NPR is pleased to announce that Kadin Mills has been selected as NPR's 2025-2026 Reflect America Fellow beginning September 8th. Established in 2019, the fellowship recognizes a new recipient each year, with Kadin Mills named its sixth fellow.
During the 12-month fellowship, the Reflect America fellow will join NPR's Education Desk and report on education in Indigenous communities across North America. The fellow will learn to analyze and understand data, develop sources on their beat and pursue explanatory stories about how schools work and how humans learn. The fellow will also seek to identify issues that are of particular concern to Indigenous communities, such as teacher training and supply, cultural isolation, funding and governance, all while working alongside NPR's award-winning journalists. Previous fellows include Pien Huang (2019), Ashish Valentine (2020-2021), Miranda Mazariegos (2021-2022), Seyma Bayram (2022-2023), and Nate Perez (2024-2025).
The Reflect America fellowship is sponsored by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation.
Read the NPR staff announcement from NPR's Education Desk Executive Producer Steve Drummond and Fellowship Stewards Sara Richards and Natalia Fidelholtz:
Colleagues,
We're excited to announce that Kadin Mills will join NPR as the 2025-2026 Reflect America Fellow, beginning September 8.
Over the 12-month fellowship, Kadin will embed with NPR's Education Team, covering education topics within Indigenous communities—from preschool to college and beyond. He brings a wealth of experience to the fellowship from years of reporting and research in Indian Country.
Kadin has reported on local Indigenous history in Chicago for WBEZ and served as a political reporting intern for ICT (formerly Indian Country Today) during the 2024 election. His work has appeared in Buffalo's Fire, Truthout, Source New Mexico and Tucson Sentinel, among others.
A 2022 Udall Scholar in Tribal Public Policy, he has mentored Indigenous youth through the Tribal Youth Media workshop and was selected as a 2023 Indigenous Journalism Fellow by IJA, where he now serves as a mentor-in-training.
Kadin is a first-generation descendant of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community of Lake Superior Ojibwe, and also has German and Irish heritage. He began his journalism career in high school, writing for a local volunteer paper in southwest Michigan and graduated from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 2024.
Kadin is our sixth Reflect America fellow since the program launched in 2019 to enhance NPR's efforts to expand the diversity of voices on air and online, and to create new pathways into public radio for emerging journalists.
Our current fellow, Nate Perez, wraps up his year with the Climate Desk next month.
A big thank you to Sequoia Carrillo, Nicole Cohen and Lauren Migaki for joining the hiring committee and to Talent Acquisition Manager Cassandra Smith for guiding us through the process.
Best,
Steve Drummond, Sara Richards and Natalia Fidelholtz
Reflect America Fellowship Stewards
Copyright 2025 NPR
