Yvette Cabrera spoke to NPF’s Widening the Pipeline fellows March 27, 2023 on “Advancing Advocacy for Hispanic Journalists.”

Yvette Cabrera is a senior reporter at the Center for Public Integrity covering inequality in economic and social well-being, including environmental justice issues. Most recently she worked as an environmental justice reporter for Grist & HuffPost, and as an investigative reporter for ThinkProgress in Washington, D.C. She 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 country.

She has reported extensively on the pervasiveness of toxic lead contamination across the country. This work includes Ghosts of Polluters Past, a Grist investigation on the legacy of industrial lead pollution in urban residential neighborhoods as a 2019 McGraw Center for Business Journalism fellow, as well as a five-part investigative series for ThinkProgress where she showed through soil testing how lead exposure is still harming children in complex ways.

Ghosts of Polluters Past won a 2023 Sigma Award for Data Journalism, and a 2022 Breaking Barriers Award from the Institute for Nonprofit News, awarded annually for “reporting that brought new understanding to an issue affecting people who are historically underrepresented, disadvantaged or marginalized, resulting in impactful change.” She is a 2022 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center practitioner and is creating a journalist guide for reporting on soil lead contamination as her project.

She currently serves as president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists; and for two decades served as a board member of CCNMA: Latino Journalists of California, the oldest regional organization of journalists of color in the country. Yvette was born and raised in California, and is the proud daughter of Mexican immigrants who taught her the importance of speaking up to address wrongdoing.