Christopher Connelly
Christopher Connelly is a KERA reporter based in Fort Worth. Christopher joined KERA after a year and a half covering the Maryland legislature for WYPR, the NPR member station in Baltimore. Before that, he was a Joan B. Kroc Fellow at NPR – one of three post-graduates who spend a year working as a reporter, show producer and digital producer at network HQ in Washington, D.C.
Christopher is a graduate of Antioch College in Ohio – he got his first taste of public radio there at WYSO – and he earned a master’s in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley. He also has deep Texas roots: He spent summers visiting his grandparents in Fort Worth, and he has multiple aunts, uncles and cousins living there now.
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Car trouble can set off a financial crisis for low-income people. In Dallas, a small nonprofit is trying to help, one automobile repair at a time.
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Payday and auto title loans have cost Texas 2,000 permanent jobs and taken $1.6 billion a year from mostly low-income people who would have otherwise spent the money on goods and services. -
With a state legislative session looming, the Texas Women’s Foundation has identified nearly two dozen policy changes that can help make the lives of women and girls better.
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A new report finds that Texas courts use very different yardsticks to decide who’s poor enough to get a court-appointed lawyer. That patchwork often leaves people without the legal defense in a criminal trial that the Constitution promises.
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The banking industry took in more than $15 billion in overdraft fees in 2019, and just small number of account holders paid the vast majority of those fees.
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The Texas Rent Relief Program will shut down its application portal at 5 p.m. on Friday. Some local governments still have money for rent help, but those funds may soon run out, as well.
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Fighting among Texas officials over mask mandates has created muddled messaging, as the highly contagious delta variant is sending people to the hospital in numbers that rival the worst months of the pandemic.
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When it launched in February, the Texas Rent Relief program struggled to help tenants who'd fallen behind on rent due to the pandemic. In the first six weeks, 72,000 Texans applied and just 250 got help. Mona Ogas was one of the people who fell through the cracks.
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After years in the headlines for suing local law enforcement agencies for violating the civil rights of Black people, Lee Merritt decided this week to try a new approach to justice: Become the state’s top lawyer.
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Children in Texas are facing higher rates of hunger and hardship during the pandemic than children in all but two other states.
