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📻One Big Story📻

Shia here, Director of News Ambassadors. This month, I’m sharing a story about a school district that switched its entire 74-bus fleet to clean energy, reducing local air pollution and environmental damage from diesel use. During the 2024 to 2025 academic year, The Oakland Unified School District became the first in the nation to adopt a 100 percent electric, zero-emissions school bus fleet. The buses, primarily used to transport children with special needs, are also much quieter. The story’s reporter, Mary Catherine O’Connor, completed KALW’s Audio Academy in 2023 and is now KALW’s climate reporter. She joined one of News Ambassadors’ depolarization strategies trainings for KALW, and has done her own prior solutions reporting. We’re thrilled to amplify work by journalists like O’Connor who are layering multiple “level-up “strategies into their craft.

Why I like it: O’Connor’s sound-rich story infuses community members’ voices and a public health and solutions lens in addition to her climate beat. I’m curious to follow developments in this story over time if follow-up air pollution benchmark data capture any measurable impacts from reduced emissions vehicles, especially since local public transportation operator AC Transit has been working on its own parallel zero-emissions bus effort which may add to the air quality impacts from Oakland schools’ fleet making the switch. 

🚌 Fun fact: “Vehicle-to-grid charging” is the term used to mean the ability of a charged electric vehicle’s battery to be used to return stored power back into the community’s power grid during an emergency or power outage! (I had never heard of this before this story!)

Broader context:  According to the World Resource Institute (WRI)’s Electric School Bus Initiative, there are now more than 5,000 electric school buses serving more than 250,000 students across the US and US territories. About 90% of the 500,000 American school buses run on diesel fuel, contributing to climate and health challenges. California is leading efforts to replace diesel fleets with cleaner energy buses nationwide. Federal clean bus incentives previously focused on supporting zero emission fleets but recently shifted to now fund a range of low-emission or hybrid vehicles (including some that still rely on fossil fuels and emit greenhouse gases). WRI says electric school bus use nationwide could save America $1.6 billion in climate and health-related costs associated with diesel buses.

News Ambassadors’ collab with KALW: News Ambassadors has been working with KALW since 2023 (and our most recent Solutions Journalism training for their current Audio Academy cohort took place just this week!) If you are into community participatory media or part of the News Futures community and not familiar with their Audio Academy, check it out! It’s a truly unique model bringing community members into the newsroom to help shape news coverage and get trained to do radio reporting. (Full disclosure: I was a KALW news editor and mentor in the program in 2022 and can attest to the exceptionally supportive experiential learning model).

 📣 Listen to the full KALW audio story here

✨Resource Spotlight✨

We’ve got a cool resource to amplify this month - a revision to a guide some of you may be using already called How to Talk Bridge-y.

PACE updated their “How to Talk Bridge-y” guide, part of their Civic Language Perceptions Project. For those who watched the Citizen University webinar on strengthening civic culture through more compelling stories of “us,” you’ll remember that our PACE colleagues introduced an earlier version of the guide during this event. This version now includes updated 2025 national data looking at how civic language can unite, divide and motivate American Voters across the political spectrum. Download the 2026 How to Talk Bridge-y guide here!

💡 Which training might benefit you — or your newsroom, classroom or fellowship cohort?💡

🧯Depolarization Reporting Strategies Training

As a participant in our depolarization training, you’ll learn how to:

• help a broader range of community members see their perspectives reflected in your writing

• uncover nuances in your community that sometimes get flattened into oversimplified opposing sides

• leave audiences curious to learn more about those who think differently from themselves

• gain confidence interviewing people on different sides of the political aisle

• encourage healthy conflict instead of toxic conflict on locally polarizing issues

• strengthen your community’s social fabric  

 🔎Solutions Journalism Training

As a participant in our solutions journalism training, you’ll learn how to:

• center solutions and human resilience in your reporting

• share useful, rigorous, evidence-based tools that communities can use to respond to challenges

• move away from “fluff”, silver-bullet, hero-worship or advocacy stories and towards evidence-based reporting on how people are responding to social problems

• take away the excuses from local leaders and others who have given up on trying to solve hard challenges... by shining a light on how other communities have attempted to respond, the ways those responses have succeeded or fallen short, and what we can learn from them

Interested in attending a training open to journalists and non-journalists? Fill out our Training Interest Form for Individuals

Interested in a training for a classroom. newsroom or fellowship cohort? Fill out our Group Training Interest Form!

Upcoming Opportunities and Events 📆 

SJN’s free Solutions Journalism trainings and opportunities 

Solutions Journalism Network has FREE monthly Intro to Solutions Journalism trainings, events and other opportunities. (You can check out their Events page and select Trainings any time to see what’s coming up). Next trainings: April 7: Intro to Solutions Journalism Training and May 5: Intro to Solutions Journalism Training, both @ 6pm ET/3 pm PT

>> Register HERE for April 7 training @6pm ET/3 pm PT<<
>> Register HERE for May 5 training @6pm ET/3 pm PT <<

More resources to help people meet our neighbors and strengthen community connections: Ever since learning (via Join or Die movie) that club involvement - from bowling leagues to garden clubs to church choirs - is one of the strongest indicators of a healthy local democracy, we’ve been thinking about resources, institutions and third spaces that help bring people together to meet their neighbors across class, age, race and political lines. In addition to join101.org from the filmmakers themselves, from the folks who run Creative Mornings events: https://creativemornings.com/clubs/browse Select your city to view clubs and events near you. Through creative mornings, we also learned about www.jumpinthejar.org -

Looking for a job in journalism? Check out the March Journalism jobs from Rebecca Aguilar’s Calling All Journalists list!  

Guide to Journalism conferences in 2026
Ready to look ahead to 2026? Check out this overview of the many Journalism conferences planned for 2026!  Solutions Journalism Network has lots of FREE monthly Intro to Solutions Journalism trainings, events and opportunities. Check out their Events page and select Training as the option.  

That’s all we have for this month folks, see you next month!