Jesse Bedayn/CalMatters
Jesse Bedayn reports on economic inequality for The Mercury News in San Jose and CalMatters as part of The California Divide project. Before becoming a Report for America corps member, Bedayn studied investigative reporting and narrative writing at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he wrote about health care and aging in California and investigated the fraught world of for-profit nursing homes for the Investigative Reporting Program. Bedayn has worked as a stringer for The New York Times and as a research and data assistant at KQED public radio where he plumbed through police use-of-force cases. Bedayn holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kent in England. As editor of the student paper InQuire, he won local awards and shared the paper’s first national U.K. award since the paper’s inception in 1965. Bedayn grew up in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada, and spends his free time rambling in the mountains.
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Commercial real estate agent Maybelle Manio is one of many middle-class Californians who found themselves financially stranded by the pandemic. The 42-year-old commercial real estate agent turned to public support for the first time in her life.