Lucy Grindon reports on low-income rural communities for North Country Public Radio in northern New York state. A recent graduate of Columbia University, she holds a master’s degree from the School of Journalism, where she covered education for Uptown Radio, documented responses to the war in Ukraine at Ukrainian Orthodox churches, and produced written and audio stories on local news, music and food. Grindon has worked for Commonweal magazine and her reporting for the National Catholic Reporter won a Catholic Press Award for best reporting of social justice issues. At Middlebury College, she studied history and Arabic, reported for The Middlebury Campus and was an opinion editor, and hosted two radio shows.
Beat: Low-income families in rural northern New York communities
In the rural Adirondack-North Country region of northern New York, nearly one out of every five families live below the federal poverty level, often in isolated, extremely rural pockets with limited or no access to high-speed internet. This beat uses NCPR's proven framework for engaging the community, via the texting-based platform GroundSource. The reporter also builds contacts and trust using social media and by attending church suppers, demolition derbies and medical care fundraisers, meeting low-income people where they are, listening to what matters to them, and telling compelling stories that can influence policy.