In April 2014 we established an important partnership with Latino USA, which airs on 141 NPR stations nationwide, with a wonderful story about a woman who singlehandedly changed the game on the sprawling and complex problem of food waste. Reporter Lisa Morehouse traveled to Nogales, Arizona, to profile Yolanda Soto, who runs Borderlands Food Bank. Soto rescues between 35 and 40 million pounds of safe, edible fruits and vegetables each year that cross the border from Mexico but are rejected by USDA inspectors for largely aesthetic reasons. This food used to get dumped in a landfill, but now Soto sells it to food-relief operations at bargain rates—offering a new model for food re-distribution.

Morehouse’s piece was featured on NPR’s The Salt blog, was picked up by Georgia Public Broadcasting and cited on The Huffington Post’s What’s Working blog. It got more than 800 SoundCloud plays, reached nearly 3,000 journalists—some of whom no doubt followed up with their own stories—and the podcast was downloaded 30,000 times. Who says there’s never any “good” in the news?