A dozen-plus projects with regional news outlets, part of our Bringing Stories Home initiative, shed light on racial inequities in access to COVID-19 vaccines and on the glaring gaps in police accountability.

What does a giant iceberg off Greenland’s coast have to do with the Lowcountry of South Carolina? A lot—and none of it good. The Post and Courier took readers on a vivid tour of Greenland’s melting polar ice to explain the threat it poses for low-lying communities like Charleston 3,000 miles away. The Charleston project was part of Connected Coastlines, our reporting initiative on climate impacts on every U.S. coast.

Our new Artificial Intelligence Accountability initiative supports stories that investigate the impact of new technologies on communities around the world, such as an Associated Press probe into a gunshot detection algorithm that sent an innocent man to prison, the misuse of surveillance and facial-recognition technology in Baltimore and Florida, and a piece in .Coda about government surveillance of health care workers in India.

Judicial impact

Following a Pulitzer Center-supported story by The Wire exposing egregious treatment of incarcerated people from marginalized backgrounds—including lower-caste people, transgender people, and women—the high court of Rajasthan, India, ordered an overhaul of the state’s prison manual that abolished caste-based labor assignments that had stood for more than 70 years.

Academic impact

The recipient of a 2021 George Polk Award for Education Reporting and a Sigma Data Journalism Award, the ambitious High Country News piece Land-Grab Universities tracked the 11 million acres of Indigenous tribal lands redistributed to U.S. colleges through the 1862 Morrill Act. Indigenous scholars extensively cited and responded to the project’s open-source data set, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) published a full journal issue dedicated to the findings.

Environmental impact

Rainforest Investigations Network Fellow Manuela Andreoni’s reporting for The New York Times was quoted in a Brazilian court hearing that found a law dramatically shrinking the size of the Jaci-Paraná reserve in the Amazon to be unconstitutional. A state attorney used Andreoni’s story to help demonstrate the extent of the illicit cattle trade within the Jaci-Paraná. The thousands of cattle illegally kept on the reserve help meet the increasing demand for leather for American luxury vehicles.

Sukanya Shantha’s Barred: A Prisons Project story (The Wire) won a Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) Award for Editorial Excellence, regarded as the “gold standard” for Asia’s best journalists and publishers. The piece also received the Asian College of Journalism’s 2020 K. P. Narayana Kumar Memorial Award for Social Impact Journalism.

"Having the Pulitzer Center as an institution backing my work gave me much more legitimacy in my reporting as a 23-year-old freelancer and helped people to take me and my work more seriously.”

Jack Brook, Pulitzer Center grantee

By the end of the year, we were mixing these virtual conversations with a return to in-person campus events. At Syracuse University, Elon University, Swarthmore College, William & Mary, University of Wisconsin, and the University of Richmond, we brought directly to students our reporting from Afghanistan, Chile, Eastern Europe, the U.S., and other places around the globe.

We also organized a virtual series with Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, focused on religion and populism, bringing together scholars and journalists, including grantee Megha Rajagopalan, a Pulitzer Prize winner for BuzzFeed’s Pulitzer Center-supported reporting on China’s mass internment camps.

Our Reporting Fellows met twice this year to share their work virtually—once in the spring for a mini-conference and once in October. This Washington Weekend Highlights video provides a glimpse into the excitement and energy of the weekend. Professional journalists and editors participated in a five-session orientation and 12 virtual workshops and training sessions.

"At a time when the pandemic had brought our lives to a standstill, the support from the Center was godsend in not just providing funds to make traveling easy, but the name recognition of it being a Pulitzer Center project helped, too." 

Ranju Dodum, Pulitzer Center grantee

In 2021 and 2022, the Pulitzer Center is producing the End of Isolation Tour (EIT), a national adaptation of grantee Sarah Shourd’s critically-acclaimed play The BOX, which exposes the harsh realities of solitary confinement in the U.S. EIT hosted nine sold-out performances in San Rafael, California, in September 2021. In spring 2022, the cast and crew will embark via a converted school bus on a national tour, hosting community engagement sessions and healing circles alongside performances in a number of cities.

A global audience gathered for the Pulitzer Center’s first virtual conference, Environment (Re)Defined. Over four days, our conference hosted an audience coming from 90 countries—nearly half of the countries in the world. This along with the more than 50 journalists and guest speakers in our 13 conference sessions brought community, country, and regional expertise across multiple time zones, from Indonesia, Brazil, and Cameroon to the southern United States and places in-between.

"Receiving the grant felt like a vote of confidence from an organisation whose work I've admired for years, and that has done wonders for my willingness and ability to challenge myself as a reporter and as a writer."

Mahlet Zimeta, Pulitzer Center grantee

Photography and film took center stage in 2021 through the Pulitzer Center’s continued involvement in the Environmental Film Festival in Washington, D.C. (with virtual showings of Cambodia Burning; Widespread Logging Threatens the Congo Basin's Critical Rainforest; A Nun, a Shooting and the Unlikely Legacy That Could Save the Amazon Rainforest; Diálogo con las Plantas; and A Vida Numa Reserva Extrativista na Floresta Amazônica) and at Photoville in New York with the Eyewitness and Dialogue with Plants exhibits.

The Pulitzer Center’s 15th anniversary celebration was postponed once because of COVID-19, but on December 9, 2021, we were thrilled to meet in person with many of our grantees, news-media and education partners, and donors who have contributed so much to our growth since 2006. A major highlight of the evening was our announcement that we have now met the challenge grant that our chair, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, set five years ago: to match every dollar contributed to our endowment, up to a total of $12 million.

“The Center represents something increasingly rare in the world of journalism today. Its focus is on reporting: pure, ambitious, big reporting. The biggest. The heaviest subjects. The ones that so few news organizations have the resources or the courage to take on.”

Dean Baquet, Executive Editor, New York Times

Highlights from our efforts to advance DEI through Center programs in 2021 included:

• Establishing live translation and open captioning procedures for virtual events
• Partnering with affinity organizations for journalists from historically underrepresented groups on conference panels and pitch events
• Expanded Campus Consortium partnerships with HBCU and community college campuses
• Grant programs for educators and marketing campaigns for K-12 resources centering voices that have been historically marginalized
• Translation of grant applications and grantee surveys into five languages
• Social media outreach in multiple languages, audio description for website images, and more.

Highlights from our efforts to center DEI in our organizational processes included:

• Establishing hiring committees for new positions and refining rubrics for application review to actively combat bias in the hiring process
• Expanding our operations team to streamline administrative work, refine processes for staff training and performance management, ensure equitable access to technology, and more
• Surveys to evaluate staff engagement and establishing a staff engagement and joy committee to support inclusion

• Monthly meetings of the Center’s staff-led DEI task force to evaluate organizational processes and plan staff training
• A four-session, all-staff workplace integrity training in June 2021 using curriculum from The Power Shift Project at the Freedom Forum.

• Quarterly evaluation of the demographic data provided by journalists who received grants and/or participated in outreach programs.

Through 227 projects supported in 2021, the Pulitzer Center supported 332 grantees. Through a voluntary survey, 42.47% of grantees self-identified as female, 41.87% as male, 0.30% as nonbinary, and 0.30% as other. 0.60% preferred not to answer, and we do not have data for 9.34% of grantees.

34.34% of grantee survey respondents identified as white, 15.36% identified as Hispanic/Latinx, 13.86% as Asian, 12.05% as African American or Black, 3.31% as other, 1.20% as being part of an Indigenous group or tribe, 1.20% as Middle East or North African, and 0.30% as multiracial. 6.02% preferred not to answer, and we do not have data for 11.45%.

In 436 K-12 education events during 2021, 64.9% of presenters self-identified as female, 8.9% as male, and 1.4% as nonbinary. We do not have data for 23.6% of presenters, and 1.1% preferred not to answer. 26.3% of presenters self-identified as white, 15.8% as Asian, 14.7% as African-American or Black, 13.2% as Hispanic/Latinx, 3.2% as Middle East or North African, 2.4% as multiracial, 0.1% as members of Indigenous groups or tribes, and 0.9% as another race/ethnicity. We do not have data for 22.2% of presenters, and 1.1% preferred not to answer.

The Pulitzer Center Outreach and Campus Consortium teams organized nearly 200 events for the general public and our college and university audiences in 2021. When surveyed, 33.9% of speakers identified as white, 13.3% as Asian, 8.3% as African American or Black, 6.0% as Hispanic or Latinx, 2.8% as members of an Indigenous group or tribe, 2.8% as other, 1.8% as multiracial, 0.9% as South Asian, 0.5% as Afghan, 0.5% as East Asian, 0.5% as Jewish, 0.5% as Kiowa, 0.5% as Middle East or North African, 0.5% as Navajo, 0.5% as Portuguese, and 0.5% as Tanzanian. 20.2% of speakers did not complete the survey’s Race and Ethnicity question, and 6.4% selected “prefer not to answer.”

50.0% of speakers identified as female, 24.2% as male, and 0.5% as nonbinary. 22.7% of speakers did not complete the survey’s gender question, and 2.6% selected “Prefer not to answer.”

Support for the Pulitzer Center in 2021 came from Humanity United, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Ar­nold Ventures, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Open Society Foundations, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, Art for Justice Fund, Julian Grace Foundation, Facebook Journalism Project, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Hartfield Foundation, One Earth Fund, Fore River Foundation, the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, Laudes Foundation, Henry L. Kimelman Family Foundation, Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI), Poklon Foundation, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Trellis Charitable Fund, Walton Family Foundation, PIMCO Foundation, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and our Campus Consortium partner schools.

This broad mix of foundation funding, along with continued core support from members of the Pulitzer family, board members, and many other generous individuals, ensures the independent journal­ism and education that is essential to our mission in these times. We are grateful to all who continue to sustain our work. We hope that others will join.

In addition to the operating revenue of $8.02 million, the Pulitzer Center received endowment gifts and pledges of $2.33 million in 2021.