Francesca Lyman

Several years ago, with a grant from the Fund, InvestigateWest uncovered a for-profit global thrift store chain headquartered in Washington State that was using marketing to make itself sound like a nonprofit charity in order to encourage people to donate goods it could sell, while revealing that little of its apparent revenue was reaching charities. After that reporting, the state attorney general sued the company, alleging that it used deceptive marketing to make it look like a charity and ...

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Rediscovering the natural world around us during the pandemic

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Francesca Lyman is a Seattle-based investigative journalist and author who writes for magazines and newspapers.

Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson's suit against the largest for profit thrift store in the world alleged alleged that the company used deceptive marketing to make it look like a charity and “downplay its for-profit status.” Now the state Supreme Court is reviewing the case.

The state says the for-profit thrift store chain wrapped itself in ‘a charitable veneer’ and violated consumer protection laws. The company says it’s done nothing wrong.

Within the last decade, state regulators across the country have accused many for-profit secondhand stores of masquerading as charities, using deceptive tactics through advertising, telemarketers, pickup services, donation bins, and dubious charity alliances. In some cases, even minimum-wage salespeople have been caught misleading the consumer in person, perhaps unintentionally.
An upsurge in public complaints about potential consumer deception by for-profit thrift stores led the Minnesota At...

Francesca Lyman is a journalist and author of such books as The Greenhouse Trap: What We're Doing to the Atmosphere and How We Can Slow Global Warming, with World Resources Institute; and a children's book, Inside the Dzanga-Sangha Rain Forest, with the American Museum of Natural History. She wrote the award-winning "Your Environment" column for MSNBC.COM for 7 years, but her environmental reporting goes back to sounding an early alarm on climate change in the 1980s (with a cover illustration...

The hospital where I worked would become the scene of the first known death from coronavirus (COVID-19) in the United States, along with dozens more deaths, in coming days, here, and at other feeder hospitals from rehab centers holding sick and largely elderly patients around the region. What had seemed like a faraway threat across the Pacific Ocean mushroomed quickly across the United States.

Sales of secondhand goods are booming, growing about 3 percent each year, faster than conventional retail. And market researchers project this multibillion-dollar industry will grow exponentially.
This surge in secondhand shopping has opened new opportunities for the public to be misled about how much money for-profit retailers are making off the charities they brag about benefiting, according to grantee Francesca Lyman’s new report for InvestigateWest, co-published by Salon.

My neighborhood, myself. Planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases from fossil fuels have reached record highs. The Seattle Times asked readers in 2020 to share their 'personal climate actions.' My post addressed moving to a new neighborhood, where a compact living arrangement and access to a bike path made a difference in my carbon footprint.

Riding a green Raleigh bicycle, Emily Aune is streaking along the banks of Oregon's Willamette River on a path lined with black cottonwoods and bigleaf maples. She's taking a scenic trail through the city of Eugene's Alton Baker Park, a cyclists' and runners' paradise. But this time, she's not commuting or out cruising for pleasure.

In her maintenance detail for the city's Parks and Open Space Department (POS), she's ditched the usual pickup truck. She's part of its pedaling a posse -- she's riding a bike.

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Overriding global concern around climate change puts it at the top of most environmental journalists' story lists. But climate change's pervasive impacts and deep complexities make it an especially daunting topic to cover. So the Society of Environmental Journalists offers this extensive Climate Change Resource Guide to reporters and editors, especially those newer to the climate change beat, in order to support their coverage of this all-important topic...