IN THE MOST UPLIFTING tone possible, several Marin City church communities gathered Wednesday for a first ever unified New Year’s Eve celebration, bidding goodbye to a year of setbacks felt by the historically Black community. The community saw the imposition of yet another affordable housing development and federal attacks on diversity initiatives.

“We sit here, and we celebrate, but to be honest with you the reason we really had this service is because it’s been a hard year,” said Rev. Floyd Thompkins of Saint Andrew Presbyterian Church. Thompkins was one of four religious leaders that spoke from the pulpit at the First Missionary Baptist Church as the congregation sang spirituals and prayed for their leaders and children.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.