Nonprofit aims to shine light on urgent issues in New Mexico.
When the Santa Fe-based nonprofit online news organization Searchlight New Mexico began its first big project about six months ago — what’s expected to be a yearlong series of stories examining the well-being of children in the state — reporters were surprised and disappointed to discover a crisis that has, in many ways, worsened in the last three decades.
The decline came after an eyeopening 1987 report, Kids in Crisis, drew widespread concern and even outrage about the dire effects of child poverty in the state and seemed to set the stage for a turnaround.
Since then, however, the rate of New Mexico children living in poverty has grown, and the state for years has been stuck at 49th or 50th in the nation in educational achievement and other measures of child well-being.
“It just didn’t seem to make sense,” said Searchlight Executive Editor Sara Solovitch.
Founded in 2017 by Ray Rivera, then editor of The Santa Fe New Mexican, the organization is working in partnership with The New Mexican and other news organizations this week to launch its inaugural series, “Raising New Mexico,” which aims to identify the factors holding the state back when it comes to improving children’s lives and to engage the community in searching for solutions.
“We really want to make a big difference,” said Solovitch, a longtime journalist who moved to Santa Fe from Santa Cruz, Calif., last year to join the organization. “We’re very ambitious. We want to have an influence on the 2018 election cycle. We want to make child well-being the issue of the day.”
Coming Monday, “Raising New Mexico” takes a close look at early education and the lifelong effects of childhood trauma.
Next week, said Searchlight Executive Director Susan Boe, the organization will release a database of two decades’ worth of proposed legislation on child welfare and will analyze the issues that have impeded such policy changes from moving forward.
In later stories, Searchlight will explore the significance of national rankings and the economic costs of a troubled education system.
“As we go along,” Boe said, “we will look at models that are working.”
Boe, a journalist-turned-attorney who taught media law at The University of New Mexico and is a former director of the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, said Searchlight has a staff of seven and operates on an annual budget of about $600,000.
It is funded primarily through private donations and grants from the Thornburg Foundation, the McCune Charitable Foundation, the Knight Foundation, Con Alma Health Foundation, the Brindle Foundation and the LANL Foundation.
In a climate that has become increasingly difficult for profit-based traditional media, the nonprofit’s goal is to work in collaboration with newspapers, radio stations and TV networks throughout the state to offer deeper coverage of key issues — beginning with child welfare, which it considered the most urgent.
“The reality of journalism … is that we don’t have the resources to devote weeks and weeks to a story,” Boe said. And so we’re hoping to fill in that gap.”