Fuller is the global newsroom dedicated to groundbreaking reporting that catalyzes positive change for women and gender-diverse people
Our Story began in 2015 with a clear goal: to change how the world sees and reports on women. Today, Fuller is a global newsroom producing reporting that drives real change for women and gender-diverse people.
Our Story
Fuller is the global newsroom dedicated to groundbreaking reporting that catalyzes positive change for women and gender-diverse people
Impact
Global Repercussions of Exploitation in Sugar Farms
A joint investigation with The New York Times exposed the systematic exploitation of women sugarcane harvesters in India — documenting forced labor, child marriage, and unnecessary hysterectomies driven by corrupt officials and powerful sugar
"We Can Finally Exhale"
For years, women first responders and survivors of the September 11 attacks were excluded from federal health care and compensation programs — their illnesses undocumented, their suffering unrecognized. Fuller's reporting helped change that. Following our investigation, women left out of 9/11 benefits became eligible for health care and compensation for the first time.
The Algorithm That Ignored Women Veterans
Fuller revealed that a VA suicide prevention algorithm used to protect veterans largely ignored women — despite female veteran suicides rising at four times the rate of men. Following publication, Senate legislation was introduced requiring the VA to overhaul the algorithm, and the VA began incorporating sexual trauma into its risk factors for the first time.
Afghan Women's Voices Under Taliban Rule
In partnership with Rukhshana Media, Fuller has documented the systematic erasure of Afghan women's rights under Taliban rule — including an investigation revealing that women's suicide rates now exceed men's in nine of eleven Afghan provinces, a global anomaly. At a moment when the Taliban has banned health professionals from publishing such data, our reporting creates an invaluable record of what is being lost.
U.S. Blocks Imports Over Forced Labor in Somaliland
Fuller's investigation into a frankincense factory in Somaliland — co-published with The Guardian — uncovered health violations, underpayment, and sexual assault. The U.S. subsequently banned imports from the factory's operator. And the nearly 300 women left jobless by the shutdown didn't stop there — they banded together to form a women-led workers' collective, earning nearly five times their previous wages.
The Fuller Project was co-founded in Istanbul in 2015 by journalist Christina Asquith and Dr. Xanthe Scharff. The organization was founded to address the imbalance in women's voices in coverage of conflict, foreign policy, and international affairs, producing story-driven investigative journalism on and by women for major international outlets. Since its co-founding from Turkey, the newsroom has grown from a grassroots start-up into a global operation, winning multiple recognitions including the Joe and Laurie Dine Award From the Overseas Press Club, multiple One World Media Awards, Covering Climate Now, and others.
Founded, with first story in CNN
2015Established in US and grew global presence.
Additional reporting in The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, and others.
Reporting grew 4x, publishing collaborations 2x.
Published 43 stories and won 4 total awards; front page of TIME; formal partnerships with Foreign Policy and Nation Media Group.
2019Expanded leadership team, reporting and formal partnerships grew 2x.
2020Next chapter of growth, with plans to double team.
Margaret Fuller was a journalist, editor, and women's rights advocate who broke into the male-dominated press not by asking permission, but by proving herself indispensable. When she joined the New York Tribune in 1844, she became the first woman on the staff of a major American newspaper, then went on to report from Europe as a foreign correspondent, covering revolution and upheaval with clarity and fearlessness. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century, considered the first major feminist work published in the United States, argued that women deserved not just rights but full intellectual and moral lives, on their own terms.
A product of the transcendentalist tradition, she believed that clear-eyed, independent thinking was itself a moral act, and she applied that conviction to journalism at a moment when women weren't supposed to have bylines, opinions, or dispatches from war zones.
Fuller takes its name from Margaret Fuller because her conviction still holds: journalism about women's lives, told rigorously and without compromise, changes what the world considers possible. That was radical in 1845. It remains the work today.