Feb. 3, 2025
The Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk has received a $300,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as one of 15 newsrooms nationwide receiving support for climate journalism.
It’s one of several grants and honors recently awarded to the Ag & Water Desk, a regional news collaborative based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism that offers free environmental coverage to news outlets throughout the Mississippi River Basin. The Desk supports a network of journalists at partner newsrooms, often including current students and alumni of the School of Journalism.
“The Ag & Water Desk is filling a crucial need in journalism, and grants like this one show that people are taking notice,” said David Kurpius, dean of the school. “By supporting news organizations while also providing opportunities for young journalists to build their skills in an important variety of local journalism, the Desk is a strong example of the value of the school’s community-oriented mission.”
Professor Sara Shipley Hiles, executive director of the Ag & Water Desk, said the grant reflects the Desk’s growing profile since its inception in 2021.
“We’re diversifying our support, and more people are seeing the value of the work that we’re doing,” Hiles said. “That’s a good feeling, because we’re starting to grow beyond the original outlines of the program.”
While the six-figure grant will go toward the Desk’s general operating expenses over three years, it has broader significance.
The grant meets a requirement for matching funds from an earlier Walton Family Foundation grant, thus helping to ensure the Desk remains adequately funded as it continues to expand its reporting network and welcomes new cohorts of journalists in partnership with Report for America and the Society of Environmental Journalists.
The grant comes on the heels of several others awarded to the Desk over the last few months. These included a $100,000 grant from Press Forward, a national coalition investing in local news, as well as $20,000 from the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) and the Google News Initiative.
The awards reflect both the quality of the Desk’s work and the inherent importance of reliable environmental reporting with local relevance and regional context.
“One of the most important stories of our time centers on both the existential crisis climate change poses to humanity and the positive health benefits and economic opportunities inherent in the clean energy transition,” said MacArthur Foundation President John Palfrey. “We need more independent journalism focused on climate and clean energy issues, a more diverse field of reporters covering the story from communities most impacted by climate change, and more cross-newsroom collaborations to reach wider audiences and leverage shared resources.”
Indeed, for Hiles, it’s the external impacts that mean the most. Specifically, the Desk’s success in reaching communities of all sizes with its content.
“We’ve gotten some big national pickups as well as reaching really small newsrooms, which is an important part of our mission: helping out those small rural newsrooms that can’t afford to have an environmental reporter full-time,” Hiles said. “Once people begin to see how interesting and important these issues are, they really take hold of it.”
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