By: Rose Schnabel |Report for America Corps Member
Resilient Florida was created to provide funding to help communities prepare for the impacts of more frequent and severe flooding, but not all who are at risk get the help they need.
-Ethan Magoc
“It was so heartening to see the Investigative Editor Corps as a whole, and Mc Nelly Torres in particular, take Rose Schnabel under her wing for many months in a row as part of our partnership with Report for America. Collectively, they helped to see this project from idea stage, through the reporting and legal hurdles, all the way to the publication finish line. Mc Nelly brought to bear her decades of reporting and editing experience, with a particular Florida-based expertise, to ensure the project was fair, told a compelling story and hit all the key public points of interest that the topic deserved. We will always be grateful at WUFT for IEC’s partnership and interest in our Report for America corps member’s success.”
Director, Innovation News Center and WUFT News
College of Journalism and Communications
University of Florida
Editor: Mc Nelly Torres
Mc Nelly Torres is an award-winning investigative journalist and editor, currently serving as interim editor at Investigate Midwest. As an editor at the Center for Public Integrity where she led an award-winning team investigating inequality, Torres was part of a team that produced 40 Acres and a Lie, a groundbreaking investigation about the government’s failed promise of land to formerly enslaved people that was a 2025 Pulitzer Prize finalist for explanatory reporting. This project was the result of a collaboration between Public Integrity, Reveal and Mother Jones and has been honored with multiple awards including a 2025 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award, Philip Meyer Journalism Award, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Awards, Global Investigative Journalism Network Sigma Award and a national Edward R. Murrow award. She previously worked as an investigative producer for NBC6 in Miami. In 2010, Torres co-founded Florida Center for Investigative Reporting. Her consumer stories at the Florida Sun-Sentinel won state, regional and national awards and led to the arrest of a bad contractor. Torres has earned over two dozen awards throughout her career, including an Emmy for her work at NBC, national and regional Edward R. Murrow Awards, a Gracie award, and several awards from organizations such as the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Education Writers Association and the Society of Professional Journalists, among others. She was inducted in NAHJ’s Hall of Fame in 2018. She’s currently serving on the board of directors of the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting and the advisory board of Investigative Editing Corps. Torres was a recipient of the Gwen Ifill Award in 2022.
Top image: Hurricane Irma flooded the Santa Fe River in 2017, causing damage to inland communities in North Central Florida. (Courtesy of Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission/Tim Donovan)