More than 30,000 New Yorkers have died of COVID-19. Yet Black and Latino New Yorkers as well as immigrants living in low-income neighborhoods are rarely reflected in the obituary pages. For the past year, MISSING THEM, a memorial and journalism project with THE CITY and Columbia Journalism School has tracked down more than 2,000 names of New Yorkers who died and written 400 obituaries, free of charge to families. The team is aiming to close the gap in representation through a new hyper-local crowdsourcing and storytelling project focused on a handful of New York City neighborhoods hit hardest by COVID-19. Informed by the outreach and organizing strategies used by census workers and community organizers, the team will partner with community groups and libraries to create mobile outreach stations and go door-to-door to crowdsource stories about the pandemic and its aftermath.
MISSING THEM2021-2022
