JACKSON, Miss. — Farish Street has an all-too-familiar story. 

Once a booming Black-owned entertainment and business district that drew Black customers from all over Mississippi, it struggled after segregation ended. Today, it suffers from the same blight and infrastructure issues as many other Jackson neighborhoods — and far too many once-segregated communities across the country.

I decided to visit Farish Street to get the perspective of small business owners on the state’s tax cut policies for an investigation published this week about a wave of such cuts pushed by conservative groups. Several told me that the state’s income and corporate tax cuts rarely benefit the Black business owners there. 

“The tax cuts are for big businesses and the rich,” said Eric Collins, owner of Herbal Blessings, a health food store and vegan cafe. “As for the support our small businesses get from the state? It’s very little.”

Marshall’s Music and Bookstore, owned by Maati Jone Primm, is located a few doors down. Primm’s grandmother, an activist who came to Jackson from nearby Utica, started the bookstore 85 years ago. 

“This used to be a hotspot,” Primm said. “The elders will tell you that on a Saturday, Black people used to come from all over Mississippi to come to Farish Street. You used to have to walk sideways.”

Primm connects the way the state Legislature handles taxes to a longstanding practice in the state to oppress Black Mississippians. Its tax structure – and the new reforms – benefit the state’s wealthiest, who are mostly white. And the majority-white state Legislature has long starved majority-Black Jackson of tax revenue.  

She sees taxes as one tool in a box filled with policies enacted by the mostly white Legislature, including voter restrictions, limited access to medical care and underfunded public schools, that make it difficult for Black residents to thrive. 

“I feel like they are attacking us,” Primm said. “It’s plantation politics. It’s absolutely awful. You have all these different attacks. It’s almost death by a thousand cuts.” 

Part of that punishment, she said, is starving Jackson of tax revenue.

It’s not a new allegation. The NAACP and nine Jackson residents filed a Civil Rights Act complaint with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last year alleging that state decisions about Jackson’s access to tax revenue have reduced or blocked funds needed to maintain the city’s water supply, ultimately resulting in long-running problems accessing clean water. City residents suffered through a days-long outage last summer.

“It’s the culture of Mississippi that says they must oppress Black people,” Primm said. “They don’t want to share power, and they really don’t want to share resources.” 

Mississippi enacted a substantial income tax cut in 2022 that moved the state to a single tax bracket, regardless of how much you make. These “flat” taxes sound equitable, in that everyone is paying the same percentage of their income in taxes. But the rest of a state’s taxes don’t work that way, sales taxes especially, and the main way governments can avoid leaning most heavily on lower-income people is with income-tax rates that increase as earnings do. 

Mississippi’s tax structure already took a larger share of income from its poor and middle-income residents than its richest, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The newest change will worsen that inequity. According to the group’s analysis, the state’s highest-income residents would receive an estimated $31,400 in tax cuts on average each year, while the lowest would get average savings of $20.

The state will likely see a $419 million reduction in revenue every year on average from the income tax cut, according to the University Research Center, a division of Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning that studies state and local policies.

Primm is most concerned about what that could mean for Mississippi’s public education system, already underfunded and underperforming, especially in places with larger lower-income Black communities. 

Her great-grandmother, who was enslaved, created a school. A visit to Primm’s bookstore makes her passion for education clear. As I waited to speak with Primm, she was helping provide books for a local church group. She’s stocked her store with countless books on Black culture and history, from Maya Angelou poems to soul food cookbooks to nonfiction on medical discrimination and books detailing the history of how African slavery in the U.S. began. Primm has adorned its walls with pictures of freedom fighters; Black people who have been murdered throughout the country’s history, including Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin; and modern cultural icons, like Morgan Freeman and Oprah Winfrey.

Underfunding education is a form of disenfranchisement in itself, Primm said. 

“The largely white power brokers want to maintain the status quo and in order to do that, they need to disenfranchise us,” Primm said. “What they count on is the people to be silent for all of this and suffer in silence. I’m not going to do that.”

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The Center for Public Integrity has won the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Breaking Barriers Award, and Audience Engagement Editor Ashley Clarke has been named Nonprofit Newcomer of the Year.

At an awards ceremony in Philadelphia Wednesday, Clarke was honored for helping transform the mission, workplace culture and partnerships of one of the country’s oldest nonprofit news organizations.

“Unhoused and Undercounted,” a Public Integrity investigation by data journalist Amy DiPierro and senior reporter Corey Mitchell, in partnership with The Seattle Times, Street Sense Media and WAMU/DCist, was recognized with the Breaking Barriers Award. The series, for which Clarke coordinated audience engagement, showed that local school districts across the country were failing to identify and serve hundreds of thousands of homeless students.

The Breaking Barriers Award honors journalism that brings “new understanding to an issue or topic affecting people or communities that are historically underrepresented, disadvantaged or marginalized, resulting in impactful change.”

Two other Public Integrity investigations, “Unequal Burden” and “Who Counts?,” were finalists in the INN Nonprofit News Awards’ best explanatory reporting category.

Clarke, 25, joined Public Integrity in 2021 after working at NBC4 Washington as a production assistant and weekend assignment editor. She earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, where she studied multiplatform journalism and Arabic.

She helped define and enforce a newsroom-wide principle of reporting “with and in service to” the people and communities closest to the problems and solutions Public Integrity tackles. And she helped build an innovative local journalism collaboration model that was featured in a keynote address at the 2023 Collaborative Journalism Summit in June. 

“Ashley joined Public Integrity as we were defining a new mission that focused all of our investigative journalism tradition on confronting inequality in the U.S., and she saw right away that it would require a different approach to our journalism and how we treat our colleagues, sources and partners,” said Public Integrity Editor in Chief Matt DeRienzo. “I think she immediately recognized the potential of the nonprofit journalism model to upend deeply unequal power structures around who has access to information and how people’s stories are told. But also that nonprofit news can reinforce and protect those systems if not bluntly challenged.” 

“I’m incredibly honored to be recognized in this way,” Clarke said. “A few short years ago, I could not have imagined that I would be sitting alongside such talented journalists let alone be celebrated for my work.” 

In addition to her role in engagement and partnership work in the newsroom, Clarke is a steward in the Public Integrity union and is co-chair of a staff-led Public Integrity Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee. Her reporting has prompted reform of a Washington, D.C., housing program and contributed to a project that exposed how state tax policies are placing a disproportionate burden on lower-income people. That work has been honored with multiple awards this year. And in February, Clarke was named to Editor & Publisher magazine’s 25 under 35 list of young leaders having an impact on the journalism industry.

Last week, Public Integrity won a national 2023 Edward R. Murrow Award for Overall Excellence for its portfolio of investigative reporting about inequality in the United States, as well as an Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Feature Reporting.

Public Integrity’s journalists have been recognized with numerous other honors in recent months, including the Paul Tobenkin Award, a Peabody Award nomination, a National Headliner Award, an Excellence in Financial Journalism award, a National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award, the Sigma Award recognizing the world’s best data journalism, two finalist honors for the Shaufler Prize for reporting about underserved people, the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing’s “Best in Business” awards, the Gracie Awards honoring media produced by and for women, the D.C. chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Dateline Awards, and the Signal Awards recognizing the country’s best podcasts.

Founded in 1989, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Center for Public Integrity is one of the oldest nonprofit news organizations in the country and is dedicated to investigating systems and circumstances that contribute to inequality in the United States.

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Two men investigated by the Center for Public Integrity for a story about groups that fundraise for causes like childhood leukemia but keep virtually all the money have been charged in connection with “schemes to defraud donors,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

Richard Zeitlin, 53, and Robert Piaro, 73, were both arrested and charged Thursday with wire fraud in connection with telemarketing. 

Public Integrity reported in 2019 that Zeitlin, of Las Vegas, ran telemarketing businesses that helped fuel a trend of political action committees spending little on the causes they were supposedly benefiting. The pitches for donations came on behalf of groups that sounded like charities, playing on donors’ sympathies for ill children, struggling veterans and others in need.

“During the last four years,” reporters Sarah Kleiner and Chris Zubak-Skees wrote, “the U.S. saw a significant spike in the number of PACs that raise most of their money from small-dollar donors before plowing much of it back into salaries, administrative costs and raising more cash. … PACs that contract with Zeitlin account for about half of that spike.”

The indictment alleges that Zeitlin directed his employees to portray PACs as charities, then “made efforts to conceal” those actions.

Piaro, of Wisconsin, ran PACs such as Americans for the Cure of Breast Cancer. That group raised more than $2 million from 2018 through January 2020 but “made only a single charitable donation of approximately $10,000 to one breast cancer charity … and did not otherwise materially fulfill the representations made to donors,” the indictment alleges.

Both men “allegedly exploited these important causes and the good intentions of everyday citizens to steal millions of dollars in small donations,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.

Neither man’s attorney could immediately be reached for comment. But Lance Maningo, Zeitlin’s lawyer, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that his client had been cooperating with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for more than a year.

Public Integrity’s investigation into Zeitlin’s operation was cited in a class-action lawsuit filed against him in 2021. “Instead of putting the millions of dollars raised by the Zeitlin companies to work for these noble causes, the scam PACs and their complicit treasurers (who also profit from this massive scheme), funnel nearly all of the funds back to the Zeitlin companies through an array of bogus and inflated overhead expenditures,” the lawsuit stated. 

Zeitlin denied the allegations in the suit, which is pending.

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In the past year, the Supreme Court has made several decisions that have radically reshaped essential rights for Americans spanning from abortion access to gun rights to the separation of church and state. 

The higher court rulings have prompted an array of analyses of how some of these decisions will disproportionately impact some already marginalized groups – like how gutting affirmative action could sharply decrease Black and Latino student enrollment in colleges and overturning abortion rights will especially hurt Black women. A recent article published in the American University Law Review urges readers to also focus on how these decisions, and others pending before the Supreme Court, could affect another marginalized group: people with disabilities. 

The article, “The Disability Docket” — co-authored by University of Pennsylvania professors Jasmine Harris and Karen Tani as well as Shira Wakschlag, senior director of legal advocacy and general counsel of The Arc of the United States — applies a “disability lens” to the Supreme Court’s 2021 and 2022 terms to show how these decisions could have far-reaching implications for marginalized communities. 

And it goes deep into how decisions that aren’t specifically considered disability cases, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, may disproportionately impact people with disabilities. 

But it also delves into how some cases that focus more on disability rights — and are pending before the court — may have broader civil rights impact. One case is Acheson Hotels, LLC v. Laufer for which the court will review the “tester” standing to challenge a hotel’s failure to provide accessibility information on its website, even if the tester never intended to stay at the hotel. Testers act as investigators, where someone voluntarily will put themselves in a situation to experience discrimination for the purpose of a legal challenge. The outcome of that case can have broader impacts on the use of testers in other civil rights cases, like fair housing.

The authors also explore the historical context behind the legal decisions regarding the rights of people with disabilities and other marginalized groups. These decisions, they say, have always been intertwined. The authors also provide advice to litigators and advocates who may find themselves arguing disability cases before this Supreme Court.  

The Center for Public Integrity spoke with two of the papers’ authors, Harris and Tani, to learn more about their findings and why it is important to apply this “disability lens” to the country’s current legal landscape.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q: Why was it important to undergo this study of how decisions made by this Supreme Court would impact people with disabilities in particular?

Harris: Disability is an often forgotten piece of the court’s docket and often neglected in terms of how it operates, and that’s reflective of how disability is in society as well. We have differential treatments for people with disabilities, and sometimes that’s warranted, and at other times it’s not. … At all corners of both society and law, you have this sense that disability is different and ought to be treated differently. 

Tani: Disability cases do really important work for the law. Their reach is broader than disability. But my sense is – and I think the sense of other people – is that those decisions tend to get kind of under-appreciated or not recognized at the time. And so the actual significance, the legal significance of those decisions has gone under appreciated.

I think part of the impetus for wanting to do this kind of Supreme Court roundup with the disability throughline was just to say, historically, there’s a pattern here of these cases actually being in some sense much more significant and far reaching, but because they’re labeled like a disability case, they’re not kind of as hot button. They’re not as sexy. They’re considered sort of in that silo. And so the idea, I think was to kind of like, carry that insight forward and see how cases more recent cases might fit that pattern.

Harris: Look, more than 61 million adults in the United States – that’s just adults – have one or more disabilities. And that’s before COVID. We haven’t had the post-COVID numbers with long haulers included in there. Disability is more pervasive than we think, and so if we see disability as touching many more things, places and people than it already does then applying a disability lens becomes even more important. 

Q:   What are some examples of “non-disability” cases heard by this Supreme Court that impact people with disabilities?

Tani: There are these big cases where they’re going to affect people with disabilities, and that effect has just not been part of the conversation. So I think our insights with both — Dobbs and West Virginia vs. the EPA — is to say, look this has a really particular and potentially severe impact on certain people with disabilities. And let’s kind of surface that as well. 

For the West Virginia vs. the EPA case, we drew on some great evidence, by other folks, about the way that people with disabilities are just disproportionately impacted by climate disasters and other disasters for various reasons, some of which have to do with underlying vulnerability and economic precarity. 

Harris: For people with disabilities, abortion has always been part of healthcare. It’s always been something that’s been talked about, not only from an individual body standpoint that [pregnancy will result in the body] taking on more stressors that create or exacerbate disabilities, but also in terms of reproductive options and choices more broadly. It’s also for people with disabilities who want to become parents, and the kind of struggle that has been around that, and that dates back to eugenics.

With respect to Dobbs, you have situations where it’s already really hard for people with disabilities to travel right independently. Now they have to cross state lines in order to get abortion care that makes it disproportionately difficult.

And so that kind of insight in terms of thinking about the ways in which these cases have compounded effects, when you think about intersectionality, it’s going to affect poor disabled Black and Brown women. That’s who’s going to be disproportionately affected and harmed the most. You have to look at Mississippi, where the rates of disability are incredibly high. The rates of poverty are high, and it’s Black and Brown people in those situations, and when you see all of that together it gives you a different picture of what the discrimination looks like and how it’s operating.

Q: Why is it important for everyone interested in civil rights to be paying attention to the outcome of some disability cases pending before the court?

Tani: Like it or not, the statutes are sort of tethered together. Your lawmakers have basically patterned one after the other, such that, you know, they’re kind of traveling together in the law. So you really do have to pay attention. 

Harris: There’s a sense in which the lack of publicity was a good thing at one point, because the disability rights movement started heavily based on white men. And it was really veterans who had connections with Congress. So there was a way in which that allowed the foundation of the law to push through very quickly in ways that the public didn’t get a chance to understand what this law was going to do and what disability discrimination looked like. 

When something goes wrong in the Supreme Court, the popular retort is, well, you’ve got Congress, so you can go to Congress, and you can vote and your vote matters. I think this is a particularly difficult issue for people with disabilities, because voting and voting rights and access to the vote has been so constrained over time and continues to be [constrained].

How will people with disabilities be able to actually have their voices heard and remedy the harm that comes out of this court?

Tani: I mean, one last thing that I’ll say is that there are disability civil rights cases with the potential to have vast implications for other civil rights laws. The Acheson case is about tester standing and testers are important, not just in the [Americans with Disabilities Act] context, but also the race and fair housing context. It’s an obvious example of where there could be spillover to other contexts. 

Q: What is some of the advice you have for attorneys and advocates bringing disability cases before this Supreme Court?

Tani: Strategy is really important before this court because they could make bad laws. We tried to call attention to some times when you’ll be asked a bad question for the court to decide and you just have to mobilize to change public opinion.

If this case is really going to be that bad, how can we get it off the docket anticipating what the court might do?

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Season 2 of the Center for Public Integrity’s podcast, “The Heist,” has won a 2023 Salute to Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

“The Wealth Vortex,” which confronted America’s racial wealth gap through the story of an Iowa woman attempting to open the country’s first Black-owned bank in decades, was recognized by NABJ for best interactive feature.

In addition to a five-episode podcast, the project included long-form text reporting, photography, drone video, resources for readers and listeners, a limited-run newsletter to share behind-the-scenes details, and an interactive text-messaging service pointing to more about the story. 

The podcast, produced in partnership with Transmitter Media (now Pushkin), was nominated for a Peabody award earlier this year in addition to numerous other journalism and podcast industry honors.

Season 3 of The Heist — “Land of Broken Promises” — will be out in October. Land of Broken Promises will explore the federal government’s role in harming generations of Black farmers.

“I’m grateful to this newsroom for giving reporters time and support to dig deeply into entrenched problems that fuel inequality, and grateful to the people who share their experiences with us,” said Jamie Smith Hopkins, a Public Integrity editor and senior reporter who hosted season 2. “We’re honored to receive this recognition from the National Association of Black Journalists.” 

In addition to winning a 2023 NABJ Salute to Excellence Award for best interactive feature, Public Integrity was a finalist for best news story for an investigation by Ashley Clarke and Amy DiPierro into a Washington, D.C., housing program. The story was published in partnership with the Washington Informer newspaper.

In addition to its Peabody nomination, Season 2 of “The Heist” has also been recognized this year with an Excellence in Financial Journalism award for best audio reporting; an award from the Shaufler Prize; a Signal Award silver medal; a “Best in Business” award; and finalist honors from the Ambie Awards, Dateline Awards, WAN-IFRA North American Digital Media Awards, Online Journalism Awards and the INN Nonprofit News Awards.

Public Integrity’s investigative reporting about inequality in the United States was recently awarded a national 2023 Edward R. Murrow Award for Overall Excellence. Other Public Integrity work this year has been honored with the Paul Tobenkin Award, a National Headliner Award, Mental Health America’s 2023 Media Award, Dateline Awards, the Gracie Awards and the shortlist for the Sigma Award recognizing the world’s best data journalism. 

Founded in 1989, the Center for Public Integrity is one of the oldest nonprofit news organizations in the country and is dedicated to investigating systems and circumstances that contribute to inequality in the United States.

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The Center for Public Integrity has won a 2023 national Edward R. Murrow Award for Overall Excellence.

It recognizes a body of work by the nonprofit investigative newsroom that confronts widening inequality in the U.S. through reporting that’s rooted in innovative data analysis, powerful storytelling, historical context and collaboration with local journalists and sources closest to the problems and solutions in question.

Presented by the Radio Television Digital News Association, the Edward R. Murrow Awards recognize outstanding achievements in broadcast and digital journalism. 

Public Integrity was also recognized with a 2023 Edward R. Murrow Award for Feature Reporting for senior reporter Yvette Cabrera’s examination of a Navajo man’s quest to heal his land, his people and himself from sickness caused by uranium mining, part of the federal government’s quest to build a nuclear arsenal.

“An overall excellence award is such wonderful recognition of the clarity and commitment Public Integrity colleagues have about the organization’s mission of confronting inequality through investigative reporting, and to the work of hundreds of local journalists who have collaborated and partnered with us in this work,” said Public Integrity Editor in Chief Matt DeRienzo. “Every single person at our small-but-mighty nonprofit, both newsroom and business-side staff, had a hand in making this work happen and the impact on people’s lives that has resulted.”

The portfolio of work recognized for Overall Excellence included:

• “Unhoused and Undercounted,” an investigation in partnership with The Seattle Times, Street Sense Media and WAMU/DCist that exposed school districts’ failure to identify and serve homeless students across the country. It was followed by calls in Congress for accountability by federal agencies and an increase in federal funding for local schools to address the problem.
• “The Wealth Vortex” and Season 2 of “The Heist” podcast, which showed how government policies from Reconstruction to the present day have compounded to give the country a wider Black and white wealth gap than existed when civil rights laws were passed in the 1960s. 
• “Unequal Burden,” an investigative series in partnership with ICT showing how state tax policy and federal tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans have helped maintain and expand the wealth gap.
• “Who Counts?,” which found that 26 states made access to voting and political representation less equal in the past two years as the “Big Lie” about the 2020 election and a new super-majority on the U.S. Supreme Court opened the door to attacks on democracy unprecedented in modern times. 
• “Harm’s Way,” in partnership with Columbia Journalism Investigations and Type Investigations, which revealed the federal government’s failure to help communities forced to relocate due to the impacts of climate change.
• “Attacked Behind the Wheel,” in partnership with Newsy, which exposed the reality just below the surface of a Biden administration push for more women to become truck drivers as supply chain issues gripped the country: a pattern of sexual assault and labor abuses faced by women who have joined truck driver apprentice programs.
• And “Institution of One,” which investigated the lack of safe appropriate housing for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Public Integrity’s journalists have been recognized with numerous honors in recent months, including the Paul Tobenkin Award, a Peabody Award nomination, a National Headliner Award, an Excellence in Financial Journalism award, the Sigma Award recognizing the world’s best data journalism, two finalist honors for the Shaufler Prize for reporting about underserved people, the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing’s “Best in Business” awards, the Gracie Awards honoring media produced by and for women, the D.C. chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Dateline Awards, and the Signal Awards recognizing the country’s best podcasts. 

Founded in 1989, the Center for Public Integrity is one of the oldest nonprofit news organizations in the country and is dedicated to investigating systems and circumstances that contribute to inequality in the United States.

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One of Leah Mapstead’s favorite things about living independently is decorating her own space. 

Her condo offers a unique and adventurous theme in each room, from an African safari living room to an ocean bathroom. But Mapstead’s sense of home goes beyond the physical space of her Phoenix condo, located in a gated community for adults with disabilities.  

“Home is not just a place,” Mapstead said. “It’s loved ones, memories, somewhere to feel safe and somewhere you know you can be yourself, no matter what.”

At a Center for Public Integrity event on July 26 — the 33rd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act — Mapstead was one of four storytellers with disabilities who shared what “home” means to them. The stories were followed by a live virtual panel exploring the challenges of finding safe homes for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

“What is Home?” was co-sponsored with USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism and State of Mind, a partnership between Slate and Arizona State University.

Watch a video of the full event on YouTube.

Watch now

Amy Silverman moderated the event. Her award-winning reporting last year for Public Integrity highlighted the challenges of finding appropriate homes for people with complex disabilities. Silverman is also the founder of Wordslaw, a platform for storytellers with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Mapstead is one such storyteller. Her work was featured at the event alongside pieces from fellow Phoenix-area residents Paul Costantini, Hailey Simon and Sophie Stern. Each shared insight into the people, places and things that make up their senses of home.

Costantini described the “paradise” he has lived in since January 2021 — a guest house on his parents’ property. He’s filled it with his own things, creating a space where he can feel secure, comfortable and independent. 

“I feel very grown up living here,” Costantini said. 

Simon shared a poem about the various homes she’s had, both within fictional worlds and throughout her life. Stern, who is Silverman’s daughter, discussed how one’s definition of home can evolve alongside family milestones, like when her older sister moved away to college.

Addressing the storytellers, Silverman said, “What I love is that each of you took the same theme — home — and you had such different interpretations of it.”

During the panel discussion, Silverman was joined by Becca Monteleone, an assistant professor of disability studies at the University of Toledo; Patricia M. Jones, a person with a developmental disability who has been a member of the Independent Living movement since the early 1990s; and Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network.

The disability community faces a lack of accessible and affordable housing, Gross said. Few homes have proper accessibility features — under 1% are wheelchair accessible. There is also no real estate market in the U.S. where a person can afford “safe [and] decent” housing solely with Supplemental Security Income, a government payment program for people with qualifying disabilities and limited income, Gross said.

“Rental assistance isn’t keeping up with demand, so funding affordable housing programs is really important,” Gross said. “Especially programs that help people with disabilities who are leaving institutions or at risk of entering institutions.”

But people cannot rely on policies alone to create equitable housing opportunities, Monteleone said. She believes community members without disabilities are also responsible for making spaces more welcoming and accessible for people with disabilities. This includes trying to anticipate needs like interpreter services or dietary restrictions.

“Rather than forcing people to both explain exactly what sort of accommodations they need and exactly how to achieve them … having some of that work done in advance is one step toward more inclusive spaces,” Monteleone said.

Support systems for the disability community need to start thinking outside the box, Jones said. Current models are too simplistic and don’t take into consideration the unique situations of each person with a disability, Jones said. 

“They plan for people who need a lot of support or no support, but they don’t think about what the nuances are of the needs in between,” Jones said.

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The Center for Public Integrity held an event on July 26 — the 33rd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act — called “What is Home?” that explored the challenges of finding safe homes for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

At the event, there were four storytellers with disabilities who shared what “home” means to them. Here is what they had to say:

Paul Costantini is an actor with Detour Company Theatre, which provides theater training  for adults with intellectual, developmental and physical disabilities.

Leah Mapstead, a Detour actor who also volunteers at the Phoenix Herpetological Society.

Hailey Simon is a life-long storyteller who is Deaf. 

Sophie Stern is a dancer at Glendale Community College and an actor in Detour Company Theatre. 

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Leah Mapstead lives by herself. She likes decorating her home in different ways.

Her living room looks like an African safari. Her bathroom has an ocean theme.

But home is more than just her space. 

Leah said: “Home is not just a place.” 

Leah also said: “It’s loved ones, memories, somewhere to feel safe and somewhere you know you can be yourself, no matter what.”

The Center for Public Integrity is a newsroom that does stories about inequality. It hosted a virtual event on July 26. 

July 26 was the 33rd anniversary of The Americans with Disabilities Act. 

Leah Mapstead shared her story. Three other storytellers with intellectual and developmental disabilities shared their stories too. 

The other storytellers were: 

• Paul Costantini 
• Hailey Simon
• Sophie Stern 

Amy led the event because she wrote a story for Public Integrity last year. The story was about how hard it is to find safe homes for people with disabilities.

Amy also started Wordslaw for disabled storytellers.

Paul was one of the storytellers. He said he lives in a guest house on his parents’ property. He said it is a “paradise.” He has his own things. He feels safe, comfortable and independent. 

Paul said: “I feel very grown up living here.” 

Hailey uses American Sign Language. She shared a poem about homes she has had or she knows from fiction. 

Sophie read a story about how she thinks of home. Her view changed when her older sister moved away to college. She shared what that felt like.

Amy told the storytellers: “What I love is that each of you took the same theme — home — and you had such different interpretations of it.”

After the stories, the discussion began. Amy led the discussion with:

• Becca Monteleone, who teaches at the University of Toledo
• Patricia M. Jones, a person with a developmental disability who is a self advocate 
• Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network

Zoe said: People with disabilities can’t find accessible housing that they can afford to pay for. Most homes are not wheelchair accessible.

Zoe said: “Rental assistance isn’t keeping up with demand, so funding affordable housing programs is really important.” 

Zoe also said: It is important to fund “programs that help people with disabilities who are leaving institutions or at risk of entering institutions.”

Becca said that we all are responsible for making spaces more welcoming to people with disabilities.

Becca said: “Having some of that work done in advance is one step toward more inclusive spaces.”

Patricia said: Support systems need to start thinking outside the box. They need to think about individual needs.

Patricia said: “They plan for people who need a lot of support or no support, but they don’t think about what the nuances are of the needs in between.” 

“What is Home?” was co-sponsored by: 

• USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism  
• State of Mind, a partnership between Slate and Arizona State University.

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The Center for Public Integrity is a finalist for the Online Journalism Awards’ coveted general excellence award.

The nonprofit investigative news organization is one of three finalists in the small newsroom category, alongside Honolulu Civil Beat and The Markup. Finalists in the award’s larger categories include The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Public Integrity investigates inequality. In the case it made to ONA for the award, the newsroom noted that exposing and explaining inequality “requires an approach to investigative reporting that engages the people closest to it.”

“Rather than the traditional investigative reporting notion of catching a bad guy breaking the rules, it demands an examination of the rules themselves: Systems of government and society that are working exactly as designed, but by design create or widen inequality,” Public Integrity Editor-in-Chief Matt DeRienzo wrote in the newsroom’s entry.

Public Integrity investigations in the past year have dug into voting inequities in every state, tax policies that increase economic inequality, assaults on women truckers because of insufficient safeguards in training programs, homeless students falling through the cracks of a law intended to help them and the lack of safe appropriate housing for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, among other stories.

“I’m so proud of the work that Public Integrity’s staff has done in the past year and continues to do to reveal inequality across a wide span of topics,” said Senior Editor Jennifer LaFleur.  “Their work reflects deep research, unique data analysis and rare efforts to make stories accessible to everyone.”

At last year’s Online Journalism Awards, Public Integrity won the pandemic reporting category, for a project about the COVID housing crisis reported with The Associated Press, and was a finalist in two other categories.

The awards are organized by the Online News Association, the world’s largest digital journalism association. The organization will name winners later this month and honor them at a ceremony in Philadelphia Aug. 26.

Other Public Integrity work this year has been honored with the Paul Tobenkin Award, a National Headliner Award, the Sigma Award recognizing the world’s best data journalism, Mental Health America’s 2023 Media Award, Dateline Awards, the Gracie Awards and nominations for Peabody and Ambie awards. 

Founded in 1989, the Center for Public Integrity is one of the oldest nonprofit news organizations in the country and is dedicated to investigating systems and circumstances that contribute to inequality in the United States.

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