Two OSI grantees, Grassroots Leadership and Radio Rookies, have received the prestigious Polk and Peabody journalism awards, respectively.

The radio documentary "Crime Pays: Who's Getting Rich from the Prison Boom," written and produced by JoAnn Mar in collaboration with Grassroots Leadership, a grantee of OSI's U.S. Justice Fund since 2000, won a 2006 George Polk Award, one of the four top journalism awards in the United States. "Crime Pays" is a one-hour program that explores the privatization of the U.S. prison system, taking an in-depth look at the many corporations that have profited greatly from the prison system. The documentary is available for download at www.grassrootsleadership.org.

Grassroots Leadership has been active for over 25 years, working with Southern activists and advocacy organizations to end abuses of justice and the public trust by working to abolish for-profit private prisons.

WNYC/New York Public Radio’s youth journalism program Radio Rookies, a grantee of OSI's Youth Initiatives since 1999, received a George Foster Peabody Award for broadcast excellence in 2005. The program provides teenagers with the tools and training to create radio documentaries about themselves and their communities.

The 2005 Rookie reporters hailed from the Bronx and reported challenging stories about some of the most intimate and vulnerable aspects of their lives. Nineteen-year-old Veralyn Williams, who was born in Sierra Leone, took personal risks to report on her immigration status, despite strong objections from her family. Sixteen-year-old Catalina Puente reported on her romantic obsession with another female student, coming out to her father in the process. And Derrick Hewitt examined his own tendencies towards violence, telling a disturbing yet honest story. All Radio Rookies documentaries can be heard at www.wnyc.org/radiorookies.

Since 1999, WNYC/New York Public Radio has conducted Radio Rookies workshops across New York, in predominantly under-resourced neighborhoods, training young people to produce stories that open windows into worlds rarely represented authentically in the media. Upon completion, the Rookies’ documentaries are broadcast to WNYC’s 1.2 million weekly listeners, usually during the local edition of NPR’s Morning Edition, but also on NPR's All Things Considered and PRI’s This American Life.