The Overseas Press Club Foundation announced the first winners of its newly launched Rukeyser Reporting Grants.
The program, which is open to the 400 or so former OPC Foundation fellows, was created to fund international freelance reporting projects. The 2024 awardees are Diana Kruzman and Max de Haldevang.
Kruzman will explore the long-lasting impact of the drying of the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest lake and now a source of toxic air pollution. She will detail how efforts to address the disaster in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan can hold lessons for other drying lakes around the world.
de Haldevang will use his grant to travel to South America, where he is reporting on the history of a storied sliver of cloud forest that could provide hope for a field of tropical botanists facing down the barrel of a biodiversity crisis that is as existential as climate change but receives even less attention.
The awards were announced by the Reporting Grants committee chairman William Glasgall, who oversaw a judging panel consisting of OPCF board members John Daniszewski (OPCF president), Tim Ferguson, Anders Melin, Caitlin Hu and Paul Haven.
The Rukeyser Reporting Grants program was named for former board member William Rukeyser, the founding managing editor of Money magazine
and managing editor of Fortune.
