Led by local journalist Siri Chilukuri, four emerging reporters are diving into Chicago’s $16.6 billion budget for 2026. Building off the wall-to-wall budget season coverage from Chicago Documenters, these fellows will go beyond the spreadsheets and numbers to examine how these complex policy decisions trickle down to impact everyday life for families, communities and taxpayers.
Meet our fellows and check back to see what we find.
Who Are We?
City Bureau Civic Reporting Fellows spend 16 weeks improving their journalism skills and immersing themselves in community reporting. (Staff photos by Linze Rice/City Bureau; cover illustration by David Alvarado)
Carolina Baldin
by Cynthia Salgado
Born in São Paulo, Brazil, and raised on the city’s outskirts, Carolina Baldin has made Chicago her home for the past six years.
Baldin studied law in college in her home country. She didn’t have the opportunity at the time to study law and journalism simultaneously, but that never stopped Baldin from thinking like a reporter when working on legal cases. She often jotted down her observations and thought about the larger story.
After getting married, her husband's job prompted the move from Brazil to Chicago in January of 2020. Since then, Baldin has enjoyed exploring different neighborhoods throughout the city, with one of her favorite pastimes being walking and sightseeing. Plus, she said, “it’s flat!” here in Chicago, unlike her hilly hometown.
She gained her master’s in magazine journalism from Northwestern University in 2023 and currently works as a freelance journalist.
In her free time, Baldin also takes classical ballet classes, enjoying the movement, but also the connection it gives her to her family. (Her parents met while dancing ballet). A big part of Baldin’s identity is being a big sister, because it gives her a sense of responsibility and accountability — two attributes that Baldin hopes can be seen in her work.
Baldin is excited to produce meaningful work during the fellowship, and also for the great mentorship and sense of community that City Bureau provides.
Cynthia Salgado
by Carolina Baldin
Cynthia Salgado is a proud Chicagoan looking to improve how the media represents her community. Born and raised in Little Village, she found in storytelling an opportunity to “make sure that we are seen and heard.”
Salgado, 26, traces her passion for telling stories to the fiction books she read as a child and school assignments where she interviewed family members about their heritage and culture. Her grandfather was a Mexican rural worker brought to the United States during World War II’s workforce shortage. Salgado remembers hearing stories about her grandfather’s experiences learning about the exploitation he saw of many “braceros,” or a laborer “who works with their arms ” in Spanish.
During college, she spent her summers working at the Yollocalli Arts Reach, a youth initiative at the National Museum of Mexican Art, where she became familiar with audio storyletting and first learned about City Bureau.
Years later, having graduated from college with a double major in communications studies and Spanish, and having worked for a state representative who serves Little Village, Salgado came to admire how City Bureau represents Chicago in a “good way that is tangible and accessible.” This led her to become part of the Documenters Network and apply to the Civic Reporting Fellowship.
A product of Chicago Public Schools, Salgado describes Little Village as an example of what community is meant to be like, a place where “everyone looks out for each other” As the youngest of three sisters, Salgado says she tries to stay connected to her roots, including who she surrounds herself with.
“My community is something that I always have in the back of my mind,” she said .
In her free time, she enjoys taking long walks in the city, going to the beach and taking her 9-year-old nephew to museums Downtown.
Zainab Noor Qureshi
by Alana Warren
For Zainab Noor Qureshi, of west suburban Aurora, storytelling is more than just sharing the stories of well-known public figures and celebrities — there’s also beauty in sharing the average person’s everyday life.
Her love for reporting began in high school when she joined her school’s journalism club. The group’s advisor influenced her to pursue a career in the field, which led to Qureshi obtaining a bachelor’s degree in journalism.
Qureshi believes everyone has a unique voice and that there’s power in vulnerability. What brought her to the Civic Reporting Fellowship was City Bureau’s ethos and approach to journalism. Qureshi loves that City Bureau emphasizes racial equity and harm reduction through the lens of relationship building and having compassion for sources.
As a Pakistani American, she is proud of her culture and credits it with shaping who she is today: someone passionate about communication who believes in the power of words. Her experiences as a woman of color have taught her to interrogate journalism, even from well-known sources or outlets. She firmly believes that people should be able to share their stories with the world, and she hopes those narratives deter oppressive stereotypes of communities of color.
Qureshi feels a special connection to downtown Chicago, where she spent a lot of time exploring during her childhood years. Outside of the fellowship, Qureshi is expanding her interests by exploring museums, parks and pop up exhibits in the “vibrant” city she loves.
Alana Warren
By Zainab Noor Qureshi
Alana Warren, a St. Louis native, has spent the past eight years building her career and home in Chicago. Although she came here to study public policy, the allure of this city has kept her here a couple of years past graduation.
Warren’s journey to journalism hasn’t been linear. She first worked as a researcher, where she analyzed local and state budgets. This led her to question the stories behind the numbers. Raised on reading and writing (and an English major at heart), this training catapulted her into investigating more effective and holistic ways to communicate with her community.
Warren knows that numbers aren’t neutral. At one point, law school felt like an obvious next step, but she realized she was less interested in arguing cases than she was in contextualizing data already available. This knowledge pulled her toward racial equity work and community-centered, collaborative storytelling.
City Bureau has felt like a natural extension of this work, she said. As a woman who has had to navigate spaces where her confidence is often misinterpreted as confrontation, her reporting is shaped by resilience, faith and a refusal to make herself smaller.
Outside of reporting, Warren enjoys art museums, live concerts and creative spaces that invite reflection. Her ultimate guiding principle is if it brings peace and joy, it’s worth following.
Siri Chilukuri
Siri Chilukuri’s journey into journalism started with her first love: science.
She has since focused her work on meaningfully contributing to the larger movement to solve climate change. At age 7, it meant mostly convincing everyone into recycling, but now it means telling the stories of the people causing climate change and the people most impacted by it.
She was most recently a Ben Bagdikian fellow at Mother Jones where she helped fact-check articles for the magazine and website as well as report and write articles.
Previously, she was an environmental justice fellow at Grist, where she wrote stories about coal transition and how a community reckons with legacy pollution. She also wrote about housing, labor, politics, and how all of these forces interact with climate change, and contributed to COP28 coverage.
Siri was a Civic Reporting fellow at City Bureau in 2022. Her team produced a package of stories about labor issues in temp work in manufacturing and warehousing on the South and West Sides.
In addition to her journalism, she volunteers with organizations like AAJA, The Uproot Project and Zenith Cooperative to increase the amount of journalists of color in the industry and help support them along the course of their careers.
(Photo by: Michael Izquierdo)
Read our previous budget coverage from previous fellows and recent Newswires about the budget.
How Does the City Budget Work?
A guide to who holds the power and purse strings when it comes to Chicago’s money. Read the story.
