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Yvette Cabrera

Yvette.Cabrera.300dpi
2026 Nova Media Fellow

Yvette Cabrera is an independent reporter working on long-form investigations focusing on climate and environmental inequities. She has reported extensively on the pervasiveness of toxic lead contamination, including the series “Ghosts of Polluters Past,” an investigation on the legacy of lead pollution in urban residential neighborhoods. She presented a 2024 Ted Talk on solutions to this problem and also created a journalist’s guide for reporting on soil lead contamination through a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center residency. She’s worked at Grist, HuffPost, and most recently as a senior reporter at the Center for Public Integrity. She is immediate past president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and is a founding member of The Uproot Project, a network for environmental journalists of color.

Media Fellowship Project

Examining how climate change affects contaminated lands around the world

Yvette reports at the intersection of justice and equity, examining the impact of systemic disparities, such as environmental pollution and contamination, on marginalized communities throughout the United States. As a 2025-2026 Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT, her reporting on the devastating effects of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation led her to examine the legacy contamination of abandoned mines. From there, she undertook a course of study to better understand the science behind soil contamination processes. As a Nova Media Fellow, Stories of Soil will examine how climate change affects contaminated lands, telling the human story of its global health impacts.

Media Fellow Publications

The Sonic Commons

Reasons to be Cheerful explores how environmental noise impacts our health, and how we can design spaces that sound the way we want them to.

Read More »
Education and Training

  • BA in History, Latin American studies emphasis, Occidental College

Selected Honors
  • National Press Club Journalism Institute’s 2024 Neil and Susan Sheehan Award for Investigative Journalism for work illuminating the long-term impacts of systemic environmental practices  
  • 2023 Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award from Columbia University
  • 2023 national Edward R. Murrow Award
  • 2023 Fetisov Journalism Awards shortlist in Excellence in Environmental Journalism category for “Nuclear buildup sickened his community. Then it caught up with him.” 
  • 2023 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications, Top Prize Science Journalist: Community Coverage category, from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine 
  • 2023 international Sigma Award for Data Journalism
  • 2022 INN Nonprofit News Breaking Barriers Award. 
  • Finalist 2022 ONA Knight Award for Public Service, and Excellence in Social Justice Reporting
Selected Publications

 

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Healing is facilitated through safety, persistence, and trust.

  • Persistence: “People did not simply progress through this sequence and experience healing. The healing journey was a recursive, back and forth process. They found helpers, used the skills/resources that those helpers provided, found other helpers that provided more resources and used those skills and resources. As this process continued, people experienced a gradual amelioration of their suffering. Although many despaired at times, all demonstrated the quality of persistence—they refused to give up.”
  • Safety & Trust: “To connect to helpers, it was essential for people to feel safe in those relationships and able to trust that the person would be a helper and not a barrier to healing. Persons whose wounds included a violation of trust were especially careful about testing the safety of new relationships.”

Resources support us as we heal. They include reframing, responsibility, and positivity. “Making connections enabled participants to acquire and refine resources and skills that were essential in their healing journey. People also brought their own personal strengths to the journey.”

  • Reframing: “A particularly important skill was the ability to reframe—that is to look at suffering through a different lens.” This does NOT mean minimizing trauma or pain, but rather it often means the opposite: understanding what happened was wrong, unfair, or uncontrollable and that we are not to blame for it.
  • Responsibility: While we don’t have control over what happened to us, we are the only ones who can help ourselves heal. “A third essential resource that people acquired or refined was the ability to take an appropriate amount of responsibility for their healing journeys. They participated actively in the process of healing. Once again, some participants already had developed this skill, and some acquired or refined it from their helpers.”
  • Positivity: “Another resource that people acquired or refined during their healing journey was choose to be positive—that is to have some optimism about their situation.” People have varying predispositions to positivity. In the study, positivity was important in helping people heal. This doesn’t mean a toxic positivity, but rather simply finding some good in life and feeling hopeful about our situations.

“Connection to others was an essential part of all the healing journeys.” Humans are social creatures, and even the most introverted of us need close relationships. Friends and family add meaning and value to life and help support us, in good times and bad. 

When we experience relational trauma, relationships can feel scary, but reestablishing safety and trust in relationships is where the healing happens. (To be clear, we do not mean reestablishing safety and trust with abusers, but rather finding other healing relationships.) 

“When safety and trust had been established, people were able to connect with helpers. The nature of the behaviours of helpers that fostered healing ranged from small acts of kindness to unconditional love.”

  • “Moving from being wounded, through suffering to healing, is possible. It is facilitated by developing safe, trusting relationships and by positive reframing that moves through the weight of responsibility to the ability to respond.”
  • “Relationships with health professionals were among these but were not necessarily any more important to the healing journey than other kinds of helpers, which included family members, friends, spirituality and their God, pets, support groups, administrators, case workers and supervisors.”

Healing probably means different things to different people, but one definition that emerged from the study is: “The re-establishment of a sense of integrity and wholeness.” 

Healing was an emergent property that resulted from each individuals’ complex healing journey, a result of bridged connections between resources and relationships. “…they gradually found relief from suffering and began to exhibit emergent characteristics: a sense of hope, self-acceptance, and a desire to help others—the immediate precursors to healing.”

 In varying degrees, “they were able to transcend their suffering and in some sense to flourish.” 

  • Helping Others: We find meaning in helping others. “Understanding that suffering gives the strength and experience to help others in similar situations.”
  • Hope: We begin to have hope that we will not always feel this bad. A Crohn’s patient said, “I think gradually I realized that I was going to feel better. I did have days when I actually didn’t vomit, when I did feel better. And I think gradually I came to believe that maybe I could have a normal life again.”
  • Self-Acceptance: We see our inherent value and understand that we are not to blame for our suffering. A participant living with HIV said, “I’m really proud of myself. I think that now I still want to live. I don’t want to die, and I really love myself a lot. I have a lot of comfort in myself.”

Suffering is the ongoing pain from wounding. 

There is some debate about whether people always experience suffering on the path to healing.

Wounding happens when we experience physical or emotional harm. It can stem from chronic illness or by physical or psychological trauma for which we do not have the tools to cope, or a combination of those factors. 

“The degree and quality of suffering experienced by each individual is framed by contextual factors that include personal characteristics, timing of their initial or ongoing wounding in the developmental life cycle and prior and current relationships.”

Characteristics: How predisposed someone may be to wounding/how many tools and resources someone may have to deal with trauma/illness.

Lifestages: Developmental timing plays an important role in the impact of trauma — young children often do not have the same resources as older adults.

Relationships: Relationships can provide solace and support for those suffering, while lack of healthy relationships can prolong suffering.