The Ferret, in collaboration with Greater Govanhill, has been awarded a grant to look at health inequalities in Scotland. The Solutions Journalism Accelerator grant aims to support long-term, solutions-focused reporting across the country.
The grant was awarded by European Journalism Centre (EJC) in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) with the goal of supporting up to 18 European media organisations/consortiums reporting on long-term solutions-focused development journalism.
The proposal, submitted in a partnership between The Ferret and Greater Govanhill, sets out a series of collaborations with independent news outlets from across the country in order to report and produce solutions-focused articles on some of the main issues impacting Scotland today.
Solutions Focused Journalism is an approach that seeks to cover responses to certain problems, as well as the problems themselves. It focuses on uncovering a given issue as well as a number of solutions that may have been generated in response to it.
“…good journalism means not stopping at highlighting the problem, but also looking – with our characteristically critical eye – at the solutions too.”
Karin Goodwin, journalist and co-editor at The Ferret
As well as publishing these investigations, the grant will allow The Ferret to train individuals from the different platforms on investigative journalism and solutions-focused reporting. More will be announced in the coming months about each collaborator and the issues they will be exploring.
Rhiannon Davies, Founding Editor of Greater Govanhill said: “We’re very excited to be partnering with The Ferret for this project. Bringing a solutions focus to issues that impact our community is at the heart of what we do. Working with The Ferret will enable us to expand that lens beyond our neighbourhood and see how different communities around Scotland are being affected by health inequality, and what can be done about it. This is a chance to move the conversation forward on a much wider scale.”
Karin Goodwin, journalist and co-editor at The Ferret, said: “At The Ferret we believe that good journalism changes things. And increasingly it feels that good journalism means not stopping at highlighting the problem, but also looking – with our characteristically critical eye – at the solutions too.
“Many exciting, embryonic solutions to health inequalities are to be found in communities across Scotland. So we are delighted to be teaming up with Greater Govanhill magazine on this project to draw on their experience of working closely with their local community in their reporting and content creation. We reckon together we’re going to be a force to be reckoned with.”
The announcement of the grant recipients was made today by EJC and it stated: “We are happy to announce the 10 projects awarded grant funding under the first calls for proposals of the Solutions Journalism Accelerator.”
More news from this project will be shared soon, so keep an eye on our social media channels and Ferret Underground Newsletter.
Photo Credit: iStock/fizkes
