Page 23 – Democracy Fund

Report

Communities Of Practice

Angelica Das Edited By Jessica Clark

April 26, 2017

At a time when news and journalism are experiencing significant disruption, Democracy Fund is seeking to better understand and equip news outlets and reporters for public engagement. Individual newsrooms are ill-equipped to deal with large-scale transformations in platforms, news economics, and audience habits. Culture shifts are difficult to achieve and often happen from the bottom up or the outside in. We recognize that new solutions are needed across organizations that can be compared, replicated, scaled, and evaluated.

Communities of Practice (CoPs) provide a structure in which this activity can happen adjacent to or outside of legacy settings. This paper examines the theory and evolution of CoPs and explores in greater detail the nascent CoPs developing around engaged journalism. The appendix provides a checklist for building and grouping CoPs.

Democracy Fund is committed to supporting a vibrant media and the public square. By examining how CoPs have developed in the field of engaged journalism to date, we can better understand how a community of practice provides useful structures for learning, growth, and innovation. We can also learn how the ideas can be applied to other communities in journalism, including leaders at local news hubs, media business innovators, and other cohorts where new practices are emerging.

We welcome your feedback on these ideas and look forward to hearing more from you about how communities of practice are being adopted in your newsrooms and communities.

Back to Ideas

Report

Supporting Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion In Journalism

Katie Donnelly And Jessica Clark

June 19, 2018

Efforts in journalism to support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) over the past decade have been ineffective in creating dynamic change in the stories, sources, and staff of news outlets in the United States.

Clearly, the dramatic financial downturn in newspaper advertising revenue has placed strain on all legacy journalism organizations. However, those dynamics alone do not explain the persistent gap in employment opportunities between minorities and their white counterparts seeking jobs in journalism following college graduation. Or excuse the historic leadership failure of large and profitable outlets to fulfill their promise to diversify their ranks, which has an outsized impact on communities of color given the dearth of opportunity at smaller newsrooms.

The purpose of this report is to begin to understand philanthropic interventions supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion in journalism from 2009 – 2015. As a foundation new to DEI funding in journalism, which has not made any grants in this area during the period under consideration, we plan to use this report to identify major funders and recipients of institutional grants.

This report represents our first attempt to get at this information using data from Foundation Maps for Media Funding, created by the Foundation Center for Media Impact Funders. We are aware of the many limits of this data set due to self-reporting and challenges in categorization. Even with those challenges we are proud of the work that Katie Donnelly and Jessica Clark at Dot Connector Studio have done so far to illuminate larger trends and we plan to use this report as a launchpad into further analysis of the organizations supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion in journalism.

We are already getting started. We are partnering with funders including the Knight Foundation and Open Society Foundations to support data training from the Ida B. Wells Society; News Integrity Initiative and Gates Foundation in leadership training from the Maynard Institute; Ford Foundation to support the National Association of Black Journalists; Google News Initiative with the revamp of the ASNE Diversity survey led by Dr. Meredith Clark; Nathan Cummings in support of DEI initiatives at CUNY; MacArthur and McCormick Foundations with new approaches in Chicago like City Bureau and the Obsidian Collection; and Heising-Simons Foundation in paid internship with the Emma Bowen Foundation.

At Democracy Fund, our approach to journalism is focused on building trust and engagement. We break our Engaged Journalism Strategy into three tracks focused on (I) Audience-Driven Storytelling, (II) Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and (III) promoting Transparency.

Through our Audience-Driven Storytelling work we invest in innovations and projects that support journalists in reorienting their work towards a focus on the concerns of their audience. This involves building inclusion into newsroom practices, supporting universities as teaching hospitals for innovation, creating communities of practice around engagement, and developing new practices, people, and products hard-wired for engagement.

Our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work focuses on improving the diversity of sources, stories, and staff in news outlets. This work involves creating an inclusive environment at news outlets; recruiting, retaining, and promoting diverse staff, including leadership; and working to develop and sustain minority ownership of media properties.

In our Transparency work, we seek to help news outlets and the public better understand one another. We are committed to supporting innovations in engaged journalism through grantmaking, partnerships, and collaboration to strengthen the Fourth Estate and the democratic principles on which our nation is founded. This report is part of that commitment. We will continue to seek opportunities to collaborate with news outlets, journalism support organizations, and partner funders to achieve this goal.

Back to Ideas

Systems Map

Digital Democracy Initiative Core Story

Paul Waters

May 15, 2020

Our democracy is a complex political system made of an intricate web of institutions, interest groups, individual leaders, and citizens that are all connected in countless ways. Every attempt to influence and improve some aspect of this complex system produces a ripple of other reactions. To identify the root causes of problems we want to address, find intervention points, and design strategies to affect positive change, we use a methodology called systems mapping. We create systems maps in collaboration with broad and inclusive sets of stakeholders, and use them to design and then assess our grantmaking strategies. They are intended to provide a shared language, creating new opportunities for dialogue, negotiation, and ideas that can improve the health of our democracy.

This systems map describes how digital tools and technologies have transformed our public square in recent years for better and for worse. The flow of news, information and civic discourse is now largely governed by five major companies: Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Following numerous high-profile scandals, the public has grown concerned about issues of discrimination, mis/disinformation, online hate and harassment, lack of transparency, voter suppression, and foreign interference in our elections through the platforms. The platforms’ lackluster response to these crises suggests that we need to build a strong movement to force the platforms to become accountable not just to their shareholders, but to the public.

The map consists of three interlocking loops.

Platform Power & Profitability describes how the platforms have come to dominate digital communications at the expense of the public square’s overall health and transparency.
Discriminatory Targeting lays out the ways in which platform tools have been used to weaken our democracy, spread hateful content and disinformation, and have exacerbated longstanding racial, economic, and gender inequalities.
The Decline of Commercial News shows why and how news publishers have been unable to compete with platforms for attention and profits in the digital age, and what the loss of journalism means for the public square.

Back to Ideas

Report

State of the Congress: Staff Perspectives on Institutional Capacity in the House and Senate

Kathy Goldschmidt

August 8, 2017

“State of the Congress: Staff Perspectives on Institutional Capacity in the House and Senate” reveals that senior congressional staff have deep concerns about important aspects of congressional operations and performance.

Back to Ideas

Blog

Mapping Systems is… Complex

Joe Goldman

March 31, 2016

“Systems thinking” and the practice of mapping complex systems increasingly looks like the next big trend in philanthropy. Popping up at conferences and in reports from respected experts and leaders, a systems view has the advantage of recognizing the inherent complexity of the topics that philanthropy often attempts to address.

The Democracy Fund adopted systems thinking when it launched last year and has spent the past year experimenting with a methodology to map the dynamic patterns and causal relationships that shape how systems involved with local journalism, elections, and Congress are influencing the health of our democracy. Our efforts have born significant fruit, but it has certainly not been easy.

In the spirit of collaboration and transparent learning, we thought that it would be useful to share some of the things that we’ve experienced during the process of developing system maps.

In an earlier blog post, I shared a bit about why we chose to adopt a systems approach. Our hope was that this orientation would help the Democracy Fund to avoid the trap of oversimplifying the challenges facing our democracy and provide us with tools to have greater leverage in strengthening it.

We recently published our first systems map focused on the health of local news and participation. As we continue to refine this and other maps, we are beginning to think about what they can tell us about finding leverage to change important incentives that are driving behavior. You can learn more about our approach to systems thinking here.

When we began the process of developing our systems maps, we hired an external evaluator (the wonderful Robin Kane) to travel with us on this journey and help to identify major learning along the way. Robin has so far produced two interim reports to help us check in on how our experience with systems mapping is lining up with what our initial expectations had been when we went into the process.

Several major themes jump out from Robin’s reports:

Shifts in Perceived Outcomes: As we wait to see other benefits of the process, our team has increasingly seen the value of our mapping exercise in its ability to provide us with a sophisticated means to communicate with our board and external partners about the environment in which we are working. The complexity of the map helps us to explain that there are no easy answers and that responses require multi-pronged approaches. It exposes the underlying logic of our strategies and helps to reveal where there are gaps in our analysis. The maps have also helped us to communicate with potential partners who can see their own work in the maps. We continue to hope that the mapping will help us to more effectively identify potential leverage to create change in the system, but the jury is still out on that front.
Interrogating a Map: We have been surprised how difficult it is for board members and other advisors to dig into and learn from a map outside of the context of a proposed strategy. Without the outline of a potential strategy, it is hard to know where greater detail or a narrower “zoom” is required because so many subjective choices are made during a mapping process about what to include and what to exclude for communication purposes. As a consequence, we’ve had to rethink the sequencing of our process and how we engage with our board around both the maps and our emerging strategies.
Confusion and Doubt: Ongoing questions and doubts about whether mapping will yield significant new insights have dogged our systems mapping from the beginning. More art than science, the process requires a faith that the time put in will yield more new insights than other approaches to strategy development. As we have been “building the plane, while we fly it,” we have had to cope with not having a clear road map about how to get to the next phase of our work.
Progress and Growth: While the process of developing maps has been time consuming and difficult, it has forced each of our program teams to think hard about the problems on which they are working and the solutions that they have pursued. Each team has consulted with dozens of experts and leaders, sharpening our overall understanding of the issues on which we are working. A strong sense of pride on what has been accomplished came across strongly from staff interviews by our evaluator.

In the coming months, we will complete additional maps on Congress, our election system, and other key topics. From each map, we will develop and approve strategies for the Democracy Fund’s work in the coming years. As we do so, our intention is to continue to learn from the process and share our learnings with you as we do.

Back to Ideas

Blog

New Faces at the Democracy Fund

Joe Goldman

April 6, 2016

2016 has proved to be an exciting year so far for the whole team here at the Democracy Fund. Since our launch, we have been hard at work building our new organization – setting up internal systems, approving new grants, refining our strategies, and so much more. We are proud of how much progress we’ve made so far, and are thrilled to see much of our planning work begin to reach the implementation stage.

As an organization, we believe that strengthening our democracy requires the involvement of diverse voices from across the political spectrum and from all walks of life. The Democracy Fund team is a group of remarkably passionate, dedicated people who strive every day to make our democracy work better. We are delighted to welcome several new members to our team:

Pat Christen is the newest member of the Democracy Fund’s board of directors. Pat is a managing director of The Omidyar Group, and serves as a senior advisor to Pierre and Pam Omidyar. She brings curiosity, a sense of humor, and a commitment to high accountability to her role, which focuses on cultivating environments of learning, innovation and impact across all Omidyar Group organizations and initiatives. Prior to joining The Omidyar Group, Pat served as President and CEO of HopeLab. She was President and Executive Director of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation for 15 years and also served as President of the Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation She has written, studied, and lectured on social and health issues both in the U.S. and abroad. Pat is a graduate of Stanford University, where she studied biology and political science. She is also a mother of four, a role that deeply inspires her work.
Terry Ao Minnis joined us as a Senor Fellow & Consultant for our Responsive Politics Program, bringing valuable insight into the current voting rights community and important dynamics shaping our elections. Terry serves as the director of the census and voting programs for Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC), co-chairs the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights’ Census Task Force, and sat on the U.S Department of Commerce’s 2010 Census Advisory Committee from 2002 through 2011. Terry has been counsel on numerous amicus briefs filed before the Supreme Court on voting rights cases, including Shelby County v. Holder and was one of the key leaders in campaigns on reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act in 2006 and on Census 2010. She received her Juris Doctor, cum laude, from American University Washington College of Law and her Bachelor’s degree in economics at the University of Chicago.
Hugo Castro joined us as our Operations Manager from the Hispanic Business Initiative Fund, where he provided financial, accounting, tax, and human resources services to over 400 entrepreneurs and business owners. He graduated from the University of South Florida Business School with a Bachelors in International Business and a minor in Marketing.
Chris Crawford joined us as a Program Assistant for our Governance Program from the Susan B. Anthony List, where he worked as a government affairs associate. During the 2014 midterm elections, Chris was Assistant National Field Director for the organization’s Super PAC, leading a GOTV operation that made over 1 million live voter contacts across four states He has worked on multiple campaigns at the local and federal level in his home state of New Hampshire and graduated from The George Washington University with a B.A. in Political Science.
Jessica Harris joined us as a Communications Associate from Third Way, where as marketing manager, she ran the distribution network that pumped organizational ideas into the policy world, amplified the debate using digital media, and oversaw the planning and execution of hundreds of highly regarded events on Capitol Hill and across Washington, D.C. aimed at advancing the case for a pragmatic, solutions-oriented U.S. politics. Jessica has worked on multiple campaigns at the local and federal level in her home state of Colorado and graduated from the University of Colorado with a B.A. in Political Science.
Roland Kennedy joined us as a Grants Management Associate from the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program where as a contract and grants associate he gained domestic and international grant making experience and worked with diverse grantee organizations and donors. Roland obtained his BA in Global Studies from Villanova University, an MS in Global Studies from Northeastern University, and is a candidate for an MPhil from the University of Pennsylvania.
Karla McLean joined us as a Network Associate on our communications team, having previously served as as an Intern and then Special Projects Coordinator here at the Democracy Fund. She also gained experience through internships with the Media, Culture, and Special Initiatives division of The MacArthur Foundation and the Illinois State Senate Policy and Budget Committee, where she helped draft legislative bills, communicated with stakeholders and senators, and analyzed the state budget. Karla graduated from the University of Chicago with a Masters in Public Policy.

Looking ahead, we expect to continue to add talent and capacity across the organization. The Democracy Fund is in the process of recruiting and hiring for several positions and we will keep you updated as we continue to grow.

Back to Ideas

Blog

Strengthening our Systems Thinking Muscles

Donata Secondo

April 20, 2016

Democracy Fund’s President, Joe Goldman, recently wrote on our blog about some of the benefits and difficulties our organization has found while integrating a systems lens into our work. He noted how systems thinking, designed to help us grapple with complexity, can at times be awfully complex itself. As a member of the Impact and Learning team, I’ve been helping Democracy Fund make sense of what it means to be systems thinkers, and Joe’s words rang particularly true for me.

Working with the incredible systems and complexity coaches at The Omidyar Group, the Impact and Learning team has been supporting program staff in developing their systems maps, and shepherding their systems-based strategic planning processes. We’ve been alongside the teams grappling with what’s been hard—but we’ve also had a front-row seat to see the wins. Like our evaluator, I’ve seen our teams’ pride in their work, and try everyday to help the teams further recognize how much we’ve learned and how our systems skills have developed.

I had a strong moment of recognition of this progress recently when Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) released their Guide to Systems Grantmaking. This resource is designed to provide grantmakers and nonprofits a toolkit of essential systems assessment tools, frameworks, and best practices—and it is yet another piece of evidence of the growing community of philanthropies taking an interest in systems thinking. As it does on other topics, GEO can continue to be a convener for this group, collect our stories, and help us share our lessons learned.

GEO’s Systems Grantmaking Resource Guide suggests, just as we’ve found, that it takes time to understand and internalize a systems mindset. At first glance, I was overwhelmed by the wide variety of tools and practices it recommended. I learned of several new approaches I’m eager to play with in our work, augmenting the causal loop systems mapping we’ve started with. But, after I dug a little deeper, what struck me more was the complementarity and interconnection of these tools. I realized that we’ve already been engaging in many more systems practices than I’d been aware. SAT analysis, leverage points, and systemic action research are already part of our approach, flowing naturally from one another as we mapped systems. Even aspects of our grantmaking approach I had considered distinct from our systems work—our interest in scenario planning, for example—are logically tied to the systems thinking frame.

When introducing new staff to Democracy Fund’s systems practice, I describe it as fundamentally a sense-making process. While systems mapping is a great tool for new learning—particularly when designed, as our process has been, to be deeply participatory—it has also been powerful in helping to bring into sharper focus what we already knew and to align assumptions across our organization and with key partners. GEO’s Guide to Systems Grantmaking, it turns out, served the same purpose for me. It brought to life what has been hard to see in the sometimes tedious day-to-day of map-building: just how strong our systems muscles are becoming.

We’ve got a lot yet to learn to get to “expert” level on GEO’s self assessment, and I know the challenges our evaluator observed will continue into the future. But, armed with new tools and deeper connections to others in the field, I’m all the more confident we’ll get there.

Back to Ideas

Blog

Welcoming New Teammates

Joe Goldman

May 16, 2016

As we near the Democracy Fund’s two-year Independence anniversary, we are delighted to welcome new staff members to our team. With each new team member, we celebrate the opportunity to enfold new experience, diversity, and perspective to our efforts to ensure the American people come first in our political system. We are pleased to introduce the following new members of our team:

Josh Stearns will be joining the Democracy Fund as Associate Director for the Informed Participation later this month. He currently serves as the Director of Journalism and Sustainability at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, where he currently leads the Local News Lab. Josh previously led national advocacy campaigns in support of freedom of expression and media diversity; most recently he served as the Press Freedom Director at Free Press, a national nonprofit fighting for all people’s rights to connect and communicate. As an award-winning journalist, Josh has published numerous reports on local news, public media, and media policy. He is a founding board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and served on the board of the Student Conservation Association. Josh has a B.A. in Writing from St. Lawrence University and a M.A. in American Studies from UMass Amherst.
Freddie Salas recently joined us as a Program Assistant with the Responsive Politics team. He most recently served as an AmeriCorps VISTA at the Fredericksburg Regional Continuum of Care where he worked to improve the organization’s services for the homeless and homeless veteran populations. Before joining AmeriCorps, Freddie volunteered with the Greater Fredericksburg Habitat for Humanity. He graduated from Virginia Tech with a B.A. in Political Science and a minor in Urban Affairs and Planning.
Emma Thomson joined our team as the Digital Communications Assistant in May. Before coming on board, she served as a Press Assistant for Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. Emma’s internship experience spans her range of interests, with previous positions in politics, public relations, and digital media. She graduated magna cum laude from The George Washington University with a B.A. in Political Communication.

Please join us in welcoming these new faces. The Democracy Fund is in the process of recruiting and hiring for several positions, and we will keep you updated as we continue to grow.

Back to Ideas

Report

Progress Report on the Presidential Commission on Election Administration

Democracy Fund

September 1, 2016

The United States’ electoral system has always been imperfect — a work in progress. And yet the health of our democracy depends on the quality of our elections. All over the country, we entrust local officials to run elections as smoothly as possible. In fact, we depend on these officials to oversee more than 8,000 election jurisdictions nationwide — verifying the eligibility of voters, designing the ballots, and counting the votes.

The decentralized administration of elections means there are always new challenges to be addressed and new opportunities for improvement. It is for this reason that the Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA) was established by an Executive Order on March 28, 2013, with the goal of confronting problems and institutionalizing processes that allow for improvement.

After an extensive six-month inquiry, the bipartisan PCEA, comprised of experts and practitioners, issued The American Voting Experience report, which stated: “the problems hindering efficient administration of elections are both identifiable and solvable.” In the report, members of the PCEA unanimously agreed on a set of best practices and recommendations they hoped would focus institutional energy on a select number of important policy changes, while spawning experimentation among the thousands of local officials who shared similar concerns.

This update highlights the progress made in several areas, since the reports release, notably in the areas of voter registration, access to voting, polling place management, and voting technology.

Back to Ideas

Statement

Democracy Fund: This Election Is Not Rigged

Democracy Fund

October 20, 2016

In the last two weeks, fear mongering over potential election rigging has come to a fever pitch. In response, the Democracy Fund issued the following statement:

“The peaceful transfer of power is a cornerstone and tested principal of our democracy. Recent fear mongering over the Presidential election being ‘rigged’ does not reflect the security and checks built into our elections system. We’ve studied the election process and worked with administrators from both sides of the aisle — and our election process is secure and safe,” said Adam Ambrogi, Director of the Elections Program at the Democracy Fund.

“By design, our election system is highly decentralized and no one person ever has unlimited access to voting machines, making widespread hacking or rigging extremely difficult. Beyond technology, we have layers of physical security and protocols that prevent against bad actors. The system has checks and balances built in to ensure that before, during, and after our elections, we’ll know if something goes wrong — and we have steps to ensure Americans can have faith in the results of our elections, no matter who wins.”

See the Democracy Fund’s report on the progress made towards more secure and smooth elections since the Presidential Commission on Election Administration’s recommendations were released in 2014: http://bit.ly/PCEAProgress

###Democracy Fund experts on the topics of fear mongering around election rigging, voting, and election administration are available for interviews. To schedule, please contact Molly Haigh at molly@megaphonestrategies.com.