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MAKING A DIFFERENCE

The methodology was simple and transparent. In Unforgotten 51, a year-long investigative undertaking assigned by Fountain and that grew out of his years as a Chicago crime reporter and decades of humanizing those too often dehumanized, the project sought to tell the personal stories of murder victims previously categorized by police as prostitutes and drug addicts. Under Fountain’s guidance, student-journalists spent countless hours—sometimes on Saturdays— searching for the families of victims using databases and traditional tough shoe-leather reporting as many of the cases dated back 15 to 20 years. Fountain was able to secure from a high-ranking unnamed police source a file containing the names and addresses of last known next of kin, which became a working base for potential sources, but was outdated in many instances as many of those listed no longer resided at those addresses. 


The fact that most of the cases of the 51 were not covered by local news media further made identifying sources akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Yet the team, under Fountain’s leadership, persisted, even through cancellation of in-person classes due to COVID-19 and a national firestorm of protests amid a racial reckoning after the George Floyd killing. The Unforgotten team investigated the lives of the victims, contacted loved ones, conducted extensive interviews, collected images, and created online multimedia portraits of the women whose families we were able to reach. Their main point: These are human beings, they were beloved, and there is power in the telling of their story. Indeed their project was arguably the first news media effort to definitively put a face on the case and to dub it the “Unforgotten 51.”


The Unforgotten 51 project, in addition to being published independently online, was featured in Fountain's Chicago Sun-Times column since 2020, reaching the Chicago metropolitan area in print and a larger regional and national audience online. The project gained regional and national traction with other outlets, garnering a cover story by Chicago’s WGN News. The effort was noted by the Columbia Journalism Review, spotlighted by People magazine, Oxygen, the Poynter Institute, the Global Investigative Journalism Network, Politico, The Grio, the Chicago Crusader newspaper, the Chicago Popo Report, WVON radio’s “Talk of Chicago,” and The Final Call, creating a buzz in other news media outlets and within Black Chicago and beyond. Writes Barbara Allen, of the Poynter Institute: “Thanks to the Global Investigative Journalism Network, last week I read “Unforgotten”: Student Journalists Capture the Stories of 51 Women Slain in Chicago. …I love seeing students this invested in a topic and bringing light to tragedies that are too often overlooked by mainstream media.” 


To date, the website has been viewed by more than 100,000 site visitors from more than 19 countries while collectively the independent digital projects Fountain has produced have been viewed, according to the websites’ analytics, by more than 300,000, not including the potential thousands more who have viewed projects, videos and podcasts for which analytics either are not readily available or have not yet been computed. Furthermore, countless others have read stories and columns in print and other publications stemming from these projects. Still, numbers don’t tell the whole story. For how can one truly measure the impact of the solace and hope brought to families of murder victims whose stories until the Unforgotten 51 project had long been forgotten?

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About Us

FountainWorks is an independent journalism and media not-for-profit dedicated to telling the untold stories of marginalized and underserved African-American communities in Chicago and its mostly Black suburbs. Unforgotten Bureau (for Social Justice Journalism) and 50 Cent A Word are branches of FountainWorks NFP

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