Meet the “Cultivating Connection Through the Media” Fellows
July 9, 2026
The Greater Good Science Center (GGSC) and Colorado News Collaborative (COLab) are pleased to announce the inaugural cohort of fellows selected for the Cultivating Connection Through the Media Reporting & Production Grants.
The fellowship supports Colorado journalists and nonfiction media producers who are creating stories that help audiences better understand how people and communities navigate differences, build trust, and strengthen a sense of belonging. Fellows will receive funding to produce original media and participate in a year-long community of practice focused on how to use the science and practice of bridging and belonging in storytelling.
The selected projects represent a wide range of topics, communities, and storytelling formats. Through documentaries, podcasts, radio features, print journalism, and online media, fellows will explore cultural, political, economic, identity, urban-rural, and generational divides on some of the most pressing topics facing Colorado today: water scarcity, wolf reintroduction, energy and development, mental health, and community belonging.
The fellowship reflects GGSC’s commitment to supporting journalism that moves beyond conflict alone to illuminate people’s values, lived experiences, and shared concerns. By highlighting stories of connection alongside disagreement, these projects aim to help Coloradans better understand one another and explore what it takes to build trust and belonging across communities.
In addition to financial support, fellows will participate in a learning community that includes an in-person convening, peer exchange, and opportunities to engage with bridging and belonging researchers and practitioners.
Below is more information about each fellow and their project.
Addison Herron-Wheeler, OUT FRONT Magazine
Unlikely Accomplices
Unlikely Accomplices is a powerful three-part editorial series for OUT FRONT Magazine (OFM) that challenges the “culture war” narrative by spotlighting unexpected advocates for the transgender community. Through long-form, personal profiles, the project features religious leaders, military parents, and rural neighbors who have moved from traditional backgrounds to become fierce allies for their trans friends and family.
By elevating these diverse voices, Unlikely Accomplices provides a roadmap for empathy, fosters cross-community dialogue, and proves that support for trans rights isn’t partisan—It’s human. This project will show how people often break from the labels and boxes we are put in, whether gender identity or political identity. Rather than the black-and-white, us-versus-them mentality pushed by mainstream news media outlets, this will take a nuanced look at the humanity behind the community.
Alan Domínguez, PBS12
Between Silence and Healing: Colorado Latine Voices Across Generations
Through intimate documentary storytelling, this film explores how Latine men across Colorado navigate inherited expectations of silence, endurance, and emotional control while confronting growing conversations around mental health and healing. Centered on healing circles and peer support spaces, the project captures moments of vulnerability, trust-building, and connection. This documentary will highlight how men are redefining strength, belonging, and emotional expression across generations.
Alexis Kikoen, Rocky Mountain Public Media
Between Two Worlds
Between Two Worlds is a visually inventive short-form documentary four-part series exploring what it means to live in the in-between. Each episode profiles a Coloradan navigating dual identities, cultures, or ways of life that don’t always align—whether shaped by interfaith upbringings, bilingual and bicultural experiences, or fluid identities. These stories embrace tension, contradiction, and moments of unexpected harmony. Rather than treating identity as something to resolve, the series invites audiences to sit in the gray space, reframing it not as conflict, but as a place of possibility.
Amy Hadden Marsh, The Sopris Sun/Sol del Valle
Will Colorado’s Grey Wolf Reintroduction Program Survive: Bridging Ideological Divides
In Colorado, wolves are the symbol of a power struggle between ranchers or livestock owners and those whose values reflect a different way of managing wildlife and habitat. This issue represents perhaps the beginning of the downfall of the livestock producers’ power control in the West, including control of government influence, control of public land and public land management and control of wild and domestic animals on the land. In 2020, Colorado voters approved Proposition 114, calling for reintroduction of Gray wolves, setting up a conflict between ranchers and wolf proponents. This three-part series will provide the history and values of both sides to open up a pathway to understanding.
Christi Bode, Moxiecran Media
Our Shared Current - Water, People, and Place in Southwest Colorado
In a time of Western water system collapse, competition breeds conflict – and connection builds consideration. Our Shared Current is a three-part video series exploring human relationships to the region’s waterways in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Beginning in the snowy San Juan peaks and winding through the communities that rely on them, each episode is a stop along the river’s path. These stories of unexpected similarities go beyond traditional boundaries and competing demands. In collaboration with the Local News Network, this series returns to our neighborly roots through the veins of a shared river.
Elaine Tassy, Colorado Public Radio
How Forms of Creativity Build Bridges Across Cultures
Connectivity is often fostered through creativity, commonality, connection building through identity. My three-part project will seek to discover and explore some forms of artistic, cultural and identity-oriented spaces and interactions where connections are made where it would not otherwise exist.
Emma VandenEinde, KUNC
Neighbors: Finding Common Ground Where Communities and Industry Overlap
Industrialization on the Front Range–specifically airports, data centers and renewable energy developments–have become controversial topics for community members, with residents and stakeholders voicing strong opinions on both sides. Through fact-based reporting that focuses on lived experience, we will encourage communities to think more deeply about the other side’s opinion. These three stories will be published on radio, social, and digital platforms. We will also hold engagement events on those reporting topics. These will be produced through local partnerships and workshops aimed at deepening understanding across differences.
Gregory Howell, Pueblo Star Journal
MoJo Bridges
MoJo Bridges is a community-centered 22-part storytelling initiative from the Pueblo Star Journal that trains local mobile journalists to document stories of connection across political, cultural, economic, generational, intergenerational, and multigenerational divides in Southern Colorado. Through video reporting, podcasts, print features, social media storytelling, and live community conversations, the project will highlight how residents of different ages, backgrounds, and lived experiences build trust, navigate differences, and work toward shared solutions. The initiative combines journalism, civic engagement, and bridge-building practices to strengthen belonging, foster intergenerational understanding, and amplify underrepresented voices.
Kristan Uhlenbrock, Denver Museum of Nature and Science
The Easement: Building Colorado’s Electric Grid Across Divided Land
You flip a switch. The lights come on. Somewhere, someone’s land made that possible. And sometimes, they didn’t get much say. Transmission lines are essential to our clean energy future, but how they get built cuts across political, socioeconomic, and geographic divisions. From the perspectives of farmers, government officials, environmentalists, utility engineers, communities, and others, we will unpack the story of shared infrastructure, competing values, and how we build a future together. The Easement is an eight-part narrative, nonfiction podcast series produced by the Institute for Science & Policy at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, as part of our award-winning Laws of Notion podcast, where we push against our preconceived beliefs and think critically about the world around us.
Mike Shum, Mike Shum Productions
Colorado Voices
Colorado Voices is a documentary project following six Coloradans whose lives sit on different sides of the state’s deepest divides. Each subject is filmed in their own place–homes, workplaces, churches, town squares–so audiences can encounter not just their views but the families, losses, faiths, and inheritances that shaped them. Six short documentary portraits are released over the year, anchored in geographies that hold Colorado’s tensions most visibly: Aurora and northeast Denver; the San Luis Valley; the Eastern Plains; the Western Slope or a mountain town; and either Pueblo or Colorado Springs. The portraits then lead to three live events held in different parts of the state. Each event brings audiences from one Colorado region into a room with portraits from another, watching the work together and then talking. The geography of separation becomes the geography of contact.
Regan Tuttle, San Miguel Basin Forum
The Water Table
The Water Table will feature three Jeffersonian dinners—a structured format where attendees participate in a guided conversation around a single table—to bring together community members with differing perspectives to discuss water and drought. These dinners will take place across the Montrose-West End, Telluride-West End, and West End-West End communities. The project will include preview stories, feature stories, and follow-up stories, produced through a media collaboration with local radio and surrounding news outlets.
Tracy Ross, The Colorado Sun
Pack Mentality- What wolves are teaching us about coexistence
Love ’em or hate ’em, wolves have been reintroduced to Colorado by voter mandate 80 years after they were extirpated from the state. But as the reintroduction effort hangs on by a thread, what first appeared to be a wildlife story has revealed itself to be something far larger: a collision between the roughly 50% of residents who chose to bring wolves back and the roughly 50% who didn’t, amid incompatible visions of land, freedom, conservation and the conflict between urban and rural identity politics.
Is there a way forward, and if so, what is it? This project will focus on the hot-button issue of wolves and help bridge the gaps of knowledge, understanding and identity, with some shared experiences, civil conversation and illustrative journalism highlighting each side’s perspective and experience. This work will culminate in four major stories in The Colorado Sun and two podcasts.