10 Student Stories We Loved in 2025

There are some stories that only young people can tell, new angles and fresh takes that new voices bring to the media landscape. In 2025, hundreds of students worked on projects with Student Reporting Labs.  To wrap the year, we’re highlighting ten stories where student journalists used their curiosity and personal reporting style to amplify efforts to protect the planet, to protect targeted communities, and spotlight artists whose work inspires.  

Cheers to all of the students actively using their voices to sow unity, identify problems and encourage solutions! Your contributions are crucial, and we can’t wait to see what you uncover in 2026!

 

1. Family reflects on 1950s deportation effort

Santiago Campos

Santiago Campos took us to a parallel moment in history, exploring how Eisenhower’s 1950’s mass-deportation policies instilled fear in Mexican families for generations to come. Santiago’s grandparents were among those US citizens deported to Mexico, and his great-grandmother was pressured into becoming an informant for US Border Patrol in exchange for naturalization.

 

2. One family’s fight for their Black-owned farm

Alessandro De Palma, Annalise Huang, and Janey Mitchell

Black ancestral land ownership is rare, particularly in the South. Upon the 100th anniversary of her family farm, Cameron Oglesby embarks on a storytelling project to preserve the rare history of her inherited land and shine a light on how communities fight environmental injustice. The Oglesbys’ land ownership was not without challenge – they faced financial struggles to maintain the farm and incursion by those hoping to build prisons near their land.

“That’s that generational wealth, man.”

 

3. The Battle to Save Maryland’s Longest River

Tomas Rubio, Chaeeun Yoo, and Kyra Svab

Likening himself to Huck Finn, Fred Tutman grew up building rafts and catching fish on the Patuxent River, Maryland’s longest and deepest river. As the Patuxent’s first Black Riverkeeper, Tutman passes down the mentorship that shaped his life through a summer camp that teaches outdoor skills, community activism, and the joys of just being in the water.

“What people experience in the environment is unique to their social orientation, and that’s where we have to integrate these movements. These movements are dying for more participation from people of color.” 

 

4. Artist Diary: How Brett Park Expresses Queer Sexuality Through Creation

Chaeeun Yoo

Growing up in the tech-oriented mindset of the San Francisco Bay area can feel stifling to kids seeking more nontraditional outlets. 23-year-old transdisciplinary artist Brett Park’s outlet became his sketchbook, and from it his queer expression grew into the real-world. His work personifies and satirizes the gaze placed on him as a queer Asian creative.

5. Kumeyaay Nation tries to save its dying language

Sarah Youssef

Of the over 4000 Kumeyaay members in California, only 30 are fluent speakers of the language. Mandy Curo, daughter of the only Kumeyaay native speaker on the Barona reservation, seeks to undo the erasure caused by forced-assimilation. Her work at the Barona Cultural Center uses cultural exchange as a means of preservation, inviting visitors to learn the native language and keep it alive.

 

6. Bringing Los Angeles’ Spanish-speaking community into climate conversations

Jose Guzman-Wug, Roury Fitzpatrick, and Cole Monzon

Mayte Abrica’s passion for environmental work was fueled by her family’s struggles to access clean water in Central Mexico. Now a student at the University of Southern California, she co-founded the Sustainability sin Fronteras newsletter, which serves LA’s Latino community with Spanish climate articles and professional development opportunities. The newsletter plugs local hands-on opportunities, like those organized by wildlife biologist Miguel Ordeñana, whose community science initiatives introduce LA residents of all ages to wildlife in the city.

 

7. Inside the 50-Year Time Capsule That Will Change Humanity Forever

Diarra Gangazha, Alia Soliman, and Jayden Hall

This story passes the mic to Americans young and old at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. This summer, the museum featured a 28-foot mural that invited attendees to write their wishes for the future, to be stored in a time capsule until 2075. Among hundreds of responses, participants wished for others to gain the confidence to be bold, that the US become a model for equality, and not least of all, for world peace. 

“What I love about this wall is that we have so much more in common with one another than we actually think we do, right? We want safe schools. We want a clean, beautiful country and society.”

 

8. Edible Stories Market Garden

Sandeep Brijesh and Deeksha Easwar

The Edibles Stories Market Garden in Hillsboro, Oregon grows vegetables used in South Asian cooking. Lakshmi Tata was motivated to teach children the power of growing their own food, and over time, her family’s garden has become a place for Hillsboro’s Desi community to connect with their heritage and each other.

 

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9. Voices across cultures: Viet Thanh Nguyen and the teen search for belonging

Khadeejah Khan

Khadeejah Khan connects with author Viet Thanh Nguyen about the duality in their respective Muslim-American and Vietnamese-American identities, noting how the US government has used those feelings of cultural divide to recruit spies in times of war. Instead of protecting inaccurate images of their histories, Thanh Nguyen implores artists to grapple with the uglier inner conflicts to strengthen their communities and not repeat the past. 

“We don’t have a unified Asian American community, we don’t have a unified American nation. That’s deeply uncomfortable for a lot of us. If we want to try to ameliorate those conditions, our task as writers is to struggle with the very human nature that produces those fractures.”

 

10. Gold Mountain Dreams: A Chinese Herbalist Story in California

Samantha Yee

Dr. Yee Fong Chung immigrated to California in 1951 after the Taiping rebellion. Samantha Yee speaks with her family to trace her lineage back to his departure from Canton, and traces the origins of anti-Asian sentiments in the US to violent pushback against Asian-immigrants joining the workforce.