Friendships are finally getting their due. Once relegated to a distant third position after life partners and children, a spate of new books are spotlighting the importance of friends. And research shows that people with close friends are healthier – both emotionally...
Purpose Prize
The Latest from CoGenerate
An Intergenerational Approach to Getting Families Housed in Santa Barbara
Lyiam Galo is the co-director of Generations United for Service, a program of the Northern Santa Barbara County United Way and one of 10 awardees of the CoGen Challenge to Advance Economic Opportunity. Watch for interviews with all 10 of these innovators bringing...
Utilizing Faith-Owned Land to Strengthen Intergenerational Community in Seattle
E.N. West is the co-founder and lead organizer of the Faith Land Initiative of the Church Council of Greater Seattle, one of 10 awardees of the CoGen Challenge to Advance Economic Opportunity. Watch for interviews with all 10 of these innovators bringing older and...
*
Bill Ristow and Theresa Morrow Ristow
Ristow and Morrow train journalists in emerging democracies in the skills they need to fulfill their essential role as independent watchdogs for the people.
After decades working as journalists in Seattle, husband and wife Bill Ristow and Theresa Morrow were looking for a new purpose. Their five children were grown, and their parents had passed away.
“For the first time in our lives, we didn’t have responsibilities to determine our future,” Ristow says. “We began to look for opportunities that would allow us to pass on the knowledge we had accumulated, most of it in journalism.”
As a result, in 2007 the two launched a joint encore career training journalists in Uganda. Funded by an Knight International Journalism Fellowship, for nine months Ristow trained the staff of the Kampala daily New Vision and three local weeklies in the essentials of reporting, writing, and editing.
Since then, the two have trained more than 1,000 journalists in Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Ukraine from editors in chief of major daily newspapers to freelance journalists in remote rural villages who make less than $2 for a story. While the journalism-school basics are important, the couple says the foundation of their training is independent thinking, and persuading these journalists to write to the electorate, not to the political candidates, to their readers, not to government officials.
“It has not always been easy. We have lived in places with scorpions in the bathtub and missed major events in the lives of our children and grandchildren,” Ristow says of their encore calling. “But when we read honest stories about what a poor farmer with no shoes thinks about an upcoming election in Tamale, or what an illiterate woman in Lira has to say about how the government cheated her out of medicine for her children, we know we have made the right choice.”