In January, following the killing of Renee Good and the Minneapolis protests, Religion News Service (RNS) reporter Jack Jenkins got a tip that he needed to return to Minneapolis to cover a training for more than 600 faith leaders from around the country, led by multimedia nonprofit news outlets.

“He was the only reporter from the mainstream press who was there,” said Director of Editorial Initiatives Pam Kruger. Jenkins covered the conference, which included a mix of activist training, spiritual revival and direct-action protest, and other events in Minneapolis: Clergy looking for ICE and Rt. Rev. Mariann Budde leading protests.

RNS, a member of the Institute for Nonprofit News, was recently awarded $1 million in grants to launch An Atlas of American Belonging, a multimedia nonprofit news hub focused on faith and immigrant communities. This grant, provided by the Henry Luce Foundation, allows RNS to double down on coverage that they are already doing, and really expand and deepen it, said Kruger.

“The Atlas of American Belonging is really about looking at how belonging has been claimed in America over time, how it’s been denied and how it’s been contested. The Atlas will enable people to make connections between stories and see trends that maybe an individual story wouldn’t necessarily point to,” said Kruger.

RNS recently announced that El Paso Matters, also an INN Network Newsroom, will be a partner on this project led by multimedia nonprofit news, said Kruger.

Immigration coverage is a key area for El Paso Matters' multimedia nonprofit news, said Robert Moore, the president and CEO of the newsroom, which covers El Paso, Ciudad Juárez and neighboring communities. Moore said that Religion News Service reached out to him about this partnership, viewing El Paso as an important location to include in its multimedia nonprofit news coverage.

Read the full article about the Religion News Service by Hope Kahn at Institute for Nonprofit News.