Planet Detroit | ANNUAL IMPACT REPORT 2021
Dear Planet Detroiters,
As we wrap up 2021, we look back with gratitude and pride in what we’ve accomplished together. One year ago, we set some goals that we shared with our readers. We wanted to deepen our journalism, grow our community, and strengthen our organization. In 2021, Planet Detroit did all of these things, and then some.
We dove deep into crucial and underreported topics, like lead and asthma in Detroit kids and air quality. We expanded our editorial efforts this year by bringing on more journalists, particularly BIPOC journalists. We hosted Rukiya Colvin, our Detroit Environmental Fellow, who reported on neighborhood climate action, the challenges Detroiters face with lead levels in the soil, and more. We deepened our coverage of climate change by joining the Local Media Association’s competitive 22-member Local Climate Collaborative and launching the Michigan Climate News Bulletin.
We now have more than 300 individual members and 25 organizational supporters who donate to our work each month, and our social media followers have increased by 400%. In 2021, we hosted in-person events and tours so we could get to know our members better and provide opportunities for our community to connect.
We brought on additional part-time staff and established a diverse and talented Advisory Board in 2021. Their guidance and leadership will be critical to helping us move to the next level.
We launched Planet Detroit in 2019 to fill a critical gap we saw in local environmental and public health reporting. In looking ahead to 2022, we are aiming to serve more Metro Detroiters and enable them to access news and information about their environment and public health by offering an Environmental News Hub to the local media ecosystem.
It’s going to be an exciting year, and we are grateful to have you along for the journey.
To the future,
Nina Ignaczak, Founder & Editor, Planet Detroit
Our Mission
Planet Detroit, with the support of our Advisory Board, refined our mission statement in 2021 to better reflect what we hope to achieve. Our mission as a news organization is to:
Hold power accountable. Uncover solutions. Reflect and serve the community.
We will use this mission as our guiding principle to determine how we will conduct our journalism, and what kinds of projects and partnerships we will engage in next year. At the end of 2022, we will evaluate our progress and impact against this mission statement. Here are some of the ways we hope to measure that impact:
Hold power accountable. Uncover solutions.
- Increase awareness of the issues
- Influence policy action, attention or change
- Influence public opinion (change in tone or quality of public discourse)
- Change behavior (civic engagement, stories used to mobilize or create new groups around an issue)
- Change narratives (people talking about issues in a new way)
Reflect and serve the community.
- Increase reach and readership
- Increase memberships and partnerships
- Identify and address community information needs
- Build opportunities for community members to connect on the issues they care about
- Increase BIPOC sourcing
- Increase BIPOC staff and contributors
Our Journalism
In 2021, Planet Detroit published our regular weekly newsletter, including the addition of our signature vv“From the headlines” section, which details and explains the most important weekly environmental and public health news stories. We also continued to publish a weekly listing of environmental and community jobs and events.
And we deepened our original reporting in 2021, thanks in no small part to a range of reporting grants that enabled us to pay ourselves and local freelancers to produce our quality independent journalism.
Here are some highlights from our best reporting:
Climate Change
Funded by the Planet Detroit Members and Impact Partners, Facebook Journalism Project, multiple funders
Reporters: Nina Ignaczak, Brian Allnutt, Joey Horan, Tom Perkins, Rukiya Colvin, David Sands, Gary Wilson
Climate change is the issue of our era. No longer something we think about as a future threat — it’s happening now. Planet Detroit works to cover climate change from a highly local angle, helping Metro Detroiters understand how we’re being impacted in our neighborhoods, who is working on policy and practical solutions from the ground up, and what programs and resources are available to help. We’ve been aided in our efforts by the Local Media Association’s Climate Collaborative, a 22-member national cohort of newsrooms dedicated to sharing resources and ideas on how to cover climate from a local perspective. We’ve also received funding from the Facebook Journalism Project to launch Michigan Climate News, a publication on Facebook’s Buletin Platform where we cover climate change statewide.
Check out Planet Detroit’s Climate coverage here>>>
Check out Michigan Climate News Bulletin here>>>
Lead and Asthma
Funded by the Erb Family Foundation
Reporters: Nina Ignaczak, Bianca Garcia, Rukiya Colvin, Tom Perkins, Aaron Mondry
Detroit children face higher rates of elevated blood lead levels and asthma than the state average. And while the causes of asthma and elevated blood lead levels are complex, we know that the environment — including outdoor and indoor sources of exposure — play an important role. A lack of understanding, awareness and engagement around these challenges and their potential solutions presents an obstacle to advancing necessary policies and programs to address them. In 2021, Planet Detroit produced ten stories and published three opinion pieces on lead and asthma in the city, including important updates on policy changes at the city and state level, and insights into the residents and activists fighting for a better future. We plan to publish more stories next year on lead and asthma and continue to pursue additional resources to enable us to keep a close eye on this important issue.
Check out our lead & asthma stories here>>>
Planet Detroit’s Guide to Your Electric and Water Utilities
Funded by the American Press Institute
Reporters: Tom Perkins, Noah Kincade, Community Outreach: Work Department, Produced in partnership with Outlier Media
Metro Detroiters deserve to know how their local utilities are planning for climate change and how the funding structures, operations, and inequities built into the governance of the region’s electric and water utilities impact that planning. As we hone in on our mission to serve the community, we aim to serve those basic information needs better. And to do that, we need to listen. That’s why we embarked on a project to respond to Detroiters’ questions about their utilities with clear answers. We conducted a community listening project in which we interviewed and surveyed grassroots leaders and residents from diverse backgrounds to capture their most pressing questions. And then, we answered them using rigorous reporting. We hope to continue this model of journalism in 2022, producing additional guides on multiple topics of interest to our readers and community.
Check out our energy and water utility guides here>>>
Parks Reporting
Funded by the Planet Detroit Members and Impact Partners
Reporter: Zaire Talon Daniels
If there was one thing we learned from the pandemic, it’s that access to high-quality local outdoor space is paramount to public health. That’s why we focused our resources in 2021 to produce a weekly dispatch on Detroit’s parks and trails, highlighting improvements, user experiences, and challenges. Because we know accessibility is key, we partnered with local tech firm Totago to produce details on how to get to each park using public transit. We’re aiming to secure additional funding to allow us to continue and expand our parks reporting initiative.
Check out the stories of our parks here>>>
Food Equity and Access
Funded by the Institute for Nonprofit News.
Reporters: Nina Ignaczak, Serena Daniels, Kate Abbey-Lambertz
Produced in partnership with Detour Detroit and Tostada Magazine
The pandemic has changed so much about our lives — including how we approach food access and security within our marginalized communities. Since last spring, food pantries have been the third-most common COVID-19 need requested by Detroiters who called the state’s 211 hotline, after testing and rent assistance. The immediacy and extent of the need — not to mention new safety precautions and unknown health risks — stretched the region’s food assistance system nearly to the breaking point. But it didn’t break. Instead, it transformed with resounding resiliency: Food pantries started offering drive-up programs; schools created satellite food pick-up sites for families when classes were canceled; farmers sold their produce directly to consumers; restaurant chefs pivoted to opening mini-marts and making meals for their neighbors in need. In the face of a crisis that’s still very much alive for Detroiters, food system innovators have started forging new pathways to food security that center agency and dignity for people who need help. These models — grounded in collaboration and sustainability — have leveraged the region’s existing food distribution infrastructure assets so that Detroiters could fill their plates.
Check out our series on Filling our Plates here>>>
Public Health and the Environment
Funded by Society for Environmental Journalists, Erb Family Foundation, Planet Detroit Members and Impact Partners
Reporters: Brian Allnutt, Tom Perkins, Nina Ignaczak, Aaron Mondry, Bianca Garcia
The connection between the quality of our environment and the quality of our health is not often well-understood or appreciated in society. But a third of Planet Detroit’s readers say the health of they or someone they know has been impacted by their environment. We’ve attacked this issue on multiple fronts this year to explain how seemingly disparate issues like COVID-19, fossil-fuel-driven power generation, air quality, housing, infrastructure, and conditions like respiratory and other ailments are connected.
Check out our ongoing coverage linking the environment to public health here>>>
Getting BIPOC Detroiters Outdoors
Funded by the Solutions Journalism Network
Reporters: Rhonda J. Smith, Nina Ignaczak
Black and brown communities in Detroit had less access to the outdoors than their counterparts before the pandemic. The legacy of environmental pollution, development decisions, and economic, transportation and historical public policies and systems have left Detroiters with fewer opportunities to enjoy the healing benefits of nature through access to forests, natural areas, and waterways than many others in the region, particularly high-income, white communities. Like most other inequities, the pandemic has made this lack of access to nature starker. Stay-at-home orders and shutdowns have left everyone with fewer opportunities for recreation. Efforts to reconnect communities of color with the natural environment as a form of healing and recreation are critical to their health and welfare, now more than ever. Planet Detroit reported on efforts to reconnect Black and brown Detroiters with the outdoors.
Check out our series on Getting BIPOC Detroiters Outdoors here>>>
Black-Owned Sustainable Businesses
Funded by the Solutions Journalism Network
Reporters: Nina Ignaczak, Randiah Camille Green
Published in partnership with Belt Magazine
Building sustainable business in Detroit means building businesses that are equitable — both in terms of who owns and operates them and who they serve.
We reported on three Black-led efforts to build ownership and equity into the emerging field of environmentally-conscious green businesses.
Check out our series on Detroit’s Black-owned sustainable businesses here>>>
Black Farmers in Detroit
Funded by the Planet Detroit Members and Impact Partners
Reporters: Rhonda J. Smith, Randiah Camille Green
Planet Detroit continued our coverage of the story of Detroit’s Black farmers in 2021, including stories about land tenure and the Black Farmers’ Land Fund.
We plan to continue this important coverage area in 2022.
Check out our ongoing coverage of Black farmers in Detroit here>>>
The Detroit River
Funded by the University of Michigan’s Detroit River Story Lab
Reporter: Patricia Jewell
As far as local environmental icons, nothing surpasses the Detroit River — which is actually a part of a strait that connects Lake Huron and Lake Erie. People who live here have deep emotional connections to the waterway.
That’s why we partnered with Detroit River Story Lab to document personal narratives and stories about this waterway. We’re excited to continue partnering with the Detroit River Story Lab at the University of Michigan to deepen our reporting on this vital resource.
Check out our series on the Detroit River>>>
Restorying Agency
Funded by the Michigan Humanities Council & the Michigan Council for Arts & Cultural Affairs
Restorying Agency is a self-guided tour that invites us to visit sites of reconnection between us and Metro Detroit ecologies. The metro Detroit region bears the scars of colonization, industrialism, racism, and capitalism — all of which require exploitation, a sense of separateness, and a way of thinking that sees the earth and other people as material resources. Restorying Agency invites us to connect with life here as it is: interconnected, relational, sacred, scarred, and alive through the development of site-specific art and writing by local creators and journalists.
The perspectives of these creators open up new ways to imagine being here, with each other. The Restorying Agency launched one new site-specific project each week, which you are invited to visit. Check it out online and also spend time at the project locations. Projects include art installations, sound walks, interviews, and meditations.
Together we will hear trees speak, honor the traditions of Wahnabezee, visit an emergent garden that provides beyond capitalist relations, breathe with stone ancestors at the foot of the incinerator, consider how to practice interconnection within our daily lives, and more.
Check out our Restorying Agency project here>>>
Participating artists and writers include Halima Afi Cassells, Shanna Merola, Billy Mark, Palace Abrams, Molly Leebove, Owólabi Aboyade, Giizhigad, Courtney Wise Randolph, and Bridget Quinn.
Detroit Energy and Environmental Reporting Fellow
Planet Detroit partners with the Energy News Network (ENN), a news and information service published by Fresh Energy, and the Detroit Equity Action Lab in a joint imperative to recruit, uplift, and mentor Black, Indigenous, and other journalists of color through the Detroit Energy and Environment Reporting Fellowship program.
This year’s selected Energy and Environment Reporting Fellow is Rukiya Colvin, a lifelong resident of east Detroit. In 2021, Colvin reported a range of neighborhood-perspective local environmental stories, including climate change, the challenges Detroiters face with lead levels in the soil, and grassroots activists working to improve the environment in their communities.
Check out Rukiya Colvin’s work here>>>
Our Organization
Planet Detroit’s journalism starts with the community. We focus on explanatory, solutions-based, and investigative reporting, and we have a deep commitment to community engagement around local environmental issues. We listen to our readers, grassroots activists, and local experts to understand the topics where our reporting offers the most value. We have a keen understanding of the issues and have the attention of local activists, nonprofit and business leaders, and other local media.
Also, the environment is beautiful and amazing. We’ll try to take some space to appreciate that, and to help our community connect to the amazing outdoor opportunities that we have here in Metro Detroit.
Since launching in April of 2019, Planet Detroit has gained more than 3,000 subscribers to our weekly newsletter. We attracted 45,000 new users to our website in 2021 and more than 10,000 followers on our social media platforms. More than 300 individuals and 25 mission-aligned nonprofits and businesses support our work. The majority of our readers are from Detroit, Hamtramck, and Highland Park; others are reading from places like Ann Arbor, Dearborn, Warren, and Royal Oak.
Planet Detroit operates as a fiscally sponsored project of the Michigan Environmental Council.
Our Staff & Contributors
NINA MISURACA IGNACZAK, FOUNDER & EXECUTIVE EDITOR
BRIAN ALLNUTT, REPORTER
RUKIYA COLVIN, JOURNALISM FELLOW
ZAIRE TALON DANIELS, PARKS REPORTER
STACEY GRANT, IMPACT PARTNERSHIP COORDINATOR
ERICA SCHOPMEYER, DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR
RHONDA J. SMITH, REPORTER
TOM PERKINS, REPORTER
RANDIAH GREEN, REPORTER
NICK HAGEN, PHOTOGRAPHER
ROSA MARIA ZAMARRON, PHOTOGRAPHER
Our 2021 Advisory Board
Planet Detroit’s advisory board offers their time, advice, and expertise around our programming, operations, and funding.
MARTINA GUZMAN, CHAIR, DAMON J. KEITH FELLOW RACE & JUSTICE JOURNALISM
SARAH ALVAREZ, FOUNDER, OUTLIER MEDIA
EMILIA ASKARI, FORMER FREEP JOURNALIST + JOURNALISM PROFESSOR
ERIKA BLOCK, ENTREPRENEUR + STARTUP COACH, STICKY LAB
LAPRISHA BERRY DANIELS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, DETROITERS WORKING FOR ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
BRIANA DUBOSE, ECOWORKS
NATALIE JAKUB, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, GREEN LIVING SCIENCE
CALANDRA JONES, ECOWORKS
MICHELLE MARTINEZ, FOUNDER, MICHIGAN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE ASSOCIATION
JEREMY ORR, ATTORNEY, DIRECTOR OF PARTNERSHIPS, EARTHJUSTICE
JUSTIN SCHOTT, MANAGER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ENERGY EQUITY PROJECT
NICK SCHROECK, PROFESSOR OF LAW, UNIVERSITY OF DETROIT MERCY SCHOOL OF LAW
TOM SKROTZKI, SENIOR MARKET DEVELOPMENT LEAD FOR ELEVATE
LESLIE TOM, CHIEF SUSTAINABILITY OFFICER AT THE CHARLES H. WRIGHT MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY
Our Impact Partners’ Circle
Our Planet Detroit Impact Partners’ Circle is a growing network of environmentally-conscious organizations and businesses that we convene throughout the year to meet and exchange solutions around our reporting.
We facilitate opportunities to learn from each other and hear how each organization is working to address environmental, climate, sustainability, and public health challenges in our region. Impact Partners help ensure our nonprofit journalism remains free and accessible to all.
Planet Detroit’s 2022 Impact Partners include:
Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice
Great Lakes Environmental Law Center
MI Environmental Justice Coalition
Six Rivers Regional Land Conservancy
Society for Environmental Journalists
Our Media Partners
Planet Detroit is grateful to our amazing media partners for helping us produce, publish and amplify our reporting.
In 2021 we partnered with:
What’s next for Planet Detroit
We’ve laid the foundation in 2021, and we have big plans for 2022! With a strong and diverse staff, audience, advisory board, and circle of Impact Partners, we aim to:
Deepen the impact and reach of our reporting
- Build an environmental news hub for Metro Detroit’s local media ecosystem
- Increase our audience & reach
- Cultivate opportunities for meaningful community engagement
- Find ways to listen to our community more deeply
- Document our impact
Increase our financial sustainability
- Broaden our philanthropic support
- Diversify our revenue streams
- Double our revenue
Build operational resilience
- Strengthen our leadership team and function
- Increase representation of BIPOC staff and contributors
- Develop a strategic plan to guide our decisions and resource allocation
- Develop metrics to measure success across the organization
Help us reach our goals and serve the community! Support Planet Detroit today!
