Kadin Mills named NPR’s 2025-2026 Reflect America Fellow

VPM | By Steve Drummond, Sara Richards and Natalia Fidelholtz

Published August 26, 2025 at 3:39 PM EDT

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

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Steve Drummond

Steve Drummond is a senior editor and executive producer at NPR who has held a variety of roles in more than two decades at the network. Since its launch in 2014, he has headed the education reporting project, NPR Ed. The nine-member team provides deep, comprehensive coverage of learning and education and extends that reporting to audiences across many platforms. In 2018, the team launched the Student Podcast Challenge. Now in its fifth year, the national contest has received podcast entries from more than 50,000 students in grades 5-12, from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In 2021 a college version was added that offers a $5,000 scholarship to the grand-prize winner.

From 2017 to 2022, Drummond was also the executive producer of Code Switch, NPR's award-winning podcast and reporting team on race and identity. During that period the national audience for Code Switch grew steadily, notably with the addition of a radio program that now airs on 197 stations. In 2020, Code Switch was named by Apple Podcasts as its first-ever Show of the Year. He remains an editor-at-large with the team.

From 2007 to 2013 he was NPR's Senior National Editor, overseeing domestic news coverage and a team of more than 60 reporters, producers and editors in Washington, D.C., and 18 bureaus around the country. In 2012, he also served as acting Senior Editor for Investigations, managing a team of six reporters and producers on investigative projects.

Drummond brings to his work more than 25 years' experience covering education issues. In addition to his journalism credentials, Drummond has also spent some time in the classroom. In the early 1990s, he left journalism temporarily, for a graduate degree in education and a brief career as a middle and high school teacher. His journalism and education interests merged in 1993, when he joined Education Week, where he spent six years as a senior editor and writer.

Following several years as a newspaper and magazine reporter, Drummond joined NPR in 2000 as an editor on the national desk. From 2003 to 2004 he was the senior editor of All Things Considered. His work has been honored with many of journalism's highest awards, including three Peabody Awards, two Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University awards, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the Edward R. Murrow Award.

Drummond holds a bachelor's degree and two master's degrees, in journalism and education, from the University of Michigan. In the fall of 2013 he was a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University, and currently teaches journalism at the University of Maryland.

He is the author of The Watchdog: How the Truman Committee Battled Corruption and Helped Win World War Two, to be published in May 2023.

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