We’re proud to announce that Housing Complex — Taproot’s series on what works, what doesn’t, and what can be improved about Edmonton’s housing system — has been named a finalist in the Collaboration of the Year category at the 2025 LION Publishers Sustainability Awards.
UPDATE: We won the award! Read more about that here.
This series would not have been possible without the help of the Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness, nor would this nomination. The Collaboration of the Year award recognizes a local, independent, online news publisher that has “successfully formed a short-term or long-term collaboration with at least one other organization to positively affect their journalistic impact, financial health, and/or operational resilience.”
Partnering with ECOHH allowed Taproot to access funding from the Alberta Real Estate Foundation, making it possible to assign writer Eric Rice and photographer Jordon Hon to capture the stories of 12 people who play various roles in the housing system. Those portraits became the heart of a multi-part series surrounded by explanatory work from Taproot’s editorial team.
We also worked with ECOHH to secure more funds for a well-attended and interactive event to help people further engage with the topic. We are endlessly grateful to ECOHH’s Jim Gurnett for helping us find a way to pursue this project, which would otherwise have been beyond our means. And we are indebted to Eric for not only conducting these interviews with immense empathy and care, but also laying the groundwork to make this collaboration possible.
The awards will be presented on Sept. 3 in St. Louis, MO, during the Independent News Sustainability Summit. Many thanks to LION Publishers for this recognition, and good luck to all of the finalists. Your work is immensely inspiring.
Election brings opportunity for more collaboration
When we embarked on the project that became Housing Complex, we expected housing to be a key election issue, and that assumption has been borne out by the responses so far to our election question: What issues do you care about as you consider who to vote for in the 2025 municipal election, and why?. The answers to this question will inform the survey we’ll be sending to candidates later this summer, and that will form the basis of the voter matching engine that we’ll make available to everyone in the fall. So if you haven’t weighed in yet on the question, please do — the more people we hear from, the better.
We’re happy to have the participation of several election partners to help us increase the breadth and depth of this work. They are using their channels to spread the question, and they’ll continue to engage their communities leading up to the Oct. 20 vote. If you belong to an organization that should be involved, get in touch.
Taproot Publishing 