We received more than 170 stories from parents and providers about Michigan’s child care crisis, many of which included detailed policy proposals. Here are seven of those ideas.

The Transparency Corps experience has been expectedly different for each participant. Efrain Soriano shares lessons learned so far and how it’s shaping how he approaches his work now.

In the late 1980s, an area of the Jurupa Valley in Riverside, California began a transformation that would turn it from a community of sprawling dairy farms to hub for enormous warehouses. David Danelski, then an investigative reporter for the Riverside-Press Enterprise, unraveled the details through public records on town planning and found one important document missing from projects approved by county officials for more than a decade: the environmental impact statement. Here are his tips on this and other key records requests you can file.

NPR’s California Newsroom is collaborating with MuckRock and Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation to investigate how wildfires affect air quality across the country. If the smoke from wildfires is damaging your health, disrupting your daily routine or forcing you to consider moving elsewhere, we want to hear from you.

In a new study, Columbia University researchers have identified coronavirus mutations in New York City wastewater that seem to appear when severe disease rates begin to rise. The findings may pinpoint subtle, understated variants in the pandemic that are affecting day-to-day outcomes, including hospitalization and death, without doctors noticing.

Freelance journalist Monica Vaughan was reporting on air pollution in California’s San Joaquin Valley when the words of one mother changed her perspective. “I just scan the stories looking for the sentence about whether or not it’s safe to live here. And I can never find that,” Vaughan remembered the woman saying.

In a second guide on air pollution, we bring together advice from reporters like Vaughan and examples that might help you uncover unsafe air in your community. From intial complaints to sustained violations, we give you the tools to ask your local government how it regulates polluters in your area