Community Foundation Support for Local Journalism Is Growing—and This Funder Is Leading the Way

With local news in peril, a cursory review of developments in the journalism space over the past few months suggests that community foundations could be the sector’s sleeping philanthropic giant.

Earlier this year, American Journalism Project CEO Sarabeth Berman told me that her organization has partnered with several community foundations “to help them assess their communities’ information needs and craft business plans to incubate new nonprofit newsrooms that can fill the void left by the decline of commercial news and play a powerful counterweight to misinformation.”

In late March, a report from Report for America found that “one of the most notable trends is community foundations creating structures designed to make philanthropic support broader and more enduring.” The report identified at least 10 cases across the country in which community foundations “have now set up special funds to attract and manage support for local journalism over the long term.”

Now comes word that the Silicon Valley Community Foundation has announced the winners of its inaugural Local Journalism Fund—over $300,000 in total funding for 13 organizations. Launched in March 2020, the fund seeks to build stronger and more engaged communities and address inequities faced by communities of color, including Black and Indigenous residents. Recipients include EASTSIDE Magazine, San Jose Spotlight and Mosaic High School, which offers professional training in journalism at San Jose State University to high school students from diverse communities.

“The focus on local news, stories and facts is what will help lead our country to real change,” said SVCF president and CEO Nicole Taylor. “It is what will bring about a better understanding of who our neighbors are. It will help change the negative narratives that have been perpetuated in the media for decades about communities of color. Prioritizing equity in local journalism will allow us to celebrate the good that is in our communities. We need that good to fuel us for the challenges ahead, and to finally get our country to a place where all communities can thrive.”

A “critically important role”

Community foundations have “played a critically important role in advancing quality news and information, and are increasingly key partners in inspiring news collaborations, bringing their local expertise and convening power to the table,” wrote Sarah Armour-Jones, the author of Media Impact Funders’ “Community Foundations & Journalism: Funding Data from 2009-2019.”

Citing data from Candid’s Foundation Maps for Media Funding, Armour-Jones noted that 26 U.S.-based community foundations gave a total of $2.6 million in journalism grants in 2009. By 2014, that total had more than doubled to $6.5 million. Four years later, 80 community foundations gave $26.3 million—an increase of 1,000% since 2009. All told, 140 community foundations have given $109 million in journalism grants (excluding journalism education) to 597 recipients between 2009 and 2019.

SVCF was the sector’s runaway leader. According to Armor-Jones, SVCF gave $44.4 million in journalism grants from 2009 to 2019. The next nine largest community foundations gave $34 million combined. These foundations were the San Francisco Foundation, Foundation for the Carolinas, Boston Foundation, New York Community Trust, Rochester Area Community Foundation, the Pittsburgh Foundation, Seattle Foundation, Miami Foundation and Tulsa Community Foundation. The $78.5 million given by the top 10 funders represented 72% of total journalism grants made by community foundations between 2009 and 2019.

Armour-Jones noted that “because community foundation grants are reported without the distinction between donor-advised giving, the available data makes it hard to determine how much local journalism is being supported by staff who oversee discretionary funds and how much is directed via donor-advised funds.”

Discretionary initiatives

The Silicon Valley Community Foundation stands out for its history of discretionary projects earmarked for local journalism outlets. This support dates back to 2014, when the Knight Foundation selected SVCF to be part of an initiative to help community foundations identify strategies to strengthen local journalism ecosystems.

That work yielded two key programs. First, in collaboration with New American Media, the foundation launched a yearlong fellowship for local journalists of color at ethnic media outlets reporting on the implementation of the Common Core standards framework. “Though many of the journalists had previously worked on the education beat, many did not know about Common Core and did not understand the school district structure in our region,” said Mauricio Palma, the foundation’s director of community building. “The fellowship became a valuable skill-building training and forum for journalists to exchange ideas and network.”

The foundation also partnered with the San Francisco-based Renaissance Journalism, which provides training, technical assistance, consultation and grants to journalists and journalism organizations with backing from funders like the Ford Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation and the California Endowment. SVCF also supported the development of the Bay Area Media Collaborative with multiple grants, yielding a series of journalistic projects focused on the region’s housing crisis.

Renaissance Journalism and SVCF went on to fund six projects focused on the 2020 Census. Last year, the SVCF joined other foundations to provide grants to 20 organizations working on local journalism during the pandemic through Renaissance Journalism’s Emergency Response Fund.

“Inform, engage and activate”

SVCF’s own Local Journalism Fund benefited from early support from the Knight Foundation. In 2008, Knight launched its Community Information Challenge to help community and place-based foundations, including SVCF, meet their communities’ information needs via strategies like rethinking public media, expanding the reach of broadband access and increasing digital and media literacy.

Equipped with support from Knight, SVCF leaders engaged local journalists, community leaders, donors and funders around critical regional issues. Palma told me that “it became clear that while income inequality had exacerbated deeply rooted inequities and social injustices in Silicon Valley, historically mainstream news media continued to fail to cover the issues that matter to the communities most impacted by those same inequities and injustices.”

And so the SVCF created a local journalism fund as part of its Community Action Grantmaking program, a new grantmaking program that it launched in late 2020 in response to recommendations from community partners. “We went back to journalists and community leaders, gathered their feedback, and made a commitment to invest in our region’s local media ecosystem to inform, engage and activate Black, Indigenous and other communities of color in civic participation,” Palma said.

The foundation looked for applicants with a clear racial justice focus and plans to center the communities served in project design and implementation. The SVCF gave priority to organizations led by people of color or Black or Indigenous leaders, and to allied organizations, and those with annual budgets under $1 million. Check out the inaugural winners here. The foundation will begin accepting applications for its next round of funding in the first quarter of 2022.

“We believe that accurate and inspiring community stories play an important role in informing, engaging and activating individuals and groups to participate in our democracy,” Palma said. “Our fund will strengthen local media nonprofits working to amplify untold or under-told stories created by, about, and for communities of color.”

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