T-Squared: Meet the newest members of our investigative partnership

When we announced the hiring of five exceptional reporters for The Texas Tribune/ProPublica joint reporting unit last month, we told you we were just getting started.

Now we are excited to introduce four more members of that partnership.

Engagement reporter Sally Beauvais, research reporter Lexi Churchill, data reporter Ren Larson and development lead Jenny Ajluni will join our investigative effort.

The dream team, aka #TeamTexas, keeps growing.

Thanks to the newest members of our team, we will be better situated to work with and learn from our Texas communities. We will be even more focused on mining public records. We will better positioned to analyze data in our reporting. And we'll have a fierce devotion to finding support for this important journalism. Yet again, another example of our investment in quality journalism for the greater good.

Here's a closer look at the newest members of this partnership:

Sally Beauvais is coming to us from Marfa Public Radio. As the station’s engagement reporter, she launched West Texas Wonders — which started with a road trip across the vast area her station broadcasts to. She introduced a quarterly town hall series with her community. She also worked for years with students at Marfa ISD to produce radio stories about their lives and issues that matter to them. Sally won a national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2019 for her community-sourced reporting about the lack of health care resources for seniors in Far West Texas.

Lexi Churchill was most recently a Scripps Howard research fellow at ProPublica, where she published an investigation exposing how the Trump administration’s quick and quiet crackdown on Idaho’s Medicaid procedures created new red tape that kept children with special needs and the state’s poorest residents from maintaining insurance. She also led reporting efforts for the “Sins of Omission” project and has been involved in ProPublica's coronavirus coverage over the last few weeks. Before joining ProPublica, Lexi interned at several organizations, including CNBC and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Ren Larson comes to the team from The Arizona Republic, where she reported on elections, immigration, environmental contamination and wildfires. Her 2019 project "Ahead of the Fire," which analyzed about 5,000 Western communities for wildfire hazard and human vulnerabilities, won a 2019 EPPY award for innovation from Editor & Publisher magazine and was a finalist for the Philip Meyer Award. Prior to entering journalism, she worked as a city planner, a case manager and a data analyst.

Jenny Aljuni will take the lead on the fundraising for the project as senior development officer, traveling around Texas to secure support for investigative reporting. Jenny first joined The Texas Tribune as development officer in 2018, and thanks to her efforts, the Circle Membership program and major gifts program have grown significantly. Before joining the Tribune in June 2018, she worked in politics at the statewide and national levels.

Like the five reporters we announced last month, these team members will be taking on their new roles by the end of March. Let's give them a big shout-out!