An update from our executive director, Fara Warner

The maple, oak and beech trees outside my windows are just beginning to slip toward reds, golds and brilliant yellows even though the hydrangeas are still sharing their gorgeous summer blooms of white dusted with pink. 

Fall has always been my favorite season with its crisp, cool weather and softer light and, yes, even shorter days. It’s an opportunity to not only harvest the last tomatoes and peppers from the garden, but to harvest ideas and set plans for the coming year. 

A big harvest for Metcalf Institute, if you’ll allow me to keep up this metaphor, is the development and launch of an all-new fellowship for local newsrooms. Conceived by Sunshine Menezes, the Institute’s former executive director, this fellowship seeks to fill an important gap in climate and environment science training within local newsrooms. Funding to support the first two New England cohorts of this fellowship comes from van Beuren Charitable Foundation, the Ruth & Hal Launders Charitable Trust and private donors. 

Local news organizations are often the first place communities look for information, insight and knowledge about local climate and environment issues–from crucial reporting during extreme weather events to longer-term challenges such as sea-level rise, loss of biodiversity and clean energy transitions. But local newsrooms often don’t have the support or training they need to cover these issues equitably, accurately and with accountability. 

The Climate and Environment Science Fellowship for Local Journalism will provide training and coaching for up to 20 newsrooms in New England next year and expand to other regions, dependent on funding, in subsequent years. It’s an important part of the strategic vision for Metcalf to scale our journalism programming beyond our Annual Science Immersion Workshop–which focuses on individual journalists–to engage more deeply with newsrooms. 

But first we need to know what newsrooms want instead of creating training that isn’t intentional, reflective of or in relationship with this community, key principles of inclusive science communication that are core to Metcalf’s work.  This September we’re holding “visioning sessions” with local newsrooms to hear the challenges they face, what climate and environment issues are important to their communities and what types of training and coaching will have the most impact on their climate and environment coverage. If you’re a journalism alumni working in local news or a scientist doing work in local communities interested in providing insight, please join us for our second session on Sept. 26 from 4 to 5 p.m. Click here to register. 

Once we’ve listened and reflected, we’ll be developing the programming with plans to launch the application for newsrooms in Southern New England by late October. The training and coaching will begin in early 2025 with newsrooms in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Later next year, we’ll support newsrooms in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. 

Of course, that’s not all we have on tap for 2025! We will host the final fellowship class of the Science Communicators Identities Project, and we start our planning for the Annual Science Immersion Workshop for Journalists in mid-October. After a highly successful 2026 workshop centered on water systems, our focus next year will shift to the impact of climate change on food systems. Stay tuned for more information about the fellowship later this year, with the application opening in January 2025. The team, led by Emily Cribas, is in the early stages of planning the 2025 Inclusive Science Communication Symposium and we’ll have more updates on dates, location and programming in the coming months. 

And finally, if you happen to be in Europe this October, please come see me at the B Futur Festival in Bonn, Germany on October 4.  I’ll be joined by Alexandra Borchardt, content director for the Climate Explorers Program with the Constructive Institute and Vera Penẽda with the European Journalism Center to discuss the transformative power of bringing scientists and journalists together.  I’m also attending to News Impact Summit in Copenhagen to soak up ideas on training for combating climate disinformation. 

And please don’t hesitate to reach out to me to get a more personal update on Metcalf. You can find me at fara.warner@uri.edu.