Thanks to our generous donors, hundreds more elementary and middle school students have received Healthy NewsWorks health education and media literacy programming over the past three years since we launched our Building a Healthy Future Campaign.
Over 2,200 students participated in one of our three programs during the 2025-26—up from 1,433 the year before our campaign started. During this time span, our reporters created 127 school health newspapers, six community magazines, and more than 30 videos.
They have collectively interviewed scores of experts, from school counselors to doctors, artists, and therapists. They even spoke with a former deputy director of the U.S. Secret Service, a Philadelphia Union soccer star, and a former Philadelphia poet laureate.
Their reporting experiences teach them a lot about themselves and the world around them. One fifth grader this year listed some of the topics that stuck with her: “empathy, food, humor, art, volunteering, anxiety, bullying, plagiarism, and direct quotes.”
A seventh-grade reporter said she learned “to have patience, how to write properly and professionally, and facts about topics.”
They also put their reporting experience to use outside their classroom newsrooms. “After hearing about volunteering, I decided to start volunteering at a nonprofit animal shelter,” wrote a seventh grader. Another wrote he “learned about how to work well in a team. I have used this in different school projects with my friends and in a group.”
Our donors also have helped us expand to new schools, not only in Philadelphia but in South Jersey and in the city of Chester. We partnered with classroom teachers to deliver our flagship Core Reporter program in 22 schools during 2025-26, six more schools than the year prior to the campaign.
To accomplish all this, we used Building a Healthy Future contributions to add three new positions to our staff, including a full-time chief of staff, a part-time teacher associate, and a part-time communications associate. We’ve also continued to revise and build out our curriculum, adding new reporting themes like decision-making and enriching older ones like healing.
We’ve developed Family Engagement Workshops for schools, tapping into our curriculum to generate interactive sessions on healthy snacking, stress reduction, and social media management. These sessions support educational goals of engaging caregivers in their students’ learning.
Other highlights include:
- Starting a volunteer editing corps to review student articles and provide feedback;
- Teaching facilitation skills to a small group of students so they can manage a discussion with adults at our new Healthy Conversations event.
- Improving our internal systems such as updating our website, strengthening our cybersecurity protections, and updating our staff policies.
THANK YOU to everyone who has contributed to our Building a Healthy Future Campaign. Your support has made a meaningful difference in our ability to refine and amplify our unique health journalism program and deliver it to a broad cross-section of student reporters.
Illustration by Aloe, 5th grade, Cramp, 2025-26.
