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Reflection on the Impact of Investing in Voter Centric Election Administration

Heather Creek

July 28, 2022

From its inception, Democracy Fund has invested in organizations supporting election administration. We believe that well-functioning election operations are a core component of a healthy election system. At the end of 2021, we commissioned an independent evaluation of the Elections & Voting Program’s Voter Centric Election Administration portfolio to review how our theory of change was executed and how the election system has shifted. Here, we reflect on the findings from that evaluation and invite you to read the full report.

Voter Centric Election Administration Portfolio History

The landscape of election administration in 2014 is a far cry from what we experience today. At that time, the findings of the Bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration were widely praised and pointed the way toward evidence-based solutions to election challenges – such as long lines at the polls and errors on voter lists – that made use of developments in technology. Election administration has always been complicated, especially in the highly-decentralized U.S. system. However from 2014-2016, the field experienced clarity of purpose and a relatively-uncontentious bipartisan consensus on best practices to move the field forward.

In this context, Democracy Fund developed a theory of change that focused on two needs of the field:

Strong networks of election administrators for knowledge-sharing across and within states
Innovative practices and technology designed for election administrators to use.

To meet the first need, we identified the leaders of state election administrator associations and hosted convenings with them twice a year in a “train the trainer” model, whereby they would learn best-in-class practices to take back to their state associations of election officials. For the second need, we invested in a wide range of civic technology tools, research, and guides developed by civil society organizations that could be used by administrators to better serve voters. Our goal was to scale and spread practices that would improve the voting experience nationwide.

Evaluation of the Portfolio’s Impact

An evaluation of the portfolio’s impact, conducted by Fernandez Advisors, focused on the ways that election officials at the state and local level have engaged in Democracy Fund’s network convenings and used tools, training, and resources in which we have invested. The report found that investing in tools and resources for election administrators helped the field adapt to shifts in voter expectations for online services and new voting methods. Our grantees’ programs helped to improve the design of election websites and ballots, helped administrators adapt to early voting and mail voting policies, and helped voters learn where to find a polling place or ballot drop box easily and accurately. These are just a few examples of the ways our grantees supported administrators’ efforts to serve voters.

This portfolio was especially well-timed to meet the unusual needs of the 2020 election when many states rapidly adjusted their voting policies and practices to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many states offered voters more flexibility to vote early at home or at voter centers in order to avoid crowds at Election Day polling places. These states could not have rapidly adopted new voting methods without following the examples of states that had spent years innovating and experimenting with flexible voting practices. Democracy Fund grantees were instrumental in helping states learn quickly from these examples because they had documented implementation processes and offered technical assistance.

While network-building, tools, and research have been instrumental in improving election administration, the failure of local and state governments to adequately resource election offices remains a significant problem. Significant and ongoing technology changes (such as online voter registration and ballot tracking) present adoption challenges for many election administrators and their staff due to both the lack of funding for technology investments and maintenance and the difficulty covering the range of expertise needed with the very small staffs that manage elections in all but the largest jurisdictions. For example, election officials interviewed for the evaluation report that they do not have the capacity to counter growing mis- and disinformation targeted toward voters.

The job of managing elections has grown increasing complex as the field faces new challenges. Local election officials must be experts in many areas: human resources, information technology, direct mail processing, public relations, cybersecurity, and more. Most election officials are managing this load with little staff capacity. In the 2020 Democracy Fund/Reed College Survey of Local Election Officials, over half of respondents said they work in an office with just one or two staff members who may not even be full-time. Participants in Democracy Fund’s state association convenings praised the information and opportunity to share knowledge and resources with peers from other states and bring ideas back to their colleagues. However, limited staff capacity and urgent demands makes it difficult for many officials to spend time adopting new practices.

Summary of Findings & Key Takeaways

When Democracy Fund began investing in civil society organizations focused on election administration, it was still a young field, with limited philanthropic investments supporting the work. We used a systems and complexity approach to analyze the needs of the field and identify the gaps and leverage points that could improve the health of election administration. We played a role in catalyzing new nonprofit organizations that support election officials and in funding emerging election sciences research. The COVID-19 pandemic upended the 2020 primary elections and made evident the importance of well-resourced and well-functioning election administration. In response, the field of organizations supporting election administration scaled up as more donors began funding this work. Even as the context shifts over time and the field adapts, strong election administration is essential to the health of a just and equitable election system.

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Resource

Language Access for Voters Summit 2021

February 17, 2022

Removing Language Barriers from the Voting Process

Democracy Fund’s Language Access for Voters Summit is an annual event that aims to remove language barriers from the voting process. The 2021 convening was held Dec. 13-14, 2021, following the Dec. 8th release of the Census Bureau’s new Section 203 language determinations under the Voting Rights Act—which provide language assistance in U.S. elections.

To help election officials navigate and implement the necessary changes, the agenda included discussions with local, state and federal election officials, voting rights advocates, and translation experts. Participants shared pragmatic ideas, tools, and best practices for providing language assistance—focusing officials’ immediate needs in the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections.

Celebrating the Diversity of Languages in the United States

The two-day event featured a collection of speaker-submitted videos in Armenian, Bengali, Dine’ (Navajo), English, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, and Yup’ik. These represent a small sample of the languages election officials provide voter assistance for across the United States.

Speakers read the 2020 Presidential Election ballot in various languages from their jurisdictions, highlighted the critical value of language and culture integration in formal settings like polling places, and shared personal stories of how language access has played a role in their own life or someone they love.

The topics, presentations, materials and resources for each day of the Dec. 2021 summit can be viewed and downloaded below.

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Report

Learning from Digital Democracy Initiative Grantees

January 20, 2022

Democracy Fund’s Digital Democracy Initiative (DDI) and its grantees are radically reimagining what it looks like to make platforms accountable to the American public and renew public interest media.

To support this work, the team’s evaluation and learning partner, ORS Impact, conducted learning conversations with DDI grantees in September and October 2021 to understand:

How grantees have responded to the past year
What it would take to better center racial equity in DDI’s strategy and in grantees’ work
Where grantees see opportunities in the current moment

The report summarizes findings about these three topics within and across learning conversations and raises considerations for funders about how to better center racial equity in their grant making, how to better support their grantees, and opportunities ripe for investment. The report encourages funders to reflect on these considerations and how they might be applicable to their strategy.

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Blog

Meet the Ecosystem Builders: A unique group of leaders transforming local news

Teresa Gorman

January 19, 2022

In 2020, two dozen Atlanta journalists gathered to take a hard look at the state of local media in Atlanta. A lack of diversity and commitment to community meant that many newsrooms weren’t responsive to the people they were supposed to serve. And on top of that, cuts and downsizing meant that there were fewer and fewer reporters to cover important things like local elections and education policy.

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Blog

When it’s Time to Learn Fast: How our Learning Processes Changed to Meet the Moment in the Summer of 2020

May 18, 2021

We tried something different. As a foundation, we are only as effective as our understanding of and alignment to what is occurring in the fields we fund. That’s tough to do in a complex environment. During a crisis, it’s even tougher. Try several crises.

In the summer of 2020, the grantees of our Digital Democracy Initiative (DDI) were revving up to combat a trifecta of mis- and disinformation about COVID-19, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the 2020 election. And we wanted to know how we could support them — not with slow, drawn-out information-gathering and analysis, but with something more agile.

We had to rethink the way we learn.

We didn’t have the luxury to wait for researchers to conduct a study and package it up for us to leisurely read nine months later. Nor did we want to ask our grantees to spare time that could be better used to do the work. So, we decided to approach our research and evaluation a little differently. We made a decision to minimize our plans for a developmental evaluation into a set of learning conversations that prioritized strengthening and facilitating information flows among our grantees over answering our own set of learning questions.

We also made a conscious decision to do something researchers would not advise (because of possible observer effects): we broke the fourth wall of objectivity. Our Associate Director of DDI and our Strategy and Learning Manager joined in on the focus groups facilitated by our evaluator. This had positive implications on our construction of knowledge. We were able to hear and respond to concerns in real time as our grantees were experiencing it and extract key points outside of those captured by our evaluators. Grantees were also able to learn from each other in real time and see other parts of the wider field they contribute to. While the resulting report, Responding to the Moment, synthesized much of this information, it was invaluable to have immediate access to it.

Our grantees expressed gratitude for the time to connect, particularly during the pandemic lockdown because some felt increasingly siloed. Hunkered down within the circles they were already in pre-pandemic, some felt it a challenge to do what the moment demanded: connect with new folks in order to advance the work.

We learned that one of the largest gaps in the mis- and disinformation network space existed between researchers and activists. While field-building and connecting across network gaps is a critical tactic for the Digital Democracy Initiative, this was an urgent learning for us. Leaning into making connections across fields of work is vital to successfully attacking the complex problem of mis- and disinformation. We have begun this through follow-up meetings and we are already seeing our grantees make these connections more explicitly in their work.

In our real-time learning, we made sure to center the experiences of people of color and women, with special attention to women of color who fall within both groups and experience unique circumstances because of this intersectionality. One important learning that resulted from this centering was the consequences and inequity of uniformed dollars in the philanthropic field due to “parachuting” and “trendiness.” As money was pouring into the mis- and disinformation space, dollars were going to new actors parachuting into the space for those resources as opposed to going to long-term actors who already worked on these issues. Additionally, a surface understanding of the challenges in the field made it likely that grantmakers would give their well-intentioned dollars to solutions that were trending, but not necessarily effective instead of buttressing effective efforts that activists and researchers were already cultivating. We have worked to elevate the voices and work of those who have been working in this space over time, and ensure funders understand the importance of that work as an anchor in this field.

These learnings underscore the inequitable ways that philanthropic support rarely goes into the hands of those most impacted by the problem and therefore best suited to address the problems. Centering the perspectives and experiences of those most negatively impacted by disinformation, people of color and women, allowed us to best understand our points of leverage for field solutions that are either out of the focus of or deprioritized by a broader philanthropic sector that is overwhelmingly wealthy and white.

The summer of 2020, like other crisis moments, was filled with chaos, trauma, and uncertainty. We were surprised by the learning that can happen even in the midst of crises when we strip away the formalities and reduce the amount of time and attention being taken away from important work being done in the field. Many of those crises continue today, and the changes we made to our learning will extend past the summer of 2020. We are thankful to our grantees for their time and honesty. The lessons we learned come from them.

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Report

Looking Forward to the Future of Democracy

Democracy Fund

April 22, 2021

The volatility of current events makes one thing clear: Our democracy is vulnerable to disruptions many haven’t even imagined. While we cannot predict the future, we can practice futuring — the creative discipline of tuning into the signals, imagining what’s possible, and choosing paths that lead us toward hope.

In fall 2020, Democracy Fund collaborated with Dot Connector Studio and a diverse group of thinkers on a futuring project called Democracy TBD. Together with our collaborators, we considered how the pandemic, racial unrest, political division, and other concerns might spark a cycle of disruption and reorganization for our democracy. We surfaced key themes — like ongoing political polarization — and identified the potential implications for our democracy.

American democracy was born out of an experimental mindset and radical imaginings; we believe these are still needed for it to survive. For Democracy Fund, this is only the beginning of our futuring venture.

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Blog

The Growing Movement for Platform Accountability

Paul Waters

March 8, 2021

Social media companies have harmed our economy, government, social fabric, and public square. The January 6, 2021 insurrection at the United States Capitol, which was fueled not just by partisan networks like Parler, but by household social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, has made it clear that government intervention and better oversight is urgently needed.

While many people still still understand the problems in general terms, such as, “social media makes us polarized,” or “there’s no privacy online” there is a growing and strengthening movement to hold these companies accountable. Too often the voices of these organizers, researchers and civil society groups are missing from the discussion about how to develop better public policy, track online mis and disinformation, and hold platforms accountable through public advocacy campaigns.

Last year, we commissioned an independent report from ORS Impact to gain an in-depth understanding of the policy ideas and issues these organizations are pursuing and create a comprehensive view of current efforts to address these problems at their roots. This kind of report is an important part of our work at Democracy Fund that we use to make informed ongoing decisions about our strategy and highlight the vital work of grassroots organizations. We are publishing this report to help funders and organizations interested in doing platform accountability work gain an understanding of the field as it stands today, and develop effective strategies and programs of their own.

Three major learnings from the report will inform Democracy Fund’s Platform Accountability strategy:

1. The algorithms behind social media platforms often amplify existing inequalities along the lines of race, class, and gender, and allow for bad actors both foreign and domestic to manipulate public opinion. Existing laws and legal precedent make it difficult to regulate algorithms with public policy. For example, current interpretations of the First Amendment generally protect algorithms as a form of speech. And to begin with, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act absolves social media companies of responsibility for the content their users publish on their platforms, under the theory that the threat of being held liable for what users post would make platforms act as speech police rather than open platforms for free expression. In practice, the platforms have used this protection to avoid all responsibility for hate speech and mis/disinformation that manipulates public opinion and undermines elections. They have also used the liability protection under Section 230 as a shield against transparency and due process in their moderation practices.

Important grantees and partners in this area include:

Groups like Change the Terms, Color of Change, and MediaJustice that have led public campaigns to pressure the platforms to adopt stronger policies against hate groups, in particular white supremacists.
Free Press Action and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which have proposed comprehensive legislation to protect user data, prevent algorithmic discrimination, give users more control over their own data, empower robust enforcement of regulations, and more.
Ranking Digital Rights, which provides a public index ranking social media companies by their transparency and integrity.

2. Journalists, researchers, and other investigators face difficulties as they try to understand how the platforms distribute and amplify information. It’s also very difficult for everyday users to know who is behind the political advertising they see. The platforms have offered very little access to internal data, and as a public, we can’t solve problems we don’t understand. Opportunities include the potential for research institutions to partner with one another to collect data about how the platforms operate, and act as data brokers between platforms and researchers. Challenges include the additional need for more qualitative data from the platforms about how they develop policy and make decisions about their algorithms and content moderation processes.

Important grantees and partners in this area include:

The NYU Online Political Ads Transparency Project, which has created a free tool that allows users and researches to track the sources of political advertising on platforms.
The Stigler Committee on Digital Platforms, which has argued that the Federal Trade Commission could be empowered to have access to platforms databases, so they can perform their own research on platform impacts, and grant selective access to independent researchers.
The German Marshall Fund, which advocates for new legislation similar to existing law that requires politicians to disclose the funding source of their TV ads (the Honest Ads Act).

3. There is a need for coordination between grantees, funders and partners to distribute important civic information at scale by leveraging the tools of social media. At present, there are few viable ideas for large-scale intervention, which points out the need for more research, strategy, and relationship-building. Major efforts in this space include the 2020 Elections Research Project, a first-of-its-kind collaboration between Facebook and outside academic researchers to study Facebook and Instagram’s impact on political participation and the shaping of public opinion; the Civic Information API, which aggregates essential information on local representatives and elections to empower developers and inform everyday people; and the Voting Information Project, which helps voters find reliable information on where to vote and what issues are on their ballots.

Important collaborations in this area include:

The Social Science Research Council, which supports scholars, generates new research, and connects researchers with policymakers, nonprofits, and citizens.
The Google News Initiative and Facebook Journalism Project, both of which provide monetary and in-kind support to help local news publishers connect with their communities and adapt their business models for the digital age.
The Facebook Civil Rights Audit, which Facebook initiated after a campaign led by groups like Free Press and Color of Change pressured the company to take civil rights issues on its platform more seriously.

The ORS Impact report will inform Democracy Fund’s grantmaking strategy, and how we build networks between grantees that cut across traditional divides between researchers, civil society organizations, advocates and policymakers. The report provides a snapshot of the field during a critical time for platform accountability work, providing a fuller understanding of the current context. Our sister organization, Democracy Fund Voice, will be implementing a similar review process in the coming months for its Media Policy strategy, which will include in-depth interviews with several grantees mentioned in this report about how the challenges of 2020 have impacted their work.

To learn more about our Digital Democracy program, contact Paul Waters, associate director, Public Square Program at pwaters [@] democracyfund.org.

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NewsMatch: A unique program to fund news “for the people, with the people”

December 4, 2020

News is a public good.

What does it mean to treat journalism as a public good? Without an informed citizenry able to access the news they need to navigate their lives, actively participate in the public square, and hold their local and national government officials accountable to their public duties, we are at risk of weakening democracy’s most vital participant and protector, the people. That is why NewsMatch has spent five years building a people powered campaign to support and strengthen nonprofit news.

Since 2004, nearly 1,800 communities in the United States have lost their newspapers. This is in addition to communities that have long existed with limited access to news and information that is relevant and useful to navigating local life. Not only are Americans losing their local newspapers, but local tv and radio news programs are also losing the original and substantive investigations these newspapers used to provide. While some news seekers turn toward social media, local tv and local newspapers remain the most utilized sources for news. The ongoing disappearance and deterioration of credible and comprehensive local news limits people’s ability to meet the critical information necessary to make important decisions that impact their everyday lives. It is not enough to simply save what has been lost, we need to rebuild stronger with serving the public as our foundation.

Mission versus money.

As traditional news models break down, there have been entrepreneurial efforts experimenting with business models to find new markets and new audiences. Many of these efforts utilize digital platforms and focus on attracting paying subscribers and advertisers. Yet, people most in need of quality and credible news are the least likely to be able to pay for it (and for what advertisers are trying to sell). They are also often part of communities whose stories and informational priorities need to be better reflected in the news already. Fortunately, there are emerging newsrooms who are increasingly committed to improving representation, inclusion and equity in their news content creation and seeking to transform the industry. But these newsrooms are forced to compete with the bottom-line need to be financially sustainable. NewsMatch seeks to level the playing field through philanthropic matching dollars and in-depth investment in capacity building around fundraising for nonprofit newsrooms.

News for all, not for some.

More and more, the philanthropic world is recognizing the opportunity to protect democracy by supporting rigorous and inclusive journalism. Finding ways to disentangle news generation from news revenue ensures that the media industry won’t just serve the interest and needs of those who can afford to pay for it or pay to influence it. Supporting news organizations committed to inclusive and fact-based news and information might also help to stymie the proliferation of media organizations with nefarious objectives that are filling the media gap in poor communities with news that is often free to the consumer, but also highly partisan, not credible and not independent from political or corporate interests. A public shift from seeing news as a service one pays for solo access to a collective good that benefits us all is an important step toward treating local news like the vital democractic resource it is.

NewsMatch is one strategy.

NewsMatch was created as a strategic way to support quality journalism. It aims to jumpstart small, emerging newsrooms, some serving communities that have been poorly served by mainstream or national media. News for the people, with the people, NewsMatch’s 2020 slogan captures the promise of what newsrooms can become when we recognize the public good it provides and act to protect it.

The NewsMatch annual campaign pools funds nationally to provide participating newsrooms with a matching incentive and tools and training to build its long-term fundraising capacity. Newsmatch is a powerful tool for donors, foundations, and corporations concerned about the future of local and investigative reporting. Since 2016, NewsMatch helped 200+ nonprofit newsrooms across the country raise more than $100 million from hundreds of thousands of people — many of whom were first-time donors to nonprofit news. In 2019, NewsMatch turned $3.7 million in philanthropic investments into $43.5 million in support for local news in just two months, a more than 1200 percent return on investment.

So, how is NewsMatch doing?

So far, so good. Last year, Democracy Fund partnered with the Knight Foundation to commission an evaluation of NewsMatch to see how the campaign was faring on three ambitious goals: 1) to dramatically increase giving to journalism, 2) to strengthen long term fundraising capacity in newsrooms; and 3) to build awareness about journalism’s impact in our democracy. There was ample evidence that the 2019 NewsMatch program met the first goal, with returning organizations securing more donors and donations then the previous year. The second and third goals, which were longer-term in nature, were not yet met, although there was indication of progress toward both goals. Related to the second goal by design, NewsMatch serves a diverse array of nonprofit news organizations ranging from small community-based start-up organizations to national public media outlets. That diversity makes it a necessity to tailor the training and support provided so that it is more relevant to the specific context and challenges each media organization faces. To better provide this added nuance, an investment toward additional administrative support was made to help newsrooms strengthen long-term fundraising capacity. As for the third goal, while this evaluation found some evidence that the general public may not yet be aware of news as something to donate to, part of NewsMatch approach is to help funders and the public begin to see news as vital to our democracy and thus cannot be left solely to market forces.

What can I do?

This post opened with the line local news is a public good. If after reading this you agree, well then, we’re a bit closer to it becoming one. Reimagining the role of the news as a collective good that strengthens and protects democracy moves us beyond futile attempts to patch and reinstitute a flawed industry with a history of neglecting and harming communities of color. There is an opportunity now to set the bar much higher by supporting local news organizations committed to the transformative change necessary to become a news industry that truly serves all people.

If you are an individual interested in donating to support news as a public good, you can find a local media organization by using the search engine NewsMatch provides on their site. If you are a grantmaker, consider becoming a partnering funder.

Lastly, while philanthropic giving is powerful, we recognize that it is just one strategy to treat local news like a public good. Newsrooms serving marginalized communities can struggle to compete for philanthropic dollars as well. While philanthropy is important, it is no replacement for sound local and federal policy. Democracy Fund is also supporting burgeoning media policy efforts to protect local news. We look forward to sharing more about this work in future posts.

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Blog

Democracy TBD: How do we plan for unpredictable futures?

Liz Ruedy & Jessica Clark

October 23, 2020

It’s become something of a cliché to say that we’re living in uncertain times — but times of uncertainty can be powerful opportunities for new ideas to take root. After all, certainty can be a form of complacency. When we feel sure of our own power and position, we have no reason to question our assumptions about the present or imagine a different future.

To push ourselves to recommit to the radical imagining and experimental mindset — which has always shaped American democracy — Democracy Fund decided to spend the last few months leaning into uncertainty, deliberately engaging with different ideas and perspectives about what our democracy’s future might look like. We asked Dot Connector Studio to help us figure out how to do this, with an experimental project we ended up calling “Democracy TBD.”

How we designed Democracy TBD

Our intention with Democracy TBD was to start to think through how the current pandemic, racial unrest, and concerns about the election might spark a cycle of disruption and reorganization. Which aspects of our democratic system might prove more resilient, and which might be fundamentally altered? How might these changes affect Democracy Fund’s efforts to support robust civic participation, responsible journalism, fair elections, effective governance, civil rights, and rule of law? Our goal was not to develop a list of fully fleshed-out scenarios, but rather to anticipate the pathways by which major changes might happen and then to consider how we could help shape those pathways rather than react to them after the fact.

We decided to reach out to people that we didn’t necessarily know, whose interests and experiences weren’t just related to politics and government, and asked them to join a series of scenario-planning conversations. In August, we convened participants in five small working groups to talk with them about what big changes might be in store for our country, and what about our democracy was “to be determined.” Participants included authors, economists, musicians, journalists, urban planners, technologists, and others, representing a diversity of gender, race, and geography.

What we have learned so far

Our first working group sessions took place in August, over Zoom. We focused on identifying events that have the potential to trigger system-level disruptions. We arrived at these “disruptors” by observing current signals — i.e., events which suggest change with the potential to spread. Chatting from makeshift home offices, occasionally pausing to help kids reconnect to their virtual classrooms, and momentarily stepping back from news updates on wildfires and hurricanes, it was not hard for participants to identify myriad potential disruptors they are considering in their own life and work. Some of the disruptors we identified were more speculative, but others were very real and immediate.

We then asked the participants to choose a disruptor from the conversation, and map it against a framework we call “STEEP+C.” Futurists and business strategists often use a “STEEP” framework to understand how a given disruptor might have both positive and negative ripple effects across Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental and Political sectors. We have added a “C” for “Creative” for our conversations, because we believe that arts, media and culture have the potential to both shape and capture major disruptions. Our hope has been to center the power of imagination in this work.

Take the following disruptor, for example: a COVID vaccine is not available until the end of 2021. We posited that there would be: indefinite work-from-home policies introduced by companies (Social), a strain on internet bandwidth and a widened digital divide (Technological), wide-scale job loss and pressure on the social safety net (Economic), a decrease in emissions and use of public transit (Environmental), increased demand/support for government intervention (Political). We also speculated that artists would start connecting more directly with audiences (Creative).

Doing so allowed participants to build out fuller scenarios about what these disrupted systems might look like. In the second set of working group sessions, we discussed each other’s scenarios and reflected on what these scenarios might mean for our democracy. It was clear that the anxiety of our current moment sat heavily on participants: scenarios explored themes of rising inequality, civil discord, climate disasters.

We brought participants back together in mid-August to reflect on the themes we distilled from the conversations. By that point, several participants had also taken us up on the offer to develop creative responses sparked by the process. The conversation, and the creative responses, surfaced themes of disintegration, fragmentation, inequality, corruption, authoritarianism, and polarization — but also renewal, cooperation, and mobilization. As we continue to sift through the wide range of possible futures our participants explored, our expectation isn’t to land with any certainty on what the next ten or twenty years might hold for our country. Quite the contrary: we’re hoping it raises lots of questions about what’s possible, and pushes us to look at our democracy, with all its flaws but also all its promise, in new ways. We look forward to sharing those questions, and those new ideas, with you. Stay tuned!

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Op-Ed

Philanthropy and the Future of Local News

Josh Stearns

April 13, 2020

As businesses close, revenue from advertising is drying up and journalists are facing layoffs, furloughs, and the possibility of their newsrooms closing down—just when we need them most. In this moment, as our nation and our nation’s newsrooms face profound challenges, what happened in New Jersey holds lessons for all of us.

Cover Photo: Free Press Action Fund News Voices Director Mike Rispoli testifying in the New Jersey Statehouse (credit: Tim Karr) (Democracy Fund did not make grants or earmark funds to support Free Press Action Fund’s lobbying efforts).