Rachel Hamada

Based in Edinburgh, Rachel is a founder and director of Scottish investigative journalism cooperative the Ferret. She has worked as a journalist for over two decades, with a particular interest in social justice and marginalised communities. She is currently leading the Bureau’s Community-Led Investigations pilot project. Before that she led the Bureau's UK health inequality project, investigating deaths in home care, barriers to Covid-19 vaccines for migrant communities and waiting times for vital disability adaptations. She has worked with Bureau Local for around five years, both on editorial and also running the Change the Story project, which looked at reimagining local news with an emphasis on collaboration, inclusion and power building. Rachel was also on the Scottish government working group on public interest journalism, has written about grassroots investigative journalism for Routledge's Investigative Journalism Handbook and has trained for the NUJ on new models of journalism. She is interested in exploring the intersection of journalism, games and theatre, and is currently doing a Masters in Playwriting at the University of Edinburgh.