“Flint is family.”

That’s the message behind Elle’s latest digital package. Released yesterday (Aug. 8), the immersive digital project chronicles three generations of Flint, Michigan women: Shea Cobb, her nine-year-old daughter Zion, and her mother, Renée, 55.

“Flint was family,” Mattie Kahn* writes. “Family was Flint—until now. This is the story of how a town loses a family and a family loses a town.”

For people unfamiliar with the details surrounding the water crisis that left the predominantly Black city of 100,000 with poisoned lead water, Kahn* gets into how it all happened (including a straightforward timeline). She also lays out what’s to come: Could this happen somewhere else? Will those responsible be held accountable? How can people help?

The digital project also includes images, both still and moving. A film features Shea Cobb’s rhymes, as the Flint mother is a bus driver by day, singer and poet by night.

This essential read reminds the public that the water crisis continues. President Barack Obama may have taken a sip of Flint water in May, but Cobbs is adamant that she will never drink it again, Kahn* reports.

That’s the Flint reality. 

*Post has been updated to reflect the correct author’s name. While LaToya Ruby Frazier did contribute photography and video to the project, Mattie Kahn did the writing and reporting.