‘Mwanamke na Ardhi’ (Women and Land) – for an app called ‘Law on Your Palm’ that provides women living in remote areas with legal advice about their land rights.
During her Fellowship year, Monica trained 35 paralegals to use the app module. This training gave paralegals the ability to provide legal advice to more than 300 women, and record obstacles that women faced to rightful land ownership. The data was used to lobby policymakers to address challenges in Tanzanian law and practice around land use in the country.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit Tanzania, Monica realized the potential of the app as a communication tool. At a time of confusion and anxiety, Monica and her colleagues were able to quickly adapt the app to send key health messages to rural communities. Monica also produced radio jingles to air on community radio stations to raise awareness about Covid-19, particularly its impact on women.
Following her Bertha Challenge Fellowship, Monica continues to expand the project’s outreach to other parts of Tanzania.
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Maeve is an award-winning investigative journalist and founder of the critically-acclaimed podcast The Tip Off. As a journalist at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Maeve has led nationwide, collaborative investigations on issues including cuts to domestic violence refugees and politicians’ use of Facebook “dark ads”. Her year-long project counting homeless deaths prompted widespread debate, influenced national and local policy and caused the Office for National Statistics to start counting when and how people are dying homeless in the UK. Her book No Fixed Abode was published in September 2020.
Maeve’s Bertha Challenge project investigated parts of the UK housing market, unaffordable rent costs and discrimination against housing benefit claimants. At the center of her Fellowship work was a call made to local media outlets to work with TBIJ to gather information from local councils on housing needs. As a much bigger network of journalists, they were able to make the stories locally relevant, while also bringing the traction of a nation-wide investigation. TBIJ shared the data and methodology for journalists to report on the specific statistics in their area, and to solicit responses from local councils.
Maeve found that, of 62,000 available properties, only 6% would be affordable to someone receiving housing benefits. A further 90% of these ‘affordable’ properties had landlords who would not consider renting to someone receiving housing benefits. Despite this, a shortage in social housing stock has led local councils to increasingly rely on homeless people finding properties on the private market. The investigation was nominated for a Sigma Award for data journalism, and an Amnesty UK Digital Innovation Award.
Maeve exposed how councils rely on the advice of doctors employed by a single private company who make decisions about an individual’s entitlement to housing support. She found that councils have paid at least £2 million for medical assessments made by doctors who didn’t even bother to meet or talk to the individuals that they reported on. The investigation led at least one local council to change their assessment process, and a medical charity to launch a campaign against the outsourcing of medical assessments.
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Article: ‘Locked Out: Why the housing benefit rise won’t make much difference’ (January 2020)
Article: ‘Islington to drop NowMedical over homelessness assessment fears’ (January 2020)
Article: ‘How a doctor who has never seen you can say you’re fit enough to sleep on the streets’ (December 2019)
Article: ‘Locked Out: Stories from across the UK expose holes in the housing safety net’ (November 2019)
Online tool: ‘Locked Out: Check if there’s enough affordable housing in your area’ (October 2019)
Article: ‘Locked Out: How Britain keeps people homeless’ (October 2019)
Article: ‘Locked Out: New homelessness law brings delays, denials and dead ends’ (October 2019)
Protus is a Kenyan journalist based in Nairobi with experience writing on politics, development, health, education, agriculture and environment with a specific interest in climate change. He is a green economy champion and his stories on socio-economic topics like land, water and housing have necessitated policy reviews. In 2013, Protus won an award by the Forum for African Investigative Reporters and the US based Oakland Institute to do an investigative story on land grabs in Africa. He was subsequently awarded the 2018 Journalist Grant from the Stockholm International Water Institute to attend World Water Week in Stockholm.
Protus applied for a Bertha Challenge Fellowship to investigate land grabbing in Kenya. In a country where the majority of people don’t have title deeds, many have been left vulnerable to exploitation by developers. Protus investigated the bankers, politicians and business people with political and social influence who collude with the land registry office for personal financial gain. He also drew attention to cases of smallholder and community evictions for government and private sector projects.
Kenya’s coastal regions are some of the country’s most exploited. Multinational companies have been allowed to buy up land at massively reduced and unrealistic prices, sometimes illegally. Protus investigated how members of the Digo community in Msambweni, Kwale County, have fought for land that had been claimed by a large sugar factory. He also wrote about community land that had been lost to Mombasa airport. Both stories related to cases that had been in court for ten or more years, but since publication have been resolved in favor of the affected communities
One of the themes that emerged from Protus’ stories was the disconnect between communities at risk of displacement and the politicians making planning and development decisions. He decided to use his Bertha Challenge Connect Fund to organize a training workshop for 10 local journalists, with the aim of strengthening the capacity of local journalists to amplify stories from their communities. He invited two other African-based Fellows, Dr. Monica Magoke-Mhoja, from Tanzania, and Nigerian radio journalist Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu, to share their experiences of working with and advocating for the needs of rural communities.
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Article: ‘20,000 schools yet to get titles despite order’ (September 2020)
Video: ‘Kakamega Forest (land controversy)’
Article: ‘Deaths, crime, unemployment in the slums of Nairobi during Covid-19’ (May 2020)
Article: ‘Counties, grabbers scramble for Lake Basin Authority land’ (March 2020)
Article: ‘Denied titles for 35 years, villagers in dilemma as second eviction looms’ (October 2019)
Article: ‘Villagers in bitter fight with sugar firm over prime land’ (October 2019)
Article: ‘EACC recovers Sh2b in stolen public property’ (September 2019)
Article: ‘City land owners hit by road project yet to be paid Sh7b’ (September 2019)
Article: ‘Squatters cry foul over historical land injustice’ (August 2019)
An investigative and data journalist from Nepal, Rudra has worked for The Himalayan Times and Republica, the leading English dailies in the country. His journalism focuses on political economy, infrastructure, foreign investments, the private sector and parliamentary affairs. He regularly writes investigative reports for The Centre for Investigative Journalism, Nepal.
During his Fellowship, Rudra conducted a series of investigations into how collusion between real estate developers, senior bank officials, and politicians have defrauded hundreds of families of their savings, pushing people into homelessness. He interviewed people affected by both rural landlessness and urban housing shortages, and published financial investigations that linked these experiences to corruption and failed government policy.
Rudra demonstrated the extent to which residential buildings are being illegally rented as office space, schools, and hospitals, including by government departments. As well as contributing to increasingly unaffordable rent in Kathmandu, this has led to buildings being dangerously overloaded and at particular risk from collapse during earthquakes.
One of his most widely read investigations revealed how both bank executives and politicians had benefited from a failed property investment scheme which had sunk the savings of hundreds of cooperative members over a ten year period. His story received widespread media attention and sparked political debate about housing development regulations.
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Article: ‘Castles in the air’ (May 2020)|
Article: ‘Help the farmers or brace for massive protests’ (May 2020)
Video: ‘How banks enabled Nepal’s biggest fraud and ruined people’s lives’ (March 2020)
Article: ‘How banks enabled Nepal’s biggest fraud and ruined people’s lives’ (March 2020)
Video: ‘Nowhere to live’ (January 2020)
Article: ‘Misuse of residential buildings raises safety concerns’ (January 2020)
Video: ‘Losing the land’ (October 2019)
Article: ‘How cooperatives made billions embezzling collateral land’ (October 2019)
Zsuzsanna is an organizer and politically engaged researcher from Budapest, Hungary. She has been working on issues related to housing for more than ten years, with a focus on understanding how the financialization of housing plays out in Eastern European countries and Hungary in particular. Zsuzsanna views current housing policy as one of the key vehicles for increasing economic injustice in Hungary and is keen to find ways to stand up against this in spite of an essentially hostile political and institutional environment.
Zsuzsana’s Bertha Challenge project aimed to bridge the gap between academic research into the financialization of housing and activism on household debt. She organized an international workshop with participation from other engaged researchers and civil society organizations from eastern and southern Europe to share experiences from across the region. The discussions were documented in a research report, ‘Household debt on the peripheries of Europe: New constellations since 2008’.
Zsuzsanna subsequently organized with housing activist groups in Hungary and lawyers providing free advice on housing-related issues to instigate a collaborative research project, building on the outcomes from the international workshop.
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On 19 July, 2021, Omar Radi was sentenced to six years in prison on trumped-up espionage and sexual assault charges. The sentence came almost exactly a year after Omar was first arrested, the entire duration of which he spent in solitary confinement in Oukacha prison, Casablanca. Omar is one of a number of Moroccan journalists who have been publicly critical of the government, and subsequently been charged with sexual assault crimes.
Omar was a Bertha Challenge fellow when the Moroccan government started their relentless campaign of harassment and discreditation. His Fellowship work – investigating state sanctioned land expropriation – led him to be pursued by a government that pays scant regard to press freedom and the rule of law.
Omar studied economics and started his journalism career at a local radio station focusing on economic and financial issues. He then joined Le Journal Hebdomadaire, a weekly magazine critical of the Moroccan establishment. The publication was shut down by the Moroccan authorities after a series of trials. During the Arab Spring, Omar launched the French-speaking edition of Lakome.com, a news website that became a symbol for the movement, and was a member of Mamfakinch, a collective website focused on social movements, activism and injustice. In 2013, he was awarded first prize by the International Media Support – Association of Moroccan Investigative Journalists for a long-form series of articles about sand quarry exploitation in Morocco and the effect this had on smaller land owners. For his Fellowship, Omar investigated the use of state-sanctioned land expropriation. He organized workshops in 3 regions in Morocco, with communities who have been dispossessed of their land. This included communities who have been pressured to give away land for little compensation, only to see it re-sold to developers at 600 times the price. Omar’s investigation led him to links between Morocco’s royal family and the expropriation of community-held land for luxury development projects.
Throughout his Fellowship year, Omar was subjected to various forms of intimidation, including relentless surveillance, from the security services. On 26 December, 2019, he was given a fine and four-month suspended sentence for criticising a judge in a tweet more than six months earlier. In June 2020, Omar spoke publicly about an Amnesty International investigation that found his phone had been targeted by NSO spyware, Pegasus – the same spyware used to track and ultimately assassinate journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Between 26 June and 29 July, 2020, Omar was summoned for interrogation 12 times, with each session lasting 6-9 hours. He was ultimately jailed on 29 July on charges of espionage and rape – both of which he denies. His trial has been criticised by human rights groups in Morocco and abroad for serious failings in the proceedings, including Omar’s legal team being prevented from calling key witnesses and being denied access to evidence presented.
Omar continues to vehemently deny the charges that he has been convicted of.
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Statement: Bertha Foundation Statement of Support for Omar Radi (July 2021)
Clooney Foundation report on Omar’s trial: ‘Moroccan Journalist Convicted After Court Excludes Evidence’ (July 2021)
Committee to Protect Journalists article: ‘Morocco’s Nec Tactic to Punish Journalists: Charge Them with Sex Crimes’ (March 2021)
Human Rights Watch article: ‘Morocco: Espionage Case Against Outspoken Journalist’ (September 2020)
Podcast: Podcast created by Bertha Challenge Fellow, Maeve McClenaghan: ‘The Tip Off, episode 47: Omar’ (September 2020)
Letter: Letter from Bertha Challenge Fellows and staff in support of Omar Radi (July 2020)
Amnesty International report: ‘NSO Group spyware used against Moroccan journalist days after company pledged to respect human rights’ (June 2020)
Interview with Democracy Now!: “They Have No Evidence”: Moroccan Journalist Omar Radi Jailed, Surveilled After Criticizing Gov’t’ (August 2020)
Interview with Democracy Now!: ‘Meet Omar Radi’ (February 2020)
Before taking up his Fellowship, Jared was Co-Director at Ndifuna Ukwazi, an activist organization in Cape Town bringing together attorneys, organizers and researchers in campaigns to counter the powerful interests and policies that replicate spatial apartheid and inequality. He was a founder of Reclaim The City, a social movement of poor and working class people in the inner city who are resisting evictions, stopping the collusion and sale of public land to private companies and securing affordable housing in well-located areas. He has worked towards securing the first commitment since the end of apartheid to build social housing in the heart of the city, an end to relocation camps for evictees and inclusionary housing in private developments. He helped to occupy a derelict public hospital in the inner city that now supports 800 occupiers unable to afford housing in the area.
Jared began his Fellowship investigating effective activist tactics to influence housing policy on a local government level. Within the first few months he had organized a zombie march with over 200 other activists and residents calling for an end to the apartheid-like housing policies being implemented by the city government.
As the year progressed, Jared realized that the scope of his project would need to be expanded in order to effect change – to look not just at housing policy but at electoral politics in the city as a whole. He shifted his project focus to consider ways of making democractic decision making more accessible to communities affected.
Jared brought together a diverse group of activists and community leaders interested in supporting independent candidates for city council seats in Cape Town’s 2021 municipal elections. He used these discussions as the basis for a popular education handbook and accompanying website and online toolkit to share learning with other communities seeking to reclaim democratic power.
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Website: https://incommon.org.za/
Elfie is a human rights activist and grassroots community organizer from Belfast. She has organized with various campaigns in Britain, Ireland and Greece, for migrant and refugee rights, environmental justice and access to affordable and safe housing. Elfie’s studies in social anthropology led her to Greece to specialize in the self organization of groups responding to the refugee emergency in Athens. Since 2017, Elfie has been lead organizer with ‘Equality Can’t Wait – #BuildHomesNow’ – a campaign led by homeless families in Belfast and supported by human rights organization, PPR.
During her Bertha Challenge Fellowship year, Elfie worked with people affected by poor housing, architects, urban planners and finance experts to develop a sustainable social housing alternative for a site in west Belfast known as ‘Mackies’. Elfie organized a series of events called ‘Take Back the City’ which facilitated an exchange of ideas, expertise and experience, and was used to inform the development of proposals for the site. Crucially, it also led to the formation of a cross-sectorial coalition of individuals with an interest in progressing sustainable social housing in Belfast.
Throughout the year, Elfie worked with activists at Build Homes Now to organize direct actions, communications with local policy makers, and media engagement to raise the profile of the site’s potential and of the need for housing more widely in Belfast. She partnered with investigative journalist Fellow, Rory Winters, who helped to raise the profile of their campaign while writing about the need for social housing in Belfast.
In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, Elfie worked with colleagues at PPR to set up a campaign to support those most vulnerable, including people isolating in inadequate housing conditions.
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Document: ‘Take Back the City’ seminar descriptions
Document: Take Back the City coalition vision for Mackies
Report: Take Back the City, Sustainability seminar
Report: Take Back the City, Finance and Ownership seminar
Report: Take Back the City, Architecture seminar
Report: Take Back the City, Planning seminar
Letter: Letter to the Minister for Communities on behalf of the Take Back the City coalition
Website: No one Left Behind
Sotiris is co-founder of AthensLive, the first English-language non-profit news outlet in Greece, and producer of The Undocumented, a podcast which aims to combat hate speech by developing a new and creative counter-narrative. Since June 2018, he has worked at the NGO, Network for Children’s Rights, as the Coordinator and been Editor-in-Chief of Migratory Birds, the first newspaper in Greece written by and for refugee, migrant and Greek youth. Previously, Sotiris was a producer and researcher for the national TV documentary series 28 Europe. Sotiris is committed to applying innovative journalism practices to help new voices emerge in public discourse.
Sotiris used his Fellowship to investigate how global financialization has displaced communities in Athens, leaving families homeless. Following a period of intense austerity and with some of the highest unemployment levels in Europe, the economic instability of the banking sector has been used to justify rocketing rates of property seizures for auction in Athens. While the ‘golden visa’ scheme has made purchasing properties in Greece more attractive to foreign investors, increasing numbers of people in Greece have been left at risk of eviction.
Sotiris also explored how the refugee emergency in Greece is directly linked to the commodification of housing. He created several short films documenting the experiences of refugees living in Athens. His 30 minute documentary called ‘Unwanted Destination’ captured living conditions in a Greek refugee camp and urban accommodation under the UNHCR’s ESTIA program.
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Video: ‘Unwanted destination’ (June 2020)
Article: ‘Covid-19 Is exposing inequalities of the past’ (May 2020)
Video: ‘Eric Maddox – In the absence of curiosity, fear and ignorance can fill in that space.’ (March 2020)
Article: ‘The rent is too damn high’ (January 2020)
Video: ‘“We are not just refugees, we are who we are. I mean real people.”’ (January 2020)
Video: ‘A sense of home’ (November 2019)
Video: ‘PAME anti-auction protests’ (October 2019)
Article: ‘Whose home is this? At least 55,625 properties under the hammer in real estate auctions — and counting’ (September 2019)
Charice is a popular educator and abolitionist from Alabama and Tennessee. She proudly identifies as a Black & queer Appalachian (Afrolachian). Her life and work is centered on communities of color, workers, land stewards, educators and the incarcerated.
Between 2017 and 2020, Charice worked with the Highlander Center, a regional popular education and social justice training center. She directed two cohorts of an intergenerational fellowship and projects addressing current economic and racial inequity in Central Appalachia. Previously, she educated youth on food justice and land sovereignty, as well as organized towards power shifts in Knoxville to address the current housing crisis and development that harms cash-poor communities.
Charice’s educational work confronts the structural impact of capitalism and racism, including the historic role land ownership has played – and continues to play – in the entrenchment of structural racism in the American South.
During her Bertha Challenge Fellowship, Charice developed popular education tools to build networks, campaigns and power for land reclamation in the region.
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Rory, based in Belfast, is a journalist with The Detail, an investigative news site. Previously he worked with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism on their award-winning investigation into homeless deaths in the UK, as well as Belfast Live and the Sunday Business Post.
Rory used his Fellowship to investigate inadequate levels of social housing in Belfast, and the discriminatory policies and practises that have left the need for housing 26 times greater among people living in predominantly Catholic areas of the city than in historically Protestant areas.
In an interview with Rory for an article about religious disparities in housing provision, the Minister for Communities acknowledged that there are inequalities in social housing – the first time that a minister responsible for housing has made this acknowledgment since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
Rory worked closely with activist Fellow, Elfie Seymour, whose campaign, ‘Build Homes Now’, calls for publicly-owned sustainable housing. Rory amplified the campaign to a wider audience, and helped to hold politicians accountable to their pre-election promises on housing provision.
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Article: ‘‘Bertha Challenge’ on housing and land rights in Belfast comes to a close’ (February 2021)
Article: ‘No commitment to social housing in ‘masterplan’ for west Belfast land’ (September 2020)
Article: ‘Racist intimidation in the Village in south Belfast “going on for years”’ (May 2020)
Article: ‘Homeless families “suffocated” in hostel during COVID-19 lockdown’ (April 2020)
Article and video: ‘Council plans for Mackie’s site in west Belfast criticised amid calls for social housing’ (April 2020)
Article: ‘Close to 100% of social housing need in north Belfast concentrated in predominantly Catholic neighbourhoods’ (February 2020)
Image and Video credits: Smallholders Foundation, Participation and the Practice of Rights – Build Homes Now campaign, Reclaim the City, Elroi Yee, Sammy Richards, Jeevan Bhujel, Miki Redelinghuys & Tim Wege, Plexus Films
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