Trusting local people, championing their dreams, and giving them the resources to build a different future.

By Molly de Aguiar + Josh Stearns

This is the story of a $2 million grant that has had a sprawling impact on local journalism and journalism funding around the world for 10 years now. It’s also a story about all the things that wouldn’t exist without a leap of faith at a pivotal moment, and how funders too often miss profound opportunities for growth and change when we refuse to trust and get out of the way.

The story begins in 2011 when the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation in New Jersey launched a new “Informed and Engaged Communities” program, with a focus on making New Jersey a model for local news innovation in a state that (in)famously gets most of its local news from New York and Philadelphia media. Dodge’s CEO at the time, Chris Daggett, had spent years in public service and believed in the role of media and storytelling in creating a healthy democracy. The program was led by one of us (Molly) and the other (Josh) joined the team later. The original budget was tiny — about $250,000 a year — which didn’t match the boldness of the vision or the urgency of the need.

We knew we would need strong partners to transform journalism in the state. We initially found that partner in the Knight Foundation’s Community Information Challenge. After a pilot grant to Dodge, Knight invested $2 million over two years and encouraged us to experiment like crazy, take big risks, and spend the money on whatever seemed to be working locally. They trusted local leaders and communities to chart the path forward through groundbreaking community engagement projects, creative revenue experiments, and shifting the relationship between newsrooms, nonprofits, and communities across the state.

That level of trust in local wisdom and solutions is far too rare. How many funders can truthfully say they create these kinds of opportunities regularly, or even at all?

We recently stepped back to trace the biggest ripple effects from our work together starting a decade ago. We wanted to make visible what is possible when a funder trusts its partners, and gives them the freedom to dream and, importantly, the resources to act. This story is not linear, but we’ve organized it semi-chronologically. None of what follows is about us, or meant to claim credit. Every one of the changes we describe below was made possible by networks of people working tirelessly towards a shared vision for a connected and collaborative media landscape across the state, centering the community’s news and information needs.

• The Local News Ecosystem Model — At the heart of this effort was an idea that if we wanted to ensure the New Jersey public had access to the news and information they needed, we had to move resources toward a range of ideas, small and large, that would make New Jersey news more community-driven, collaborative, and open to addressing the harm it inflicts, particularly on Black people and communities of color. There was no silver bullet, no single answer. The work of reinventing, healing and repairing local media required deep investments to build up new civic infrastructures within newsrooms and communities, and the relationships to weave them together. We started calling this an “ecosystem model” for local news. Near the end of the $2 million grant, Democracy Fund, a nationally-focused private foundation, adopted core aspects of this approach and began to replicate the New Jersey work in North Carolina, New Mexico, Colorado, and Chicago. Together with local funders in those regions, this work has brought tens of millions of dollars into local news. Other partners, like the Solutions Journalism Network (Mountain West), Local Media Association (Oklahoma), American Journalism Project (Ohio), Google and Microsoft (nationally) have all built on aspects of this ecosystem approach.
• The Center for Cooperative Media is both the heart of local journalism in New Jersey, and a leading national research center and proponent of collaborative journalism. They serve as a critical backbone for the reinvention of journalism in New Jersey, providing resources, research, training and organizing for newsrooms of all sizes, and they have inspired similar efforts in other states. Creating a hub for action and reinvention at the state level was a totally new model and it took time to get it right. The $2 million grant helped us give CCM the running room to experiment, imagine, and invest in deep listening to guide its development. Ten years later, it’s thriving, and CCM and its staff are beloved for the support and resources they provide to journalists in NJ and across the country. Their influence extends far beyond the state, helping shift the culture of journalism away from competition towards collaboration as a fundamental path towards serving communities, holding leaders accountable, and covering the biggest stories of our time. See for example, projects like US Democracy Day, their pathbreaking research, and their Spanish language story exchange.
• News Voices is an initiative led by Free Press, which was piloted in New Jersey by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. It has since spread to Charlotte, Philadelphia, and beyond. The organizers who lead the News Voices program act as bridge builders between local newsrooms and community members, bringing them together in dialogue and collaborative projects designed to build enduring partnerships between them. News Voices has created a body of evidence that local communities will engage, support, and participate in local journalism that is responsive to their issues, relevant to people’s lives, and rooted in respect and trust. Several community-led media projects that are actively filling news and information gaps sprung out of News Voices organizing; here is just one compelling example from Atlantic City, NJ. The News Voices team also helped launch Media 2070, a coalition of media makers and organizers building a future in which media systems are no longer harmful to Black people, and Black, Indigenous and other systematically oppressed people are fully free to tell and share their own stories and determine their own futures. Media 2070 has and continues to be a source of deep inspiration for us.
• ​​New Jersey Civic Information Consortium (NJCIC) — When New Jersey sold its public television licenses for $332 million, Free Press and a broad coalition of thousands of New Jersey residents (a coalition that the News Voices project built) argued that the public deserved to benefit from the sale of the public airwaves. After a years-long campaign to pressure the state to invest these public dollars into civic information and local news, a bipartisan group of lawmakers created the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium. NJCIC is a nonprofit that uses public and private dollars to make grants to local news and information projects — the first of its kind in the nation. By the end of 2023, the Consortium will have given out close to $7 million in its first three years — with state allocations growing from $500,000 initially to $4 million in the most recent budget. Now NJCIC is the largest journalism and civic information funder in New Jersey and a national model. As one of the most significant pieces of media policy passed within the last decade, it has paved the way for a different national conversation about public funding for local journalism and sparked similar efforts in a number of other states.
• NewsMatch — NewsMatch is the largest grassroots giving campaign for local news. Each year funders provide matching dollars to incentivize members of the public to support their local nonprofit newsrooms during the year-end holidays. Since 2017, NewsMatch has helped more than 300 newsrooms raise a quarter billion dollars in contributions from their local community, creating a profound shift in giving to journalism around the country. NewsMatch was launched by the Knight Foundation in 2016, and expanded with support from Democracy Fund and other foundations in the years since. In expanding the campaign, Democracy Fund was inspired in part by a project at Dodge called the “Jersey Give Back Guide,” which created a simple one stop website for the public to donate to NJ nonprofits and have their gifts matched.

Without the constraints of narrow metrics and arduous reporting requirements, we made our learning public by writing about all of these projects — their ups and downs — in public on the Local News Lab, as well as a weekly newsletter called The Local Fix. After nearly a decade the Local News Lab has been archived, but you can still find a comprehensive set of resources and guides for newsrooms, profiles of some of the trail blazers leading the reinvention of local news, and a comprehensive report on everything we tried over the course of two years. The Local Fix newsletter continues to thrive with more than 3,000 subscribers.

Beyond the projects listed above, there are a number of other projects, relationships, and organizations that can be traced back to the grant. These are the long term ripples that we never could have predicted:

• Dodge supported a series of investigative reporting + community engagement projects led by Reveal (formerly the Center for Investigative Reporting), including using live theater as a way to tell investigative journalism stories. These projects helped CIR build out a model for collaborative work with local newsrooms across the country.
• Cole Goins, who led the CIR work in NJ has gone on to work with the New School Journalism + Design program (another Dodge grantee) and Resolve Philly to create a free, six-week certificate program at the Community College of Philadelphia called “Community Journalism as a Civic Power.” This work is spreading to other community colleges now, including in New Jersey.
• A grant to the Listening Post Collective helped build out their model from one New Orleans project into a replicable approach to building and expanding civic media and community journalism, with more than 20 projects now across the country. This early investment in the seed of an idea has turned into a bold strategic plan and a playbook for others to build on.
• Local newsrooms across NJ for years used a legal guide that Rutgers Law School created as part of the $2 million grant. That work helped inspire Democracy Fund to create the Legal Clinic Fund with the Klarman Foundation and other partners, which has mobilized more than $5 million to fund free legal support for local news through 12 university legal clinics across the country.
• Many experiments we tried failed. For example, we tried to create a local ad network with a shared ad sales person — it didn’t work. But today some of those partners have built better solutions. The Center for Cooperative Media is getting traction with a joint NJ Ad Lab and the Center for Community Media at The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York made transformative change through their Ad Boost initiative which drove millions of dollars in New York City advertising to community media outlets led by and serving people of color.
• We helped fuel a national community engagement discussion through multiple demonstration projects with partners at Hearken and GroundSource. Based on these early investments a group of funders created the Community Listening and Engagement Fund which helped spread these and other engagement approaches to hundreds of newsrooms. Today community engagement in newsrooms has moved from the margins to a central part of how journalism is done in many places (but there is more to do to move from engagement to equity).
• Another important project to come out of the New Jersey work was the New Measures Research Project, which created a methodology of assessing “the nature of journalistic content; the needs, interests, and preferences of local news audiences; and the health and rigor of the local news infrastructures in communities.” This research helped show vast information inequalities that mirrored economic and racial inequality across New Jersey and has been built on across the country.

Funders often insist that prospective grantees convince us that they will produce a specific set of deliverables with our funding. When we do this, we miss out on something profound: the magic of what can happen when we have faith in the dreams, visions, and expertise of these organizations. Those in the field working on models like Trust Based Philanthropy know these lessons well and have created vital resources to help other funders move in this direction.

The $2 million grant transformed us, too.

While the ecosystem model described above is rooted in equity, and evidence suggests that intentional, community-centered news ecosystems around the country are producing more equitable outcomes, we failed to truly prioritize funds for Black, Indigenous, and people of color-led organizations. We have grown as people and as funders, and today, we are both focused on centering racial equity in our work and making sustained investments in media and movements for justice. We are grateful to allies, peers and field leaders who gave us feedback and provided accountability along the way.

Moreover, we witnessed how our partners delivered impact beyond their — and our — wildest dreams when they had the agency to experiment, as well as the permission to set aside promises about deliverables and outcomes. These are lessons we carry with us and try to live into every day.

Perhaps most important of all, we carry the work forward by removing barriers that require organizations to justify their ideas and repeatedly prove their worth, and we push ourselves to move substantial and flexible resources to create conditions for justice and change.

We challenge our funding colleagues to reflect on what a single $2 million grant continues to make possible a decade later, and to ask yourselves: what do communities lose when we refuse to use our power to help them grow theirs? Trust your partners, give them what they need to win, and you too will experience transformation.

***

Molly is now the President of the Independence Public Media Foundation supporting community-owned media and internet in the Philadelphia region. Josh is the Senior Director of Democracy Fund’s Public Square Program where he has helped invest and raise millions for local journalism across the country, building on the lessons from the Knight grant. At both Independence Public Media Foundation and Democracy Fund we are working to invest in narrative power building and civic information with BIPOC communities.

If you are a funder interested in supporting media making and narrative change work, but need some advice and support, or if you would like to collaborate or share ideas, please get in touch with us.

Earlier this year I shared IPMF’s intentions for 2022, and it’s time for an update on what we’ve been up to so far this year:

Grantmaking

“The good news is that we plan to simplify and streamline our grantmaking this year by continuing to work with the grantee partners we have. The not-so-good news is that we will be minimizing bringing on new grantees this year, with the exception of our local film nominations program.”

Today we announced that we have awarded $8.9 million to organizations in the Philadelphia region for a wide array of digital equity initiatives, community storytelling projects, film, youth media, community radio, and grassroots podcasting. We are also continuing to invest deeply in shifting narratives around violence and policing which harm communities of color in our region. You can see the full list of grants on our website.

With the support of our board, we made all of these grants automatic renewals. We did not ask for any proposals, including for the four $1 million+ grants we made, though we did, in some cases, ask for some modest documentation where needed. We also have been improving our application and reporting processes, and are delighted to say that we have made our application, grant letters, and grant reports available in Spanish.

We will announce more local filmmaking grants in the fall, as well as a few others we are finalizing between now and the end of the year.

In the three years that we have been partnering with communities across the region, in particular with Black and brown-led organizations and projects, we have invested $38.5 million dollars in support of people and communities telling their own stories, and growing their power.

Capacity Building

“Grantees can be assured that we will continue providing capacity building workshops and coaching throughout the year, with some new topics and partners added to the line-up.”

Robust capacity building opportunities and resources are an investment in the long-term success of organizations. It helps leaders strengthen their organizations, build community with their peers, and feel supported.

In our second full year of offering a variety of workshops and coaching opportunities, the topics have expanded based on what our grantees have said they want help with. This year’s line-up includes:

• Fundraising
• Communications
• Governance and leadership
• Financial management
• Measuring impact
• Navigating fiscal sponsorship
• Deciding whether or not to become a nonprofit, and
• Leadership succession planning

We also have a separate series of workshops tailored to local filmmakers that cover topics like fundraising for film, distribution, publicity and legal issues, among others.

Not only have we learned a great deal about the breadth and depth of the needs of our grantee partners through these capacity building opportunities, we’ve also learned a lot about matching our grantees’ specific challenges with the experts who can understand and help them. We haven’t always gotten this right, but we work to create a safe space for our grantees to offer us honest and constructive feedback about their experiences, so that we can adjust where needed.

Website

“We went through a brand study process last year with our partners at Message Agency, grantees, and community members, with the intention of overhauling the look and feel of our logo and website…we learned a lot about what we need to resolve before we can move forward with a whole new look and feel to our organization. As a result, we are working on an updated version of our website — a vast improvement, but not yet the complete overhaul we were aiming for. We will unveil that this year, while also taking more time to explore an identity that matches our values and aspirations.”

We are nearing the finish line — stay tuned for a new website this fall. It looks great and we can’t wait to show it to you!

Expanding Our Team

“We’ll be adding new staff this year, and expanding our small but mighty team of four to a team of six. We will be looking for a finance director and a program associate, and we will be launching that search soon.”

A big chunk of our spring was devoted to hiring and welcoming our two newest team members, Finance Director Chris Capato, and Program Associate Karla Jimenez-Magdaleno, both of whom have already brought so much expertise and camaraderie to our team in the short time we’ve been together.

We worked hard to make the hiring process transparent and equitable, and we have plans to write up how we did that, including sharing with all applicants what to expect from the process, timeline, and salary, as well as sharing questions with candidates ahead of time. We thank our friends at Bread & Roses Community Fund, whose transparency about their hiring process on their website served as an inspiration for us. And we thank the folks at Work in Progress, who helped us build out and practice an equitable hiring process, reviewed our employee handbook, and helped us create equitable family leave and paid time off policies. Their anti-racist HR guidebook is a valuable resource you may want to check out.

Equity + Embracing Emergence

“Our priority this year is to focus on deep exploration and discussions about equity and justice: what we need to do to center them internally in our operations and governance, and externally in our relationships, funding, and vision for the future. In order to do that, we’re learning to sit with the discomfort of not planning out our year, embracing emergence, and allowing this journey to take us where it needs to go.”

We packed the first half of our year with grantmaking and hiring (in fact we crammed a little too much in the first six months), in order to give ample space during the remainder of this year for learning about and centering racial equity across all aspects of our organization and our work. Our partners in this work, Leticia Peguero and Amanda Perez Leder, are skillfully and thoughtfully leading us through these discussions and decisions.

I wrote a bit in my previous essay about slowing down, and resisting too much planning and scheduling for the year (or next year, for that matter), in order to honor the time needed for such fundamental conversations and decisions. It is hard to do that, though. It is a challenge to reconcile slowing down with the sense of urgency one feels about the current state of the world, especially knowing the position of extreme privilege that we occupy in philanthropy.

In the spirit of embracing emergence, though, I don’t know where the remaining months of this year will take us, though it seems likely to me we will be working well into 2023 on honing our vision for this foundation. Perhaps by the end of this year, we’ll be able to share something more concrete.

Transparency

And speaking of sharing: on a final note, I received a lot of feedback from my earlier essay, most of it gratitude for the transparency, but also from funding colleagues who said they appreciated it but reacted as if they couldn’t fathom sharing so much information.

My regret, actually, is that I don’t make time to write more often about our work. Transparency builds trust. It helps us manage expectations about what we can and can’t do, share what we’re learning, and also what we’re struggling with. Transparency shifts power to communities by demystifying the way philanthropy works and by being accountable.

There can be no equity without transparency.

In 2022, we are going to do things a little differently at Independence Public Media Foundation. Before I get to the details of that, I am hoping you will indulge me in sharing some things we’re proud of, which will also help you better understand where we are now as an organization.

In the past two and a half years, we have grown from 11 original grantee partners to about 100, with nearly $30 million invested so far in community-centered media and media making across the region. We are a team of four, growing to a team of six in 2022, and our board has doubled from six to 12 members, who volunteer a significant amount of their time and expertise to help build and guide this foundation.

In 2021, we launched a series of free workshops and coaching sessions for grantees on topics they prioritized for us, including communications, financial management, fundraising, staff wellbeing, and nonprofit governance, as well as some workshops specific to filmmaking. Our community zine, which we publish monthly (sign up here!), offered additional resources and encouragement on all of these topics and more, as well as highlighting grantee milestones and news.

Last summer, we published “Community Media Across the Greater Philadelphia Area: A Needs Assessment and a Call to Action,” original research conducted by Dr. Rosemary Clark-Parsons and her team. In summarizing her findings, Dr. Clark-Persons emphasized,

“As the COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated, access to news and information is vital to people’s personal, social, and economic well being. Rather than approaching media as a separate funding area, philanthropic organizations should include community media as relevant to addressing any high-priority need.”

We couldn’t agree more, which is why we support and collaborate with funding colleagues in the region on community media and storytelling strategies and projects. In 2021, for example, we collaborated with the HealthSpark Foundation and the Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund to award $2.3 million to 47 area organizations through our Community Voices open call. Since 2019, we have partnered with the Leeway Foundation, Bread & Roses Community Fund, Scattergood Foundation, Lenfest Institute, The Alliance for Health Equity (formerly the Brandywine Health Foundation), Fels Fund, Barra Foundation, the Foundation for Delaware County, Knight Foundation, and the Delaware Community Foundation. That list, which we know will continue to grow, gives us so much hope about the future of local news and information, and community-centered storytelling.

Other 2021 highlights include: a deep dive to learn about the region’s digital equity landscape, and awarding $1 million to 18 organizations for digital equity projects; launching a pilot project to explore grantee-centered impact assessment with Impact Architects; learning about mission-aligned investing throughout the year; and working hard on an updated website, to be shared in 2022.

And, because we center care in our relationships and actions, we have tried our best to be responsive, communicative, and accessible to our community of grantees, funding colleagues, and those seeking funds and information from us, while we all continue to navigate this devastating pandemic.

In the past two and a half years, we have learned a great deal about the media and digital equity landscape in Philadelphia, as well as the myriad needs of the start-up and small organizations led by people of color that we prioritize in our grantmaking. We continue to practice unlearning philanthropic processes and decisions that are harmful and extractive, and we are challenging ourselves to work harder and commit more deeply to equity and justice.

Like everyone else, though, we are tired.

Given the position of privilege and power we occupy, and the desperate need for the resources we control, it feels bad to admit that. But the truth is that in order for us to have deep clarity about what we hope to accomplish long-term, we need some space this year to reflect and learn, and to dream about and plan for the future.

So, these are our intentions for 2022:

Grantmaking

The good news is that we plan to simplify and streamline our grantmaking this year by continuing to work with the grantee partners we have. The not-so-good news is that we will be minimizing bringing on new grantees this year, with the exception of our local film nominations program. Specifically, this means we will not be conducting our Community Voices open call or another round of the Digital Equity open call this year.

We recognize and acknowledge the tension between trying to center equity in our work and not being as accessible this year as we would like to be, particularly for organizations who have not received funding from us. This is a trade-off we feel we have to make this year.

That said, we do want to keep hearing from you about your projects and ideas. You can always send an email to info@independencemedia.org, and we will always respond.

Capacity Building Workshops + Coaching

Grantees can be assured that we will continue providing capacity building workshops and coaching throughout the year, with some new topics and partners added to the line-up. If space is available, we will offer these resources to community organizations who are not current grantees. Our aim is twofold: to help strengthen individual organizations in whatever ways they have identified needing support, and to strengthen connections between and among organizations working toward justice and change in the Philadelphia region.

An Updated Website

We went through a brand study process last year with our partners at Message Agency, grantees, and other community members, with the intention of overhauling the look and feel of our logo and website. We asked ourselves challenging questions about our identity and history as a public television station, our transition to a private foundation, and our aspirations for supporting transformative, community-led work. Many times, we didn’t yet have the answers to the questions we were asking, and we learned a lot about what we need to resolve before we can move forward with a whole new look and feel to our organization. As a result, we are working on an updated version of our website — a vast improvement, but not yet the complete overhaul we were aiming for. We will unveil that this year, while also taking more time to explore an identity that matches our values and aspirations.

Expanding Our Team

We’ll be adding new staff this year, and expanding our small but mighty team of four to a team of six. We will be looking for a finance director and a program associate, and we will be launching that search soon. If you think you know the perfect person for the role — maybe it’s you? — we hope you will help send candidates our way. We’ll post information to our website and job boards, so stay tuned.

Equity + Embracing Emergence

While it may not sound like we’re not slowing down in 2022, we truly are. Our priority this year is to focus on deep exploration and discussions about equity and justice: what we need to do to center them internally in our operations and governance, and externally in our relationships, funding, and vision for the future. In order to do that, we’re learning to sit with the discomfort of not planning out our year, embracing emergence, and allowing this journey to take us where it needs to go.

I know that when foundations talk about going into strategic planning mode (whether they’re using those terms explicitly or not), it strikes fear in the hearts of grantees that we will decide to go in a completely new direction, with a new vision and new partners, and walk away from our current grantees. I can tell you that’s not what this year is about for IPMF.

In fact, the intention is the opposite: we’re seeking to illuminate and clarify what we’re willing to deeply commit to long-term, in pursuit of equity and justice, as well as what resources, strategies and action are needed to fully support our commitments, so that we can effectively, with integrity and care, build power with communities by supporting community-led and community-owned media making in our region.

We look forward to sharing with you what we’re learning.

It’s Spring already, and we’re overdue with this update on what we’ve been up to at Independence Public Media Foundation this year, and what we’re planning for the rest of the year:

2021 Grantmaking

In 2021, we will conduct two rounds of invited proposals from our grantees to whom we gave two-year grants in 2019, along with a handful of other organizations whom we’ve identified as key partners. We are nearing the end of the first round of invited proposals: our board will review recommendations in May, and we’ll announce those grants shortly thereafter. The other round of invited proposals will happen this fall.

We also plan to conduct an open call for digital equity proposals, and an open call for our Community Voices Fund, both of which we’ll launch in mid-May, and complete by the end of July. Any current grantee (including last year’s Community Voices Fund grantees) or prospective applicant (nonprofits, or fiscally sponsored organizations) is welcome to apply to the open calls. We’ll be sharing more specifics on our website soon.

And this fall, we will support another community-led nominations process for grants to individual filmmakers, as we did last year. This process is led by local leaders and artists in the film community nominating other local filmmakers for funds to help support existing film projects.

Also, we have made three grants this year totaling $395,000:

• In March, we partnered with several of our funding colleagues to support the COVID Prevention + Response Fund with a grant of $350,000. This pooled fund is hosted by the Philanthropy Network of Greater Philadelphia in partnership with Philly Counts. Fifteen community advisors, living and working in communities disproportionately impacted by COVID, are leading the design and implementation of the fund, including making decisions about grant funding. You can read all about the fund here.
• We made another grant of $20,000 to the Philanthropy Network of Greater Philadelphia in support of their strategic planning this year.
• We also made a $25,000 grant to Securing the Roots, to support paid fellowships to participate in a 6-month fundraising training program for organizations with budgets under $1 million.

In total, we plan to make about $7.2 million in grants this year.

We are still experimenting with our processes, trying to find a balance between managing the volume of requests we receive while trying to remain as open and accessible as possible to new ideas and projects.

Workshops

One of our highest priorities this year is to support training and peer-to-peer learning on topics that our grantees have identified are most important to them. Through surveys, we learned that fundraising, financial management, and communications were at the top of their list. They also identified staff wellbeing, governance, and leadership as critical needs.

As a result, our team has developed a series of training opportunities this year, including:

• A series of financial management workshops led by BDO / FMA (Fiscal Management Associates)
• A communications workshop series led by Message Agency
• A program on supporting staff wellbeing led by Healing Our Work
• A fundraising workshop with Securing the Roots
• A workshop on nonprofit governance led by Dragonfly Partners

Additionally, we are supporting a cohort of local filmmakers on a variety of topics, including fundraising, film distribution, and engaging communities.

Later in the year, we will share what we’re learning through these workshops. What we already know is how much non-profits need funders to help support robust opportunities for their learning, growth, and resiliency, so we hope more funders will make room in their budgets for this work.

Beyond the Grants

We also have been:

• Working on a new website and logo with Message Agency
• Developing a learning + impact framework with Impact Architects
• Finalizing some community media research led by Rosemary Clark Parsons, and
• Participating in a mission-aligned investing cohort through the Philanthropy Network in order to ensure that our values and mission are driving our investment management decisions.

Although it’s not easy to balance all of this work with making time to write about it, we’re committed to transparency and sharing what we’re learning, so we will have more to say throughout the year about everything laid out here.

Please keep an eye on our website and on Twitter for announcements and specific details about our open calls, and reach out to info@independencemedia.org if you want to get in touch.

Although philanthropy is not known for transparency, it is one of our guiding principles at Independence Public Media Foundation. It is essential to building trust in the work we do, and to being held accountable.

At the beginning of April, we published a statement about how we intended to respond to the Covid-19 crisis, and we promised to publicly share information about what we’re working on and what we’re supporting.

Today, I’m happy to offer some updates on grants we’ve made to date, and what we’ve been working on over the past two months, including details of a new grant opportunity for organizations in the Philadelphia region.

First, what we’ve supported so far:

Pledged:

“Make trustworthy news and information, translated in multiple languages and provided in a variety of formats, available and easily accessible to people across the region, with a special emphasis on understanding and fulfilling the ongoing and evolving information needs of our most vulnerable communities in the region.”

Action Taken:

In March, we partnered with the Lenfest Institute for Journalism to launch the Philadelphia Covid-19 Community Information Fund because we believe that trustworthy information must be at the heart of helping people navigate this crisis. We contributed $1.5 million to the $2.5 million fund, with $1 million of that helping to launch Resolve Philadelphia’s large-scale Equally Informed initiative.

This project coordinates collaboration between more than 20 newsrooms, as well as working with public health experts, local elected officials, nonprofits and others to get urgent, relevant, culturally competent information, translated into multiple languages, deep into communities. They have also made available to the public a text-messaging service so that anyone can ask any questions about living and working in Philadelphia and get well-researched, fact-based answers.

Equally Informed builds on Resolve’s impressive and inspiring body of work fostering deeper collaboration among journalists across the region, building trust with mis- and underrepresented communities, and elevating community voices and community solutions.

The other $500,000 we contributed to the Philadelphia Covid-19 Community Information Fund supported an open call for proposals for “Philadelphia-area media and other community organizations as they work to meet the news and information needs of Philadelphia’s diverse and marginalized communities that leads to informed decision-making and resiliency both at this time of acute need and for the long-term.” Those proposals are now being reviewed, and Lenfest will be announcing those grants in June.

Pledged:

“Invest in the long-term resilience of community-centered communications infrastructure, such as community access media and low power FM radio.”

Action Taken:

In partnership with the Center for International Media Action and Prometheus Radio Project, we committed $198,000 to support the region’s community radio stations. Specifically this grant supports the five low-power FM stations in Philadelphia, 2 online radio stations, and 3 additional low-power stations in the region. These funds will provide technical improvements and training, hyper-local programming, and peer-to-peer learning between the stations.

We see this as an important first investment in the long-term resiliency of community-powered radio, and we will continue to look at opportunities more broadly to invest in community-owned media and communications infrastructure.

Pledged:

“Provide support for equipment, online services, and digital literacy training for grassroots community organizing for racial, social, and economic justice in the Philadelphia region.”

Action Taken:

IPMF contributed $100,000 in support of Bread & Roses Community Fund’s Solidarity Fund for Covid-19 Organizing to help grassroots groups quickly access up to $10,000 as they organize for a just and humane recovery from the Covid-19 crisis. These funds are urgently needed now, and they double as investments in strengthening grassroots groups’ ability to move their organizing online, many of which were not equipped to do so before the pandemic hit.

We are grateful to Bread & Roses for making sure grassroots groups can continue to fight on the frontlines and aren’t being left out of funding opportunities in this moment.

The Solidarity Fund stays true to Bread & Roses’ process: a community panel reviews the applications and makes the decisions. The Fund is even able to make some grants to new groups who aren’t yet 501(c)3 or fiscally-sponsored organizations.

At the end of 2019, IPMF made a grant of $800,000 to Bread & Roses in anticipation of future collaborations. The $100,000 in support of the Solidarity Fund came from that $800,000 and is not new funding from our corpus.

Pledged:

“We gave all of our grantees, including those with multi-year project grants, the option to convert their grants to operating support, and we are encouraging them to share any emergency needs and requests they have. We also eliminated their interim reporting requirements, and assured them not to worry about changes to the timelines and deliverables of their original grant agreements. When they are ready and able to return to their projects, we will be there to support them.”

Action Taken:

We have since provided an additional $770,000 in emergency support to our grantees ranging from $10,000 to $80,000. Although we did ask about half of them to fill out a brief survey to let us know how they’re doing, we did not require any paperwork to receive these grants.

We are also committed to understanding our grantees’ shifting needs, including what services, training, and other support we might be able to offer them.

To that end, one step we are taking is hiring MING (Media in Neighborhood Group) to create videos in partnership with a handful of our grantees, helping them document their work and tell stories of the deep challenges in their communities posed by the intersectional issues of race, class, gender, age, and geography, among others, all exacerbated by Covid-19.

We believe that communications is critical to making nonprofits’ work visible and valued, but that it is also severely underfunded and underappreciated.

Pledged:

“Remain open and agile this year to new opportunities, creative ideas, and community needs.”

Action Taken:

When we shared our intentions, we acknowledged that we didn’t have an open application process in place but committed to make ourselves as accessible as possible, and we invited people to contact us with questions and ideas. A few organizations did, and we made some grants as a result, including providing Chromebooks for Philadelphia students, supporting local women filmmakers of color, and efforts to amplify voices of people with disabilities impacted by Covid-19.

We continually wrestle with how not to perpetuate a system of inequitable access to capital in which those who have the know-how and connections to ask for funding are the ones who receive it. Which brings me, finally, to the announcement IPMF is making today:

Pledged:

“Support journalists, artists, and nonprofits to galvanize community media making and storytelling during this crisis. We want to help people, especially those hardest hit by the pandemic, feel visible and heard by funders, policy makers, and others with power and authority. We also want to encourage creative expression, fostering understanding, and connecting with others in this time of physical distancing.”

Action Taken:

Today we are delighted to share the news of a new $750,000 Community Voices Fund, specifically designed to elevate community voices and community solutions to the structural inequality being laid bare by the pandemic.

This is an open call to non-profits and fiscally-sponsored organizations in Philadelphia and the surrounding region (including New Jersey and Delaware) to apply for their ideas and projects that document, share, and preserve people’s experiences and stories, foster community connections through creative media making, and strengthen community-owned and community-led media. You can read the full details of the announcement on our website, and see examples of projects that have inspired our thinking about the Fund. The application will open next week (June 4, 2020), and we will be reviewing your submissions on a weekly basis.

Naturally, as we make grants, we will announce them and add them to our website, as we have with all of the grants we’ve made in 2020 to date — just over $2.9 million so far, including the grant to Bread & Roses’ Solidarity Fund.

We continue to encourage you to contact us with your ideas and questions, and to tell us about organizations whose work we should know about. And we reiterate our pledge to remain open and agile this year to new opportunities, creative ideas, and community needs.

Our hearts are with you all as we struggle to navigate this pandemic, grieve those who have died, and fight for a just recovery.

. . .

Read more about the story behind Independence Public Media Foundation. We are committed to sharing our processes, decisions, and learning publicly.

The Independence Public Media Foundation announced its second round of grants today, totaling $4.3 million in support of its goal to establish the Philadelphia region as a “hotbed for creative media makers.”

What does that mean? What might that look like? I will admit that when I joined the foundation, I was equal parts excited and overwhelmed by this goal. It is more aspirational, but less concrete or solutions-oriented than our other three stated goals which support: 1) community-centered local journalism; 2) digital literacy and inclusion; and 3) media that represents the diverse demographics of the region in their governance, employee base, content creation, and audience reach.

As our foundation has explored the boundaries of creative media making through this grants cycle, I’ve come to realize that it is, by itself, not the goal. The goal is what is made possible through creative media making: community connections, a sense of belonging and agency, civic engagement, preserving history and memory, change, and justice.

Our role is not to focus on what kind of media to support — filmmaking, animation, video, audio — yes to all of that and more — but rather what media can do. For people, for communities, for the region.

My colleague Lauren Pabst at the MacArthur Foundation wrote an essay this past summer, “The Space for Change,” which arrived at just the right time to help me see this. She wrote:

Journalism works to hold the powerful accountable, whether it is public officials or private corporations, provoking a public reckoning with wrongdoing and forcing change.

Documentary films, especially in recent years, have also been held up as drivers of social change; presenting untold or long-forgotten stories in a cinematic format can generate new levels of awareness.

But documentaries and journalism do not, by themselves, create change. They present evidence and the building blocks for the levers of accountability by exposing wrongdoing or telling stories misrepresented by the larger media anew. They can provide context where before there were only soundbites.

Journalism and documentary can create the space for change.

For social change to take place, that space must be claimed by engaged civic actors and organizations, whether they be public servants in a position to act or grassroots activists who work to force action where it did not seem previously possible.

By bringing new information and new stories to light, journalism and documentary present a choice to the public: Will we act on these revelations? Will we use our civic power to take this information and run with it? And, importantly, are mediamakers willing to be in dialogue with the activism their work relies on?

In her essay, I found a roadmap for the kind of organizations and work we supported in this round of grants and expect to support in the future:

• Is the intent of the organization and the proposed work to create the space for change?
• Are the organization and the proposed work rooted in the community, such that engaged civic actors can claim that space?
• Does the work bring new information and stories to light, particularly untold, unheard, or long-forgotten stories?
• Does the work present a choice or solutions to the public about using their civic power to act on the information presented?
• Will the media makers be in dialogue with the activism on which their work relies?

Fundamentally, these questions can reveal to us an organization’s values and the clarity of its goals, and whether it’s well-positioned to work in solidarity with its community, or if it operates on its own, disconnected from the community.

Beyond these questions, though — beyond how we might discover which routes to take — there is a central point in Lauren’s essay that represents what I think is the heart of our opportunity in supporting media and media making across the region: change happens when a network is working together, when media makers and engaged civic actors are working toward that change.

As a funder, we have the power, and I argue an obligation, to build and strengthen networks that power movements for change. IPMF can and will do this by making grants— you can see this particularly with the grants we’ve made in this round to Media Mobilizing Project, Free Press, and the Media, Inequality, Change Center. But we have many other tools at our disposal to support network building, too: convening and encouraging collaboration among our grantees, fostering partnerships with funding colleagues and others, investing in compelling storytelling, and sharing our work and lessons with others, to name a few.

As Lauren points out, we need “an entire society of people with the courage to act and the courage to learn” in order to create the conditions for meaningful change.

…

A Note About Our Processes

Independence Public Media is a start-up foundation with very limited staff capacity. As a result, we are in an experimental mode, and we have not yet established grantmaking processes for those seeking funding. We look forward to 2020 when we will have more staff and more capacity to build clear, transparent, and equitable guidelines.

…

Read about our first round of grants here.

To learn more about IPM, its guiding principles and four overarching goals, see the background paper (PDF) on our website. We are committed to sharing our processes, decisions, and learning publicly.

Today, Independence Public Media Foundation is announcing its first ever grants: $5.3 million to eleven organizations in Philadelphia, as well as a partnership with Bread & Roses Community Fund, to help communities across the Greater Philadelphia region build power through media and media making.

These grants reflect IPM’s expansive definition of media, with support for community archives (African American Museum of Philadelphia, Taller Puertorriqueño), digital literacy workshops and programs for immigrants and refugees (Digital Literacy Alliance, SEAMAAC), community-centered journalism (Germantown Info Hub & Kensington Voice via Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication), media justice initiatives (The Village of Arts and Humanities), cultural competency training and professional development opportunities for legacy newsrooms (Lenfest Institute for Journalism and WHYY), and creative expression (PhillyCAM, Scribe Video Center, Doc Society’s Good Pitch Local Philly).

I’m oversimplifying the grants a bit for brevity’s sake (please do read the full grant descriptions), but they reflect an understanding that media impacts our lives in myriad and complex ways, requiring us to explore multiple avenues for creating a just and equitable media landscape.

The announcement of these grants is a major milestone for IPM. Although we are a new foundation, we are not a new entity.

Independence Public Media, founded in 1981, was formerly a public broadcaster operating WYBE Channel 35 in the Philadelphia market. It was a small public television station with a creative, artistic vision for the role that media can and should play to strengthen communities. It was known, in particular, for programming and staff that represented the true and rich diversity of the Philadelphia region.

In 2017, IPM relinquished its broadcast license as part of the Federal Communications Commission’s Broadcast Incentive Auction and received a one-time payment of $131.5 million. The auction offered participating stations the option to go off the air entirely (and potentially get a bigger payout), or stay on the air, but move to a less valuable spot on the spectrum and share space with someone else (“channel sharing”). To the best of my knowledge, only three stations in the country, including WYBE, elected to go off the air; the other two belonged to universities which planned to use their proceeds for other initiatives at their respective institutions.

WYBE was the only station in the country to seize the opportunity of the auction and transform itself from a broadcaster into a private foundation, believing it could have far greater and longer-lasting impact on communities as a funder. That private foundation, which I now lead, has a $5-$6 million annual grant-making budget to honor and carry forward the very best of what WYBE offered the region, while also exploring new ways that media can foster understanding and improve people’s lives.

Stop for a moment to consider the courage it takes to completely give up the way you’ve been serving your community for nearly 40 years, and decide to pursue a whole new way to serve and support them.

The IPM board could have chosen to upgrade the station’s equipment, put some money away in a rainy day fund, and keep right on broadcasting, just like the other non-commercial stations across the country did with their $2 billion in auction proceeds. But that is not what IPM decided to do.

Instead here we are, after two years of incredibly hard work transitioning from tv to philanthropy, celebrating our first grants today — more than $6 million! — directly invested into community-centered and community-led media organizations and projects. Better yet, we are just getting started.

To learn more about IPM, its guiding principles and four overarching goals, see the background paper (PDF) on our website. While this first set of grants is a good representation of IPM’s values and goals, we know we have a lot to learn, including how best to serve and support the region, not just Philadelphia. We are committed to sharing our processes, decisions, and learning publicly.

As part of the News Integrity Initiative, we’re featuring a series of profiles of NII grantees in order to highlight their groundbreaking work. NII is centered around a vision for journalism that builds trust, empathy and solutions in our communities. In order to have enduring trust between newsrooms and the public, however, new organizations must fully represent and be rooted in the communities they serve. Here, Evelyn and Martin explain why that is — now more than ever — and how the Maynard 200 program to train 200 journalists, community storytellers and entrepreneurs of color over the next five years, is leading the charge.

Thanks to Lindsay Muscato for facilitating this profile.

These days we hear a lot about Americans’ lack of trust in the media. For us, it’s a disconnect that goes right back to our roots. The Maynard Institute began almost five decades ago, in the dramatic aftermath of the Kerner Commission, and the notion of holding the media accountable for ignoring racial fractures in American society.

At that time, the number of journalists of color in newsrooms was so small, just handfuls. The “reason” given was often, “we can’t find anyone qualified.” So the Maynard Institute’s founders — a group of reporters that was very diverse — said, “we’re going to train journalists ourselves.” Back then in many newsrooms, Maynard Institute graduates (about 20 people a year) were the first people of color to work there.

In fact, we — the co-directors right now — are Maynard Institute graduates. The experience we had while in Maynard programs were invaluable to us in our long careers as reporters and editors at major publications. We’ve both come back to our roots, and now we’re working on training journalists through Maynard 200, a grantee of the News Integrity Initiative. Our goal? To train 200 storytellers, managers, and entrepreneurs of color in the next five years. Although it’s a pilot for us, in many ways the stakes couldn’t be higher: diversity in media looks just as dire as when the Maynard Institute began.

Hidden reasons for a broken pipeline

It’s not that newsrooms never made any progress whatsoever — it’s that the pipeline for journalists of color was, for many years, at a standstill, and while some progress has been made, there is still much work to do. There’s been a lot of talk about how the rise of social media has affected journalism’s bottom line, so it’s easy to forget that the Great Recession has an enormous impact, too, and it was a real setback for diversity. A couple of years ago, after the worst of the recession had passed, an editor said: “I’m hiring now and I don’t recall how to hire. It’s been such a long time.” For so long, everybody was hunkered down, cutting staff, cutting training. Diversity was regarded as a “nice to have” as opposed to something that should be at the core of every organization, as part of your strategic plan for success and survival. A lot of the journalists of color that were in newsrooms left — through attrition, cutbacks. That includes many of the success stories, the people who could have contended for higher-level positions. Here’s a case study on the Philadelphia Inquirer, where even a robust effort to increase representation began to fall apart when the money stopped flowing.

Industry-wide, a generation or two was lost at the upper echelons, whether that’s on boards or executive teams. We’ve even had to convince organizations that diversity should be part of their strategic plan, in 2018.

To make real, lasting progress, this effort has to be about more than just numbers. Newsrooms need to be actually empowering and valuing people of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. It’s about creating a culture of inclusion that embraces the totality of what diverse journalists bring with them through life experience. Otherwise, people become disillusioned and leave. That’s why retention is so challenging for many news outlets and why so many journalists of color leave the business altogether.

We’re here to rebuild.

Why diverse newsrooms matter so much right now

Among other things, a lack of diversity completely erodes trust and faith in the institution of the press. The Trust Project, for example, has outlined eight indicators of trustworthy content, that is derived from research of both domestic and international news consumers. One of those indicators is diverse voices in a news organization. If we want to be seen as trustworthy and credible to the communities we seek to serve, diversity has been determined empirically as an indicator of trustworthy content. So even if the business case or the moral case for diversity doesn’t resonate with you, most journalists do care about being trustworthy and credible.

That’s why it’s not as simple as just hiring more people of color. We need a cultural embracing of diversity at the organizational level. You can’t have six people of color in a room but not have them bring their full selves to the journalism they want to do, the sources they select, the angles they want to take. The notion of objectivity in journalism is false; every journalist brings how they see the world. Let’s acknowledge that the white perspective can’t be the default perspective. It’s critical that we add various lenses to the camera which we use to see the world, just like a photographer does.

Those lenses matter in our coverage — and in our everyday interactions with each other, behind the scenes. As we cover divides in American society, we have to realize that we’re no better. We’re at a critical juncture; there’s a collective divisiveness going on in our own industry. We need to be hyper-aware and connected, open and humble, about our biases and how they affect our perceptions of the world. Journalists, it’s long past time to get this right.

What the Maynard 200 looks like

We’re starting with 26 people of color who bring a wide variety of different backgrounds, under the leadership of project director Odette Keeley. Our cohort includes so many talented folks who are the future of this industry, everyone from a manager at Newsday to an entrepreneur covering the Bangladeshi diaspora. It’s a wide spectrum.

We’ve focused on:

• Storytellers, because we need to look beyond the outdated boxes of reporter/editor and support everyone telling the stories of their communities.
• Managers, because we need to support diverse leaders in all kinds of news organizations, especially in non-traditional and ethnic media.
• Journalism entrepreneurs, because journalists of color need to chart their own course, and not be beholden to mainstream media.

Maynard 200 Fellow Michael Butler

Our vision is that this group will become part of a mini-movement, which then becomes a huge movement. It has to. There’s not a moment to waste. Our country needs these journalists — their perspectives, their leadership, and their innovation — more than ever.

The good news is, we’re well on our way. In December 2018, 26 Maynard 200 fellows met for their second weeklong training at USC’s Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism. The first week was back in July in Boulder, CO and run in partnership with Google News Lab.

This talented group worked through business challenges, learned how to navigate difficult conversations, had a day-long investigative bootcamp put on by IRE, and much more. It all culminated in more than 20 mentors from across the country flying in to meet with their assigned mentee.

Those in the management and storytelling tracks were assigned individual mentors who are top news executives, editors and journalists from a who’s who of media outlets and academic institutions. The entrepreneurs got a different kind of support: a virtual board of directors that will help them on an as-needed basis over the next year.

Sonya Ross of the AP gives a keynote address during Maynard 200. Ross also agreed to serve as a mentor for a Maynard 200 fellow.

Maynard 200 fellows pose with their mentors following graduation at USC’s Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism Dec. 13, 2018.

The days of diversity and inclusion being viewed as a “nice to have” are over, whether news executives want to believe it or not. We are living in a society that is rapidly changing, and if we want to be credible, trustworthy, and grow audience, then the time for viewing people of color as anomalies is over. We have to be at the table and in the meetings, where our perspectives won’t just be tolerated but embraced.

Maynard is here to help, to push and advocate for what we know will help our newsrooms — and in doing so, help the craft of journalism and the people it seeks to serve.

Evelyn Hsu and Martin G. Reynolds are the co-executive directors of The Maynard Institute, which promotes diversity in the news media through improved coverage, hiring, business practices and training programs that equip journalists with leadership, multimedia skills and subject expertise for news organizations across platforms.

More from this series: How Outlier Media Works for Detroit

We Can’t Afford to Wait for More Diverse Newsrooms was originally published in News Integrity Initiative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Jessica Clark, Dot Connector Studio
Molly de Aguiar, News Integrity Initiative

Next week, several hundred people from national, community, and place-based foundations, as well as newsrooms and other nonprofits, will come together at the Knight Media Forum in Miami. The conference focuses on philanthropy’s role in strengthening local news and information, which is essential for healthy communities and a vibrant democracy. We believe there’s an important conversation missing from the conference schedule: a discussion of the power imbalance inherent in funder-grantee relationships, and what we can do about it.

Funders wield immense power over the field of nonprofit news, from what they choose to value and support, to how the boundaries of “journalism” are defined, to how they design their systems and processes. Any nonprofit that has ever tried to figure out how to get its foot in the door with a funder, or spent countless hours on its application, and months waiting for a decision, already knows it can be relentlessly discouraging to try to get funding. And once they get it, hanging onto it for more than a year or two can seem like a never-ending battle.

(Trust us: nonprofits reading this right now are nodding their heads.)

What would a more equitable relationship look like between funders and nonprofits? We explored this topic in a workshop recently at SRCCON:POWER, a conference that examined “how power operates in our newsrooms, in our relationships with communities, and in the algorithms and technologies that are reshaping our work.”

Given our backgrounds working as media funders or advisors, as well as grantees, we understand the challenges from both perspectives. Ahead of SRCCON:POWER, we asked people — whether they were attending the conference or not— to submit questions and comments, as well as stories about sticky situations they’d encountered. The bad news is that folks had A LOT to say about funder frustrations. The good news is that there are many relatively easy strategies that would go a long way toward building trusting partnerships.

Before delving into those, a little bit of background, particularly for those who aren’t seasoned “media” funders (or perhaps don’t think of themselves as media funders at all).

Funding Media Today

Foundations have supported public media for decades, especially in the U.S. But now there are many calls for them to support other forms of nonprofit news and information. This change is a response to the crisis in business models for news — especially on the local level — and also the recent rise in concern about how social platforms amplify misinformation and propaganda. Journalists and publishers need to learn to work with funders in new ways.

Additionally:

• Journalism is not explicitly defined as a “charitable purpose” in the tax code, which means that many foundations are still working to figure out how and why to support it.
• Only a few funders — most notably the Knight Foundation — are explicitly organized to support journalism.
• Many other foundations fund media more generally in order to achieve their program goals — but not all of that is for news outlets or projects.

And as is the case throughout the social sector, there aren’t nearly enough philanthropic dollars to meet the needs. In the case of local news, the catastrophic loss of journalism jobs and whole newsrooms is significantly outpacing funders’ ability to support solutions.

What Does This Mean for Nonprofits?

Given that the media funding space is fairly new for many foundations, as well as to the nonprofit news organizations sprouting in the aftermath of the industry’s crash, writing grant proposals for journalism projects and outlets can be an exploratory process. In other words, both funders and grantees are learning the ropes.

Moreover:

• Program officers and foundations might not be familiar with journalistic culture or ethical guidelines about newsroom independence.
• And because foundations have limited dollars, they may only provide short-term funding, or emphasize sustainability without fully understanding what that looks like (and what resources are required) for local news and information.

All of these factors and more can create friction and power imbalances between funders and grantees.

Potholes in the Road to Trusting, Equitable Partnerships

So what are some of the common frustrations we heard from people who attended our workshop or submitted stories to us?

Nonprofits are mystified by funders’ processes.
If organizations are relatively new to fundraising, they don’t know how to begin a relationship, they don’t know what to expect during an application process, and they have no sense of how or why decisions are made. Even seasoned veterans feel left in the dark about decision-making processes.

Patient, long-term support is rare.
Too often, funders require proof of impact on an unreasonable timeline, and without providing resources for learning and evaluation. More importantly, much of the funding is restricted to program support, rather than giving organizations maximum flexibility to do their work with general operating support. And journalists, trained to value independence above all, bridle at the notion of being measured.

Decisions take forever.
Funders do not have processes in place for responding quickly with grants and other resources to shifting political or social developments. This is especially challenging for media as the landscape continues to transform rapidly, not to mention the intensified political attacks on press freedoms. We also heard a related and growing frustration with funders who have approved a grant but take months to make a payment.

Who you know matters more than what you know.
The same organizations — the ones with the most resources and know how to “play the game” — get the funding over and over again. This risk-averse approach to funding all but ensures that marginalized communities will continue to be cut off from any meaningful access to capital.

Say something, risk losing it all.
And perhaps the biggest issue of all that prevents more equitable relationships: there are few safe spaces for giving honest feedback, no meaningful way to challenge funders’ processes, decisions, or power without risking losing funding permanently.

To be clear, nonprofits should have to answer for their mistakes and weaknesses too, including failing to research foundation priorities, and proposing ideas that lack clear and compelling strategies.

But this is an open letter to funders about what a more equitable relationship can look like with the nonprofits you support. So let’s get to those recommendations.

Small, Medium and Bold Strategies Toward Sharing Power

We said in the beginning of this essay that there are a number of simple strategies funders could deploy to build more trust:

Baby Steps

• Increase transparency on your website and through all your communications channels (including in-person meetings between program staff and applicants) about your foundation’s processes and priorities.
• Design an easier application process: fewer questions and requirements, especially for small grants; allow organizations to submit proposals that they’ve submitted to other funders.
• Require less in-depth reporting. Do not force grantees into time-consuming data collection. It is easier — and usually more enlightening — to check-in occasionally with grantees in person or over the phone to hear how they are doing during their grant term, rather than learning about their work through their written reports.
• Commit to paying grants within a certain quick timeframe after the decision has been made; share this commitment through all of your communications channels.
• Host occasional in-person or virtual office hours to field questions, reinforce priorities, explain processes, and increase your exposure to new people and ideas.
• Be aware that asking grantees to participate in convenings or funder-driven collaborations takes time, money and valuable attention, and compensate them accordingly. Fund process, not just projects.

Now Tackle Some Harder Issues to Signal Your Commitment to Equity

• Rather than designating only a small percentage of your grant for overhead, commit to grants that are general operating support only. If your interests in a nonprofit’s work are specific, you can give them operating support to maximize their flexibility and chance for success, while developing a relationship that focuses on and communicates about specific aspects of the work.
• Commit to multi-year grants (three or more years), and pay the full amount upfront if possible. Like your elected officials, whom you would rather see do their jobs instead of always fundraising, multi-year grants empower your grantees to concentrate on their work without being dragged down by worrying about where the funding will come from. Multi-year grants positively impact the way organizations plan, and give them enough runway and stability to innovate. Paying the full amount upfront requires some careful budgeting but can have outsized impact on the organization, particularly for larger grants.
• Design or tap into mechanisms for honest, anonymous feedback that collects input (at least once a year) from grantees, organizations whose applications were rejected, and any other group over which you as the funder hold significant power. Publish the results, and publicly and frequently document the steps you are taking to address the areas that need improvement.
• Commit to substantially increasing the proportion of grants in your portfolio to organizations with leaders and constituents that represent the true diversity of the communities you serve. Collect data and publicly share the results. This requires you to re-examine the barriers you may have in place that keep marginalized communities from initiating a relationship with you. It also requires you to explore the impacts on groups that have been largely shut out of foundation funding, and the solutions for rectifying those harms.

OK, Really Go for It!

• Share control of grantmaking funds and decisions with the communities you serve. Trust them to know what support they most need and how to lead. Document what you are learning together, so that other funders can emulate you.
• Invite grantees to regularly weigh in on a range of decisions: investment tools, potential strategic shifts, foundation processes, and more. Publicly document the feedback and the ways in which you are incorporating it into the foundation’s decisions.
• Give community members and grantees seats on the board. In this way, foundation boards cannot become divorced from and indifferent to the day-to-day challenges that nonprofits face.
• Fully align your foundation’s investment policies with your mission, so that none of the investments are directly or indirectly undermining the work of your grantees (e.g. funders focused on climate change whose endowment is invested in fossil fuels).

Now What?

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, of course, for what steps funders could take to share power more meaningfully with the communities they intend to serve. Rather, it is meant to provoke discussion, and acknowledge that funders hold disproportionate power in ways they are often unaware of, or unwilling to admit. The role that media funders are playing is just part of a much larger critical discussion about the undemocratic nature of foundation giving.

You might have noticed some themes around philanthropy being more transparent, soliciting regular, but anonymous (or otherwise safe) feedback and documenting it, warts and all, for the public — as well as the ways in which funders are willing to take that feedback seriously.

These measures alone would go a long way toward building trust while undertaking the harder, longer work of examining and re-inventing processes and shifting mindsets toward equity.

Just as many funders exhort journalists to be more transparent and responsive in order to increase trust and fortify democracy, they must be willing to examine their own practices and beliefs, so that they are not complicit in perpetuating the very same structural imbalances that fuel inequality.

Jessica Clark is the founder and director of Dot Connector Studio, a Philadelphia-based strategy and production firm that works with funders and grantees to navigate the turbulent waters of media and technology en route to high-impact media projects.

Molly de Aguiar is the Managing Director of the News Integrity Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, a philanthropic initiative with a vision for journalism that serves as a force for building trust, empathy and solutions in communities.

At the News Integrity Initiative, we’re launching a series of profiles of NII grantees in order to highlight their groundbreaking work. We can’t think of a better way to kick off this series than with Outlier Media in Detroit, founded by Sarah Alvarez. Outlier Media expands our imagination about what information is valuable to people and how to deliver it to them. Sarah has created an elegant model that uses some automation to reach large audiences, while also offering community members the chance to talk to and get help from real human beings. It is a model that offers seemingly endless opportunities for plugging all sorts of data into it for the benefit of communities, which is why we hope to see it both fully funded in Detroit and tested in many other places.

Thanks to Lindsay Muscato for conducting this interview.

Q. Can you give us an overview of your model for journalism in Detroit, and why it’s different from a lot of what’s out there?

When journalists talk about audience engagement, and listening to their readers, they don’t often mean listening to them one-on-one, on a daily basis. But here at Outlier that’s exactly what we do. I set out to build a service for low-income news consumers — because their information needs are ignored by most types of media, which means that accountability suffers. In the process of building out an organization, we’ve realized there are two things that makes us different: 1) we are focused on our news product having utility over every other quality and 2) the more democratic that news gathering and distribution is, the more valuable the news product is.

What that looks like day-to-day is texting with the people of Detroit and making sure their information needs are met.

It’s a model that takes a lot of work and a lot of data, but it’s the best way we’ve found to deliver valuable information to the people we serve, while holding those in power accountable.

Q. Tell us more about how your model works. What does Outlier do, and what’s the origin story behind the model?

We fill information gaps, meaning that we let the needs of our audience determine our coverage. Our two beats right now are housing and utilities such as electric and gas, and water. We try to make sure the information we deliver is both valuable and actionable because with fewer local journalists in Detroit, we believe we have to distribute some of our mission. In our case, we can redistribute the watchdogging function by giving people the information they need to make sure their landlords, the city and the county are following the rules. We follow up with anybody who wants more or extra info or who has something they think a reporter should know or can help with.

Q. Why text messages?

It wasn’t hard to figure out that we needed to use text messages. Traditional news organizations don’t reach a significant number of low-income news consumers, so we knew, from the beginning, that our outreach needed to be much more direct. We buy lists of cell phone numbers from a data broker, and then “cold text” Detroiters with an intro to our service. If they want to engage (and about 40 percent of them do), they enter their home address.

The really hard part was figuring out what information, deliverable via text, would be both valuable and actionable. So for that challenge, we turned to United Way’s 211 service, for clues to what Detroiters needed most. Our first year, it turned out to be housing, housing, and housing. Which, fortunately, is a topic I’d covered before, and a topic with a lot of public data.

This is where it got even harder, though. All of that data? It wasn’t in one place, or one city or county department. It certainly wasn’t in one format. You can’t Google these kind of things, they’re not answerable in an easy way. I was not a data reporter before I started Outlier, but I had to learn that. Now we have a combination of public data, FOIAs, web scrapers and scripts that connect them. (Now we also have Katlyn Alo Alapati, who’s writing scripts that allow us to update so much automatically!)

Q. What are your interactions like with readers? What kinds of information do they receive?

When we first started, we were sending people data about the property where they lived. The tax auction in Wayne County is a giant driver of displacement, and a lot of people are renting and don’t even know if the house that they’re living in is on the tax auction block. If it’s sold, they can be evicted by the new owners, and that happens pretty commonly. We were giving people info on things like the owner, auction status, and blight tickets on the property.

Now we’re able to do much more. The choices are to: check the tax status of your home; rental inspection and information on your rights; electric, gas or water service issues; questions about a vacant property; and then the last option is “I don’t need this info right now.” Each of those take people down a different path and they get different data depending on what their information need is. The replies are one-on-one, it’s via text. It’s like, “Hi this is Sarah from Outlier, tell us what you need.” We usually keep interacting over text but we also give our phone number, and some people give us a call.

These days, we reach about 220 Detroiters each week, which means we’re in regular touch with more people than newsrooms many times our size.

Q. Do you have any advice for other news orgs that might want to take this on?

I’ll be honest — I don’t have a lot of faith that news organizations want to do this but just haven’t figured out how. It’s that they haven’t figured out why it’s worth their while. Low-income communities and low-income news consumers are still undervalued. It’s a rare news organization that says, “Yes, I want to learn to serve a bigger portion of my community, and I’m willing to change things in order to do it.” It’s very hard for most news organizations to give up power over what they think is important.

It’s a rare news organization that says, “Yes, I want to learn to serve a bigger portion of my community, and I’m willing to change things in order to do it.” It’s very hard for most news organizations to give up power over what they think is important.

Outlier is based on the idea that the needs of our community are what drive us. What I think is important is not what I’m going to report on. It’s not about the news cycle, or my expertise or what I find interesting. Trust me, if I did not have to report on utilities I wouldn’t. It’s so hard. But unless we redistribute the watchdog function so that everyone can be acting on the same information and making choices that increase accountability, we’re not going to make any change. Some places, it will. Maybe the Washington Post or the New York Times. But here in local media, that’s not enough… one bad story doesn’t change much. It’s going to have to be really bad. And should people have to wait for things to be so bad that they’re worth a major investigation?

Q. Can you say more about that aspect of Outlier’s mission, making sure that people don’t have to wait for situations to get really bad?

One thing I’ve talked about with other reporters who do this kind of work — like the folks at City Bureau, or Spaceship or Jiquanda from Flint Beat — is that, when we’re doing our jobs, our communities value us because we are making a problem less. We are preventing a problem or mitigating the effects of a problem. It’s almost like preventive journalism. It’s not that something terrible happens and then we’re writing about it and then maybe something changes. We’re reporting on communities that face a lot of challenges, and if we can make some of those challenges less awful, by providing good information and keeping everyone honest, and making sure there’s consistent watchdogging going on, that’s why we’re valued. It’s not because we’re something great to read.

How Outlier Media Works for Detroit was originally published in News Integrity Initiative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.