Francesca Lyman

Book on global warming--Penguin Books

The long-awaited decision sparked a wide range of responses – from exuberant backslapping among the corporation’s top executives and followers on social media to hand-wringing among consumer protection advocates and cries of shock among nonprofit thrift stores. Truth in Advertising (TINA.org), a Madison, Conn., consumer-advocacy nonprofit dedicated to fighting false advertising and deceptive marketing, called the ruling “bad news.”
“This ruling is an insult to all the real, genuine nonprofits...

The journals of the scientists, artists, and filmmakers on expedition to a remote rain forest in Central Africa, home to Baka pygmies, gorillas, elephants and 200 foot trees.

We are thrilled that InvestigateWest has won five awards in the regional NW Excellence in Journalism awards contest, organized by the Society of Professional Journalists Western Washington chapter.

Celebrating independent journalism—and the reporters who make it happen—is important, especially after such a trying year. This journalism is only possible thanks to our supporters like you. To those of you who give, thank you for supporting this critical work. If you’d like to help power independe...

Taking the Nature Cure:

Rediscovering the natural world around us during the pandemic

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

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 ...

Let nature give you a ‘jab in the arm’~
Interactions with the natural world can give you a kind of booster shot, inoculating against the anxiety and trauma brought on by the COVID pandemic.

The Bellevue-based for-profit thrift store chain won a lawsuit over its marketing approach, but nonprofit competitors aren't happy.

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.