IWMF Announces Inaugural Grantees Of The Howard G. Buffett Fund For Women Journalists

$2.3 Million to be Awarded to Women Journalists Through 2024

June 1, 2015 – The International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) is proud to announce the first group of 2015 grantees in the inaugural funding round of the Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists. Nine trailblazing women journalists were selected from a stellar pool of 650 applicants representing media projects based in over 100 countries.

“We are in awe of the talent and diversity of ideas represented in the hundreds of applications we received from around the world for this Fund,” said IWMF Executive Director Elisa Lees Muñoz. “The strength of the proposals truly reflects the bold aspirations of women journalists.”

Inaugural IWMF Grantees

Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists

Lily Casura is awarded a $19,500 grant to complete a multimedia project examining homeless female veterans in the U.S. Casura is a freelance writer and the founder of the award-winning Healing Combat Trauma website, created to address the issue of combat veterans and PTSD. Her work has appeared in Texas Tribune, Huffington Post, Agence France-Presse and other media outlets. She is a chapter author in Healing War Trauma: A Handbook of Creative Approaches (Routledge).

Priyanka Dubey is awarded a $1,800 grant to help her complete her book on the crisis of rape in India. Dubey is an independent journalist based in New Delhi. She covers human rights, gender, conflict and development in India. Her work has been published in Yahoo Originals, Tehelka, Hindustan Times and Scroll. Her work has been recognized through several national and international awards including the 2015 Knight International Journalism Award, the Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism, and Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Indian Journalism.

Rahima Gambo is awarded a grant of $8,400 to pursue a multimedia web project about students in Northeastern Nigeria, who have been impacted by the Boko Haram insurgency. She will also participate in Hostile Environments & Emergency First-Aid Training (HEFAT). Gambo is a freelance visual journalist based in Abuja, Nigeria. She was a 2014 Magnum Foundation fellow and her images can be seen in The New York Times, Time Lightbox, Leadership Newspaper, The Nation Newspaper, City Limits and other media outlets.

Iris Kuo and her team are awarded a grant of $9,500 to create a multimedia research tool and web app, LedBetter, to increase access to information on gender in corporate leadership. Kuo reports for Argus Media, an international energy wire based in Houston, Texas, and was recently selected as one of 10 2015-2016 Knight-Bagehot fellows at Columbia University. Previously, she led green energy investment coverage for the tech news outlet VentureBeat and reported for The Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong.

Victoria McKenzie is awarded a grant of $2,500 to pursue an investigative reporting project on water access in rural Colombia. Decades of failed water projects in Colombia’s northernmost department of La Guajira suggest the need for closer evaluation of aid and development effectiveness. McKenzie is a human rights and global health reporter based in New York City, focused on international aid and development. She has covered political corruption in Colombia for Vice News and Colombia Reports.

Pascale Müller and her team are awarded a grant of $10,000 to implement a skills-building workshop for female journalists in the Middle East and North Africa. The program will be hosted in Cairo, Egypt. Müller is a freelance multimedia journalist based in Germany and coordinator of Middle East and North Africa Committee (MENAC) of the European Youth Press (EYP). She has written for Jordan Times, Syria Deeply, ProJourno and the German daily Tagesspiegel. She mostly writes about MENA politics, women’s rights and terrorism.

Katie Orlinsky is awarded a grant of $15,000 to complete a photography project exploring climate change and environmental issues in Alaskan communities. Orlinsky is a photographer and cinematographer from New York, she has photographed personal projects, assignments and documentaries all over the world. Orlinsky regularly works for The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America, a variety of international magazines and non-profit organizations such as Too Young to Wed, an organization and campaign to end child marriage around the world.

Alice Su is awarded a grant of $3,000 grant to complete Hostile Environments & Emergency First-Aid Training (HEFAT). Su is an independent journalist based in Amman, Jordan. Her work focuses on refugees, religion, China and the Middle East, and has been published in The Guardian, The Atlantic, BBC News, Foreign Policy, Vice News, WIRED and Al Jazeera America, among other outlets.

Tennessee Jane Watson and her team are awarded a grant of $36,000 to complete an audio documentary examining childhood sexual abuse in the United States. Watson is a documentary artist and educator who has produced nationally distributed radio features, award-winning films, oral histories, public sound installations and youth media projects. Across disciplines her practice is defined by a collaborative and community-based approach.

Three additional funding rounds will be completed in 2015, and a total of $230,000 will be awarded to applicants this year. The next application period will be open from June 15 – July 27, 2015.
At least $2.3 million will be awarded to grantees over the next 10 years. The opportunities this Fund will empower are critical to transparency, democracy and embracing the diversity of voices reporting across all media platforms. The only prerequisite is that grantees are female journalists working full-time either for a specific media outlet or as a freelancer.

The Fund was established by the IWMF in 2014 with the generous support of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation to promote the work and advance the contributions of women in the media working around the world.

Learn more about the Fund, sign up for updates, and submit proposals during the application period for future funding rounds at iwmf.org/fund.

Follow the progress of IWMF grantees on Twitter @IWMF, #IWMFfund, #IWMFgrantee.

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