It’s been something of a breakthrough year for Deceleration. After eight years producing free environmental justice news and analysis for the community on the side of jobs, kids, and life, 2024 was the year we finally managed to wrangle the funds needed for two editorial staff able to give the project our full attention.
The tidal shift came this past spring when we were included in New Media Venture’s Latine Voices for Democracy accelerator program, alongside support from the HIVE Fund for Climate & Gender Justice, Jacob and Terese Hershey Foundation, Press Forward, Local Independent Online News (LION), the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN)—as well as ongoing small-dollar reader support which has been so critical. So much thanks to all of you who believe in the work that we do.
JUMP TO SURVEY!
This expanded capacity allowed us to finally do basic things critical to our sustainability as an organization:
- We overhauled our website in preparation for accepting advertising in 2025.
- We found a grant writer to stay in the hunt for foundation support.
- We even got a bookkeeper.
Most importantly, we expanded and deepened our coverage—producing 56 original stories, 4 podcasts, 13 video stories, 3 live community forums, and 4 resource guides. We co-produced stories with Truthout and had our original stories republished in the San Antonio Current, the Texas Observer, Esperanza Project, Texas Signal, Resilience, Monthly Review, and La Voz de Esperanza.
This year we’ve been fiercely proud to publish a number of talented writers reporting on environmental justice concerns across South Texas and beyond—from Space X in the Rio Grande Valley to EJ candidate slates in Cancer Alley, and from buffalo restoration in the sacred Black Hills of Hé Sapa to encampments for Palestine at UT Austin. We’ve continued to provide critical coverage on extreme heat and the underreporting of heat deaths in Texas, highlighting (again) deaths that came very close to home.
We sent a media team to Lakota Dakota Nakota Nation to report back on WILD12, an international wilderness conservation conference hosted for the first time by a tribal authority. Locally, we’ve followed Indigenous-led efforts to protect migratory birds in San Antonio’s public parks. Pre- and post-election, we have increasingly published on anti-democratic, white nationalist, and Christofascist movements as these intersect with environmental and climate issues—but also as they threaten the lives of our most vulnerable friends and family.
In addition, we co-organized community conversations about extreme heat and the extractions of global capital. With the help of youth organizers from SWU, we produced and distributed 2,500 extreme heat survival doorhangers to our neighbors. We produced guides on how to recognize common forms of climate denial and anti-trans disinfo. We documented and archived the grassroots intellectual labor of the People’s University for Palestine. Always and throughout, we are listening hard for stories about community-level solutions that go unrecognized and underappreciated—the barrio ecologies from which new ways of thinking, doing, and being are spun.
As we prepare ourselves for 2025, we humbly ask our readers for help in two key ways.
1. FILL OUT OUR SURVEY!
Let us know how you engage with Deceleration and what you’d like us to cover in the year to come. Click above to share your thoughts on how we can better serve as a resource to the communities we care about—especially those we anticipate will be most targeted under the incoming administration.
Those who fill out the survey before January 15, 2025, will be entered in a raffle for a chance to win a print of Greg Harman’s photo of a black swallowtail (16″ x 24″ Canson Rag Photographique paper), as archived on his new emerge.photos photography website.
2. BECOME A MONTHLY SUPPORTER
If you value the work of grassroots media and have the means, consider becoming a monthly Deceleration supporter or one-time donor.
As authoritarian threats against nonprofits, journalists, writers, and activists rise in pitch and furor, your direct support will become more critical than ever. Although our ability to secure grants has gotten us to the point of being able to hire a third full-time staff member, we are dangerously dependent on grant support for more than 90 percent of our operational budget. In 2025 we have to increase support from advertisers and our community supporters. Paid supporters in 2025 will gain access to special events and other exclusive content.
