Editor’s note: This interview took place before the Sept. 1 death of Barbara Ehrenreich, the co-founder of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Alissa Quart is, admittedly, “obsessed with other people.” It’s a quality that serves her well as a journalist, author and now the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP), which she founded with the late Barbara Ehrenreich in 2012.
“If you believe what we have on Earth is all there is, journalism is a form of secular faith,” Quart says. With a “profound curiosity in others” that developed from an early age, she always wanted to know and share people’s stories, including a gym teacher she interviewed when she was just 8.
Quart’s introduction to EHRP came when she worked on a short documentary called “The Last Clinic” about the abortion clinic in Mississippi that became the center of the recent Dobbs Supreme Court decision.
“We did that and got support from EHRP, which was just started by Barbara. … Her focus has been on working class labor, women’s labor, etc.,” Quart says. “She started this nonprofit after 2008, after the recession, to support journalists. It wasn’t just journalism that was tanking but lots of middle-class professions were tanking and having a hard time trying to survive.”
Quart joined EHRP in 2014 and helped build it up into a substantial nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that helps support the work of journalists.
“Part of (EHRP’s mission) is keeping people who are middle class, working class, not just the most affluent elite reporters in the profession,” she says. “Some of it is about getting that work into journalism. We made a decision and co-publishing is the way it should be for smaller nonprofits. I felt like this is a small nonprofit, the biggest effect will be if we can change existing sites and journalism entities. We offer a very polished set of drafts, films, photography, often by people who are nontraditional, not from the Ivy and Ivy-Plus universities, and give them to publications from the Washington Post to Cosmo to Teen Vogue. The mission is two-fold: To change who gets to be part of reporting and then what people are reading.”
The importance of working with those other publications and not focusing strictly on niche outlets is to put material in front of people who might not otherwise think about the far-reaching economic questions and issues associated with things like people experiencing homelessness or the inability to get access to health care.
“We try to get our stuff into places that are not having this issue reported on locally or are sympathetic,” Quart says. “You might have voters who might have been found through various surveys in certain geographies who might not have a beat on homelessness. It might be a challenge to get stories in those local newspapers. We’ve had reporters who’ve experienced homelessness in Alaska, places where you’re less likely to have citizens who think they need help. Honestly, just having people who have experienced homelessness but are also professional writers, that’s a small group of people. It’s growing.”
For example, EHRP worked to co-publish a story written by Alex Miller, a young writer who experienced homelessness. “He was in college and a friend said, ‘Come to New York City, I have a place for you.’ Alex was 22 and wound up unhoused. The friend said, ‘OK, the week’s up, time to go.’ You can see how it creeps up on you. It’s not that you’re bracketed, or this fixed identity; or you’ve had some incredible incidents that led to this. He didn’t have the resources. He’s young and he’s in a shelter. I think that’s important.”
The stories co-published by EHRP, and on the organization’s website, all focus on issues of inequality.
“That can include TV shows about debt or reproductive rights because that intersects a lot around poverty,” Quart said. “There’s a lot about the cost of adoption, things around economic struggling that you might not think about. If you’re writing about disability, the angle is having trouble getting a job because you have vision impairment or you’re having trouble paying for your kid who has autism spectrum disorder. If you’re coming to us with a story that doesn’t seem like an inequality story, there’s probably an angle.”
Alissa Quart discusses how the Economic Hardship Reporting Project supports the reporting of nontraditional journalists and helps them find outlets to co-publish their work in order to reach a wider audience.
