2020-21 FELLOWS

Bertha Foundation supports activists, storytellers and lawyers working to bring about social and economic justice and human rights for all.

Bertha Foundation is delighted to introduce the 19 Bertha Challenge fellows who will spend the next year investigating relationships between profit, politics, and the global climate and ecological crises.

The Bertha Challenge is a global fellowship program for activists and investigative journalists. In December 2019, we invited applicants to pitch projects that responded to the following question:

How is the relationship between profit and politics contributing to our interconnected climate and ecological crises and what can activists and investigative journalists do to address this?

To read more about the 2020-21 Bertha Challenge question, click here. This Challenge follows the inaugural 2019-20 Bertha Challenge, which invited 16 activists and journalists to investigate equitable access to land and housing. To read more about the 2019-20 Bertha Challenge cohort of fellows, click here.

This year’s call for applications received 171 applications from 58 countries. It was inspiring to hear about the important work being done around the world in urgent response to the crises that our species and planet is facing. Selecting the new cohort from among so many high quality applications was a difficult task.

Each of the 19 fellows, coming from 11 different countries, will be working on projects that reach to the heart of a pressing ecological issue.

Today, we are excited to introduce the fellows and their work.

ACTIVISTS

Alex Kelly

Location: Australia
Host organization: Not Yet It’s Difficult

Alex is an organizer and artist committed to social and climate justice, based on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, ‘Australia’.

Alex has worked in film, theatre, communications and troublemaking in many forms. This includes taking part in blockades from Jabiluka in Australia to la zad in France, collaborating on the Indigenous Language and theatre project, Ngapartji Ngapartji, and curating the Something Somewhere Film Festival. 

As a Producer, Director and Impact Producer, Alex has worked on powerful documentary films including Queen of the Desert, THE ISLAND, Island of the Hungry Ghosts and In My Blood It Runs. Alex was also the Global Impact and Distribution Producer on Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything project.

Alex is currently focused on The Things We Did Next, a multiplatform speculative futures and climate change collaboration. Working with artist David Pledger and his company Not Yet It’s Difficult, Alex is generating new approaches to ‘futuring’ and ‘worldbuilding’ that bring thought leaders and audiences into conversations about the possible. Through practising the art of imagination, Alex hopes to strengthen our ability to tackle the complex challenges we face by imagining more just futures.

Angeles Solis

Location: USA
Host Organization: Make the Road New York

Angeles is the Lead Organizer of the Workplace Justice Team at Make the Road New York. 

Make the Road New York (MRNY) is one of the largest membership led community organizations in New York, providing direct services and organizing for housing, labor, immigrant rights, police accountability, environmental justice and more. Angeles drives the organization’s campaigning against the damage Amazon is doing to communities across New York and the country. 

Members of Make the Road are fighting to improve conditions in communities impacted by Amazon’s unfettered expansion and climate impact; calling for an end to militarized ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and law enforcement aided by Amazon technology; and organizing workers in Amazon warehouses. Members recognize the multi-faceted threat posed by this global monopoly, and are taking on the fight for their land and their homes. In coordination with global and national partners, Angeles’s Bertha project will equip community leaders with the tools to build power on Amazon, and elevate the voices of an immigrant base calling to #BreakUpAmazon in order to slow the climate crisis.

Before joining MRNY, Angeles was the International Campaigns Coordinator at United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), where she spearheaded a successful campaign to secure a global access agreement for the Worker Rights Consortium and NIKE Inc, landing a multi-million dollar settlement for garment workers in Vietnam. She has organized with fast food, retail, and community health workers in Washington State, where she was raised.

Federico Zuvire Cruz

Location: Guatemala
Host organization: FGER (Federación Guatemalteca de Escuelas Radiofónicas)

Located in Mesoamérica, Federico is a storyteller and land defender. He works with social movements and organized communities to develop narratives that can respond to day to day struggle, while in the long run dismantle oppressive structures. His work combines art and technology to create online and offline culture hack interventions.

His Bertha Challenge project with Andrea Ixchiú (journalist fellow), uses filmmaking and community radio to reveal the logic behind profit, government and extractive industries that are destroying and dispossessing indigenous territories in Guatemala. But more importantly, to highlight the contribution of woman land defenders and indigenous communities on the human strive for climate breakdown mitigation. In times of global crisis, his project is telling stories of local alternatives that point to the defense of life as a whole, as a condition for the continuity of human life on this planet.

Juan Francisco Donoso

Location: Germany
Host organization: The Centre for Research and Documentation Chile-Latin America

Juan is a Climate Justice organizer, campaigner and writer based in Berlin. He seeks dialogues between anti-capitalist movements and community building, operating ‘from below’, and facilitating the communication services and interactions between communities and solidarity networks.

He is a non-conformist planetarista, a seeker of climate solutions, an aficionado to energy and work reduction, and allergic to toxic masculinities. In recent years, Juan has been shaking things up with Bloque Latinoamericano, a collective of people and organizations of the left in Berlin, focusing his work on the defense of nature and territories, while highlighting the role that European transnational companies have in Latin America.

During the Bertha Challenge, Juan will be working with Yasna Mussa (journalist fellow). His wish is to deepen and widen public engagement with social and environmental crises beyond the green bubble by working with young students from public schools. Through visual mediums and explanations from different stakeholders, the students will analyze lithium extraction in South America and the involvement of the German automobile industry, while building a foundation for critical thinking of the hegemonic narratives and knowledges of the so-called Just Transition. The final project will be “mural-sized guerrilla images” in urban and suburban areas of Berlin pasted by the same participants.

Lenin Tinashe Chisaira

Location: Zimbabwe
Host organization: Advocates4Earth

Lenin is an activist environmental lawyer based in Zimbabwe. Lenin holds an LLBs Hons (University of Zimbabwe), a PGCert in Environmental and Natural Resources Law (University of London) and a Master of Laws (University College Cork, Ireland). His thesis focused on climate investments in Sub-Saharan Africa. Lenin has published research and academic works on the environment and climate crises. He is a member of the IUCN Commission on Environmental law.

Zimbabwe and most of Southern Africa suffers from climate and environmental injustice, economic inequality, high levels of corruption and restricted civic space for human rights, social and environmental justice work. 

Currently Lenin works as the Founder and Director of Advocates4Earth, a non-profit environmental law, climate and wildlife justice organization. Lenin and Advocates4Earth have lobbied and participated in UN environmental conferences such as the 2019 CITES CoP18  (Geneva, Switzerland), the 2018 UNFCCC Cop18 (Poland) and the 2019 CoP25 (Spain).

Under the Bertha Fellowship, Lenin will focus on the human rights, accountability and environmental justice impacts of the relationships between investors, governments and communities in the extraction of coal bed methane in Lupane (Zimbabwe). He will work with affected communities to develop an environmental justice legal handbook and mini-documentary.

Linh Do

Location: Australia
Host organization: Plan International

Linh has spent the last decade in climate action with experience across advocacy, media and social enterprise. She is passionate about strengthening civic institutions to achieve climate justice through tackling social inequality. Linh calls Melbourne, Australia home with experience across the globe. 

In her most recent role, Linh led the Australia and Pacific office for Climate Reality, Al Gore’s leadership program. She developed educational programs and communications framing to support a network of over 1,600 individuals. Linh previously served as the editor-in-chief at The Verb, an environmental newswire service, where she covered the Paris Agreement negotiations. She is currently a board member at Climate Action Network Australia.

Linh is being hosted by Plan International, an international development organisation with a focus on girls and youth. There she will explore how large organizations can support and cultivate activism, alongside what civil society can do to better engage culturally and linguistically diverse audiences.

Throughout the Bertha Challenge, Linh will work with Dan Ilic (journalist fellow), an investigative comedian at A Rational Fear. On the back of a ferocious summer of bushfires and amidst the global response to COVID-19, they will explore different means to engage with audiences.

LJ Amsterdam

Location: USA
Host organization: Mayday Space

LJ creates opportunities for people to take courageous and collective action. As a direct action trainer and a dancer, she believes that our bodies are the most essential elements of building community power. As an organizer, she is driven by the deeply human desire to belong. Over the past decade she has worked with resettled refugees, opiate users, families fractured by mass incarceration, homeowners in foreclosures, and indigenous communities on the frontlines of climate change.

LJ is a collective member of Mayday Space, an organizing center and social movement hub in Brooklyn, a trainer for The Center for Story-Based Strategy and The Ruckus Society, and the civilian-ally board member of About Face: Veterans Against the War. She also has fused movement, music, and media-making to create dozens of political education projects for young people. Born, raised, and based in NYC, she holds a B.A. and M.A. in African-American Studies from Columbia University.

Her Bertha Challenge is a creative nonviolent direct action incubation and experimentation lab. Every major social transformation in history has been powered by direct action, and now we need to level up. This project is about action praxis– innovating strategy and iterating tactics– with rigor, play, and risk.

Narrira Lemos

Location: Brazil
Host organization: The Tor Project

Narrira is a researcher and technologist based in Brazil. Most of her work is based in research around how technology impacts people’s lives, especially regarding security and privacy intrusion. In recent years, Narrira worked as a digital security trainer for social movements, activists organizations and third-sector organizations, aiming to strengthen privacy and security in collective actions and data uses. Narrira also worked as a UX Researcher, examining technology products to improve their uses for privacy and engagement for human rights defenders. 

Currently, Narrira is a Mozilla fellow embedded in the host organization Derechos Digitales. In her current project, she works to strengthen safe and sustainable practices for privacy and security online, and access to trustworthy information. 

As a Bertha Fellow, Narrira will work closely with environmental organizations and activists that are in the frontlines of the work against climate change, and to promote territory rights. Her work will bring security practices in the organization’s online communications, as well provide safe tools and methodologies to protect and promote collective organizing. Narrira is embedded in the host organization The Tor Project, and together they will work to circumvent censorship and provide reliable and safe access to the Internet.

Puah Sze Ning

Location: Malaysia
Host organization: Center for Orang Asli Concerns

Sze Ning has been working with indigenous communities in Malaysia for over 15 years, assisting in advocacy training, documenting and welfare aid. 

During her fellowship, Sze Ning will be working with Elroi Yee (journalist fellow). She seeks to look into the impact of indigenous communities who, after decades living in government resettlement sites and finding their lives worse off than before, have moved back to their traditional territories. Those territories, however, have not been spared from the impact of development and climate change. Through her fellowship, Sze Ning will investigate how these communities fare, whether using indigenous knowledge to cope with the current environment can provide enough resilience, and supporting their initiatives in asserting their rights.

INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISTS

Abiose Adelaja Adams

Location: Nigeria
Host organization: Cable Newspaper

Abiose has always sought to expose social inequalities and injustices arising from bad governance; and mirror them through investigative reporting and creative writing. A seasoned journalist, with almost two decades of experience, she is passionate about fact and science and the magic of theatre.

A fellow of the World Federation of Science Journalists, she has been at the forefront of reporting science and development issues. In the face of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in 2006, her work won the Red Ribbon Award for breaking the silence on the disease and stopping its spread and stigmatization. In response to the outbreak of the ebola virus disease in 2014, she produced a journalist reporting manual and was a recipient of the Investigative Reporting Project where she investigated the state of primary health centers.

She is the Programme Officer at Cable Newspaper Journalism Foundation, where she coordinates a program that focuses on using the tool of investigative reporting for accountability and transparency. Here she manages the investigative reporting programme and journalist training, while also interfacing with activists for amplification and advocacy.

During her fellowship year, she will be exploring what alternative political, economic and scientific models can work in response to the environmental degradation and climate crisis at Nigeria’s Niger Delta. Her work will also include writing and staging a play to be performed amongst the fishing and farming communities in the South of Nigeria, where she will focus her work.

Andrea Ixchiú Herández

Location: Guatemala
Host organization: FGER (Federación Guatemalteca de Escuelas Radiofónicas)

Maya K’iché, Totonicapán, Guatemala. Andrea is a journalist, human rights activist and defender of the territory. She is a Nobel Women’s Initiative Fellow and was awarded the Sakharov Prize Fellowship, which honors individuals and groups of people who have dedicated their lives to the defense of human rights and freedom of thought. She describes herself as an investigative activist and journalist.

She has also been an indigenous authority in her hometown of Totonicapán. Her career path is extensive: she’s actively involved in coordinating various processes of cultural management, community communication and technological innovation. She developed audiovisual communication methodologies and investigative journalism tools to make visible the struggles of the indigenous people and the territory in Guatemala.

During her Bertha Challenge fellowship year, she will work with the Guatemalan National Federation of Radio Schools focusing on three stories of resistance told by women. The focus of her work is in the intersection of organized woman, indigenous rights and territory with an emphasis on water, land and governance. Andrea will be working with Federico Cruz (activist fellow), creating communication strategies to highlight the voices of indigenous communities in the climate breakdown conversation.

Antonia Juhasz

Location: USA
Host organization: Democracy Now!

Antonia Juhasz is a leading energy analyst, author, and investigative journalist specializing in oil. Her articles and opinion pieces appear in outlets including Rolling Stone, Harper’s Magazine, Newsweek, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, CNN, The Nation, and Ms. Magazine. Antonia is the author of three books: Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill, The Tyranny of Oil, and The Bush Agenda. She has contributed chapters and essays to seven books, including Rebecca Solnit’s Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, and she is currently writing a book on the end of the fossil fuel era.

Antonia was a 2019 Ted Scripps Fellow at the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado, a 2017 Yale University Poynter Fellow in Journalism, and a 2013 Investigative Journalism Fellow at UC Berkeley. Antonia founded and runs the (Un)Covering Oil Investigative Reporting Program. Her on-the-ground investigations, which focuses on women and girls, include the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, oil exploitation in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the Paris Climate Accord, the role of  oil and natural gas in the Afghanistan war, and resistance movements from Standing Rock to the Norwegian Arctic. She lives in Colorado.

Antonia’s Bertha Challenge project is a collaboration with Democracy Now! She’ll be writing articles investigating the causes and consequences of the 2020 collapse of the global oil industry, and the intersection of human rights, fossil fuels, and climate change. “Will the global Covid-19 crisis offer a path out of the fossil fuel era or drive the world more deeply into its grip?”, is one of the questions Antonia will be addressing during her fellowship 

Bhrikuti Rai

Location: Nepal
Host organization: Centre for Investigative Journalism

Bhrikuti is a multimedia journalist based in Kathmandu. During her decade-long career, she has reported extensively on environment, technology and human rights. Bhrikuti loves all things audio, and is co-creator of the feminist podcast Boju Bajai, which she started in 2016 with poet Itisha Giri. In late 2018, the podcast was the first Nepali media entity to put out an open call for Me Too stories in Nepal. Since then, Bhrikuti has consistently reported on stories about sexual harassment, which were some of the first and few MeToo stories that came out of Nepal. 

Bhrikuti has a diverse portfolio ranging from narrative podcasts, investigative stories, documentaries to social and immersive digital content. Her work has appeared in several Nepali and international media, including The Kathmandu Post, Nepali Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times and Buzzfeed News. In 2017, she won a Fulbright scholarship to pursue a Masters degree at Columbia University in New York, where she specialized in investigative journalism.

As a Bertha fellow, Bhrikuti’s work will focus on investigating the extent of the ecological crises caused by illegal extraction from rivers across Nepal, which impacts the most vulnerable communities. With a special focus on the extraction of sand, she will investigate the collusion between business and politics, embedding her work within the communities severely affected by this environmental devastation.

Charles Saki

Location: Zimbabwe
Host organization: Community Radio Harare

Charles is a Zimbabwean Journalist and freedom of expression evangelist. He has a keen interest in community centric investigative journalism with special focus on social justice and environmental management issues.

In 2010 he was one of the founding employees of the Media Centre in Harare, where he was instrumental in establishing a resource centre for Freelance Journalists and promoting citizen journalism in communities across Zimbabwe. A Radio Netherlands Certified trainer of trainers in multimedia production, Charles is a Programs officer and Editor at a Community Radio Harare (CORAH), a community radio initiative awaiting government licensing.

Having trained and worked with citizen journalists, Charles is a firm believer in changing lives through access to information through advocating for the use of alternative media, internet freedom and promoting access to information in Zimbabwe. The pursuit for social justice drove Charles into community media and his Bertha project is focusing on the effects of corruption and mismanagement on the delivery of basic sanitation services for marginalised communities in the face of the climate crisis and massive pollution.  

Dan Ilic

Location: Australia
Host organization: A Rational Fear

Dan is one of Australia’s most prolific comedy filmmakers. Calling himself an “investigative humorist”, Dan has used comedy as an activist tool throughout most of his professional career in Australia as well as the USA where he worked. 

Dan is the host of the popular podcast and live comedy show, A Rational Fear, a show that brings together experts, journalists, comedians and politicians and uses comedy to talk about issues that get overlooked in mainstream media, namely climate justice. 

Dan has performed in front of thousands of people across  Australia, including sell out shows at the Sydney Opera House and seasons of radio on ABC Radio National. As a journalist and TV producer, he covered the 2016 US presidential election as the Executive Producer of Satire for Fusion Media Group and Gizmodo Media Group in the USA and in 2015 was the Senior Satire Producer of Al Jazeera’s youth publisher AJ+. Most recently he was the Executive Producer and showrunner of Tonightly with Tom Ballard (ABC) and in 2020 was the Executive Producer and Showrunner of the coronavirus comedy lifestyle show At Home Alone Together (ABC).

Throughout the Bertha Challenge, Dan Ilic will work with Linh Do (activist fellow), who is hosted by Plan International. On the back of a ferocious summer of bushfires and amidst the global response to COVID-19, they will explore different means to engage with audiences in climate vulnerable areas.

Elroi Yee

Location: Malaysia
Host organization: Star Media Group

Elroi is Deputy Executive Producer at R.AGE, a multimedia investigative journalism team based in Malaysia that combines its journalistic work with advocacy campaigns. During his time at R.AGE, the team has been nominated for the Peabody Awards twice. 

He aims to document the new migration patterns of indigenous peoples in Malaysia, who are moving out of government resettlement schemes and returning to their original lands. These lands are often exploited by the state and commercial enterprises for profit, leaving little resources for the indigenous communities. He will specifically look at the drivers of deforestation and the state structures – and individuals – allowing this to happen. Working in video and print, he plans to also deliver photo and video essays during his fellowship year.

During his Bertha Challenge fellowship, Elroi will work with Puah Sze Ning (activist fellow).

Margot Gibbs

Location: United Kingdom
Host organization: Finance Uncovered

Margot is an investigative journalist reporting on the financial flows which underpin the exploitation of people, the environment and society. She works on collaborative investigations with Finance Uncovered’s international network of journalists and campaigners. She previously covered oil sector corruption for Africa Confidential, has made critically acclaimed radio for the BBC and has worked as an investigator for Greenpeace, Corruption Watch and the Syria Campaign.

During her Bertha Challenge year she will explore the agri-chemicals business, with a focus on the environmental, economic and social impact of the synthetic fertiliser industry, whose GHG emissions have been long underestimated. Amongst a number of investigative pieces, she will map the profits and profit drivers of the industry: following the money from the ammonia plants of the former soviet union, to the mountain towns of Europe’s busiest tax havens, the palm oil plantations of South East Asia and North America’s fast food franchises. 

Michael
O. Snyder

Location: USA
Host organization: Blue Earth Alliance

Michael is a photographer, filmmaker, and environmental scientist who uses his combined knowledge of visual storytelling and conservation to create narratives that drive social change. He holds an MSc in Environmental Sustainability from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He is a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, a Blue Earth Photographer, and founder of Interdependent Pictures.  He has directed award-winning films in the Arctic, the Amazon, the Himalaya, and East Africa. His work has been featured by National Geographic, The Guardian, Vox, BBC, and other outlets. 

Snyder’s project is titled Eroding Edges and explores the rapidly changing lives and identities of coastal communities in North America. While these communities are vastly different in geographic and cultural heritage, they share two tragic commonalities: 1) the land that they have called home for generations will be wiped from the map in less than 50 years due to sea level rise, 2) they are battling fossil fuel companies in their own backyards. While the project bears witness to the unprecedented loss of place-based tradition, it also focuses on the quest for leadership in the face of rising tides, with an emphasis on community driven solutions and the facilitation of meaningful migration.

Yasna Mussa

Location: Chile
Host organization: Late Magazine

Yasna Mussa is a freelance Chilean reporter, based in Santiago de Chile. 

For a decade she has worked as an international correspondent for written and radio media, covering from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Her work has been  published in media such as La Tercera (Chile), The New York Times, Vice (Mexico), and Mediapart (France).

She is co-founder of Late Magazine, where she is currently working as Editor and mediambiente.cl, a site committed to climate change. She has dedicated recent years to covering socio-environmental conflicts, making the Climate Emergency podcast and a series on the subject. These issues hold great importance in a country like Chile, where the extractivist model has generated deep and permanent damage in communities facing a context of drought and contamination.

During her Bertha Challenge project, she will work with Juan Donoso (activist fellow), to investigate the two faces of renewable energy and the electric cars that are marketed in Europe thanks to lithium obtained in what is known as the lithium triangle, spanning the most hauntingly beautiful earth between Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia.

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