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Democracy Fund’s New Just and Inclusive Society Strategy

Shuya Ohno

March 21, 2023

Climate change is here. Unfortunately, that means that many of us across the globe will soon need to leave our homelands. Within the United States, people are already leaving the rising waters of the Gulf Coast to seek refuge further north. Others are fleeing the wildfires and droughts of California for safer places. And at the southern border, migrants from all over the world (no longer just points further south) are seeking a safer life in the United States. Last year, 100 million people were displaced globally due to conflicts and crises — a new record. Climate change is multiplying this crisis. The UN estimates that over the next 30 years, about one billion of us will need to move.

What does this displacement mean for democracy in the United States? In a nutshell: as global migration reaches unprecedented levels, white supremacy is rising to meet it. This has dangerous consequences.

From the start, the founders of American democracy designed our political system to exclude everyone but white, elite, male landowners. They built racism into our public institutions and society to exclude and marginalize people of color. As a way to protect this power structure, white nationalists have always pointed to migrants as a primary target for scapegoating. Today, white nationalists are using hostile, racist language to dehumanize migrants. This often leads to acts of discrimination and violence. It’s not surprising — this cycle has happened many times throughout this country’s history. But now that climate change is accelerating, we’re seeing it at a larger scale. It affects both migrants entering the United States from other countries, and migrants within the country.

Another factor to consider: our democracy is land-based. A person’s rights and representation are tied almost entirely to where they live. When we suddenly have to move, this becomes a problem. For example, an American citizen who flees a hurricane in South Carolina and takes refuge with family in Virginia still has a passport and basic protections under the Constitution. She could request an absentee ballot from her town in South Carolina, assuming the town is still functioning. But what happens when the impact of climate change is so extreme that an entire town or city is displaced? What would it mean for a city councilor, a state representative, or a member of Congress whose constituents all leave their districts?

At Democracy Fund, we are working to address these challenges. In April 2022, Democracy Fund announced our new organizational strategy with a commitment to investing in the power and leadership of communities of color to strengthen and expand the pro-democracy movement and undermine those who threaten the ideals of our inclusive, multiracial democracy. Over the past year, our Just and Inclusive Society program has revised its strategies in line with this new organizational strategy to better meet the moment we are in while building for the best version of our shared future.

Our new five-year strategy is the result of many thoughtful conversations with our grantees and experts from across the field. We cannot overstate how much we appreciate the experience, passion, and creativity of these organizations, whose staff are working on the frontlines of these issues. We look forward to continuing our collaborative approach with our grantees, as we aim for transformative impact together.

We are interested in hearing your thoughts on what elements excite you, and we know we have a weighty responsibility to help make these ideas a reality.

Building power for a welcoming and inclusive American democracy

We are working toward our vision of an American democracy that is welcoming and inclusive of all migrants and refugees, that actively supports their resettlement in a just and humane manner, and that builds social cohesion in the face of massive internal and external migration. To get there, we believe we need to support a broad-based intersectional social movement capable of inspiring hope over fear, instilling cooperation over competition, and instituting a sense of shared abundance over scarcity. At every step, the movement needs to be led by marginalized and most impacted communities who are integral members of the pro-democracy coalition fighting for a just and inclusive multi-racial democracy.

In support of this future, we will fund this intersectional movement through our Power-building in Marginalized Communities initiative. This initiative will focus on the intersectional movements led by refugees, migrants, and Black and brown communities. Our investments will support organizations and leaders to: (1) elevate stories and shift narratives around migration and refugeehood, (2) build a shared strategy and solidarity across movements, communities, and geographies, and (3) build power in marginalized communities.

This area of focus is a natural outgrowth of the work we began in 2017 to protect the civil rights and liberties of Black, African, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian (BAMEMSA) communities who were targeted by the Trump Administration. This earlier work provided legal and policy support to immigrant rights and racial justice work, and helped mitigate the risks of political violence resulting from a resurgent authoritarian faction.

Our new strategy has been informed by our conversations with our grantees and partners about how philanthropy needs to meet this moment in our democracy. We listened deeply to what grantees said is happening now, and what is on the horizon. Our new strategy takes those challenges head on, guided by an advisory group including the Rise Together Fund, El Hibri Foundation, the Pillars Fund, Ford Foundation, and Unbound Philanthropy.

Some changes you will see in our funding

In the next five years, we are reorienting our focus from BAMEMSA communities to include broader refugee and migrant communities that have been and will be displaced by climate change, as a subset of our wider interest in supporting all marginalized communities. Key to that work will be a shift from providing direct services, to building capacity, power, and momentum across communities that will be sending and receiving migrants.

A few of the key shifts include:

Moving from prioritizing litigation to a power-building framework. We’re shifting from a responsive posture to one that proactively works to change the system. As the numbers of migrants increase, so too will the political rhetoric driven by fear, subverting or suppressing civil liberties and rights. We plan to focus on intervention points emerging from the increasing flow of migration and rising xenophobic and racist attacks by the authoritarian faction.
Focusing on intersectional movement building led by migrant, refugee, and impacted communities. The growing number of organizations working in this arena are disconnected and insufficiently funded. To bolster the movement, we will begin investing in refugee organizing work, engage grassroots and national network organizations, and explore intermediaries that also have footprints at the regional, state, and local levels.
Engaging place-based organizations. We will support organizations located in geographies that either are “sending” people to other places or “receiving” incoming migrants by funding the implementation of existing or experimental models of support for migrants and refugees (e.g., transitional justice mechanisms, mutual aid, community sponsorship, or resilience hubs).

As we begin implementing our new strategies, we’re motivated by the opportunities for learning and growth. We will be transparent, accessible, and accountable along the way. We are excited to invest in organizations that: demonstrate excellence in building and executing programs aligned with our strategic priorities; exhibit a solid racial justice analysis; employ BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) in senior leadership roles; and work in concert with aligned efforts to build the power of marginalized communities.

Moving into the next five years

It’s clear that climate-induced mass migration and white nationalist authoritarianism are on a collision course, but efforts to protect vulnerable communities are also gaining momentum. The support we have seen in Washington, DC and New York City in response to migrants bussed there from Texas and Florida, is a powerful example. Community organizations are recruiting volunteers, enlisting local charities and churches, pressuring municipal governments, and controlling narratives. The community leaders in these cities are building a moral social movement that responds to need, supports the integration of migrant communities, and turns a tactic of division into an opportunity for solidarity and unity.

The challenges we face as a country and as a people over the coming decades are enormous. A key part of our new strategy will also be to partner with more and more funders to meet this moment.

There are still many decisions left about who and how we will fund to make this vision a reality. We’ll be sharing more information, updating our website, and considering new grantees in 2023 and we welcome your partnership and accountability along this journey. If you have questions about our new strategy, don’t hesitate to reach out. We are grateful for your partnership and energized for our collective future.

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Democracy Fund’s New Digital Democracy Strategy

Paul Waters

December 12, 2022

We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. – Freedom’s Journal, 1827

In April 2022, Democracy Fund announced our new organizational strategy with a commitment to investing in the power and leadership of communities of color to strengthen and expand the pro-democracy movement and undermine those who threaten the ideals of our inclusive, multiracial democracy. It’s a bold, ambitious plan that will steadily guide us as we navigate both known and unforeseen challenges affecting our democracy.

The digital media platforms and systems that now comprise so much of today’s civic engagement and community life have become essential for staying informed and connected. But many of the platforms that people turn to have also been weaponized by hate groups, authoritarians, and other bad actors to suppress and depress voter turnout, harass women and people of color, spread divisive disinformation, and violate civil rights laws. The power to control conversations and filter information lies with just a handful of private companies.

With this in mind, our Public Square program has revised its Digital Democracy strategies in line with our new organizational strategy to better meet the moment we are in. We envision a society where Black, Indigenous, and people of color fully and equitably create, access, and enjoy media and technology that represents their needs, concerns, and dreams. As a result, America’s public square becomes more inclusive and contributes to a thriving pro-democracy movement.

Our new five-year strategies are the result of many thoughtful conversations with our grantees and lessons from the field. We cannot overstate how much we appreciate the expertise, passion, and creativity of these organizations, whose staff are working on the frontlines of these issues. Our grantees are always one step ahead, and their pivots have often preceded the challenges other researchers and analysts have eventually spotted. We look forward to continuing our collaborative approach with our grantees, as we aim for transformative impact together.

The strategies below are focused on our Digital Democracy work, which makes up half of our Public Square team’s grantmaking. In addition to the Digital Democracy strategy updates, you can find updates about our Equitable Journalism work here. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on what elements excite you, and we know we have a tremendous responsibility to help make these ideas a reality.

Building power for an inclusive, multiracial democracy through the digital public square

Our Digital Democracy strategy is working toward an inclusive, multiracial democracy in the United States where civil and human rights online are respected and grounded in an equitable civic infrastructure that is open, just, resilient, and trustworthy. To get there, we believe we need a more comprehensive policy analysis and movement-building agenda for how we will support the media and digital systems we need beyond traditional commercial markets. At every step, the movement will be led by Black, Indigenous, and people of color, who have experienced disproportionately low levels of digital ownership and creation opportunities and disproportionately high levels of harm on digital platforms.

In support of this future, our Public Square program will be funding digital democracy efforts through two areas of focus:

Our Equitable Civic Infrastructure initiative will fund organizations that build public pressure to change media and telecommunication policy at the state and federal levels. This work will create the equitable access to the news and information Americans need to thrive.
Our Civil & Human Rights Online initiative will fund organizations that are reigning in the systems and structures that make online spaces so toxic and dangerous. By applying principles like antidiscrimination, public accommodations, and equal protection under the law, they are transforming how we experience the internet.

These areas of focus build on our learnings from the last five years, especially informed by our conversations with our grantees about how philanthropy needs to meet this moment in our democracy, the longtime harms media has perpetuated that got us here, and the role of philanthropy in exacerbating these challenges. We have collected some of that learning in a recent evaluation ORS Impact produced. We were also guided by an advisory group including Alicia Bell of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, Courtney Lewis of the Institute for Nonprofit News, Jessica Gonzáles of Free Press, Lizzy Hazeltine of the NC Local News Lab Fund, and Chenjerai Kumanyika of New York University.

Some changes you will see in our digital democracy funding

In the next five years, we are focusing our support on the leaders and organizations that can combat the inequitable systems that have limited internet access, stymied local journalism, and led to widespread discrimination online. To advance our goals, we need race-conscious equitable government intervention into our tech and media systems, and we must invest in state and local base building. And at every step, establishing civil and human rights online is imperative to support the communities facing harms caused by these platforms, while working to address the underlying causes. This intentional shift from reactionary pivots to a long-term vision will allow for hopeful, future-focused movement-building led by BIPOC voices.

A few of the key shifts include:

Our new strategy includes a focus on platforms but expands beyond that to the full suite of infrastructure that constitutes our digital public square; and our tactics have homed in on the role of enforceable rules through the courts and government agencies.
We now recognize the important role of organizing, both to impact outcomes at the local level where early legislative wins can scale up, and to better connect national issues with the last-mile impact on communities. There can be no lasting change without a movement of people supporting it.
We understand that civil and human rights laws are the best opportunity to enforce the equitable treatment people need in online spaces to fully participate in our digital public square, and we will invest accordingly in enforcing these laws.

As we begin implementing our new strategies, we’re motivated by the opportunities for learning and growth, and we will be transparent, accessible, and accountable along the way. We are excited to invest in organizations that demonstrate excellence in building and executing programs aligned with our strategic priorities; exhibit a solid racial justice analysis; employ BIPOC in senior leadership roles; and work in concert with aligned efforts to build the power of marginalized communities.

Moving into the next five years

There is no doubt that the threats we face online are affecting civic participation, not to mention people’s physical and mental health. But there is a swell of support building to shift our relationship with digital media, with a particular emphasis on holding tech companies accountable. All across the United States, we see people recognizing the power they have over tech companies and imagining what a more transparent and less polarized future could look like in this digital age. As a philanthropic organization, we have a responsibility to help build a healthier digital media ecosystem, where people’s rights are protected and the civic information people receive is accurate and dependable. A key part of our new strategies will also be continuing to partner with other funders to meet this moment.

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The State of Election Administration in 2022

Paul Gronke & Paul Manson

November 2, 2022

In a nation of over 258.3 million eligible voters, election officials’ myriad duties differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction—small to large, rural to urban—and from voter to voter. Despite these many differences, there are common themes and predictable challenges faced by every official. And of course, every official has experienced unforeseen events and unexpected circumstances that force them to assess, reform, and adapt. As any official will tell you, there is always another election on the horizon.

The Democracy Fund/Reed College Survey of Local Election Officials provides a window into the attitudes, actions, and needs of the public servants who manage US elections. Surveys during the last three election cycles have illustrated the stable features of the system and the way that the challenges of the moment impact the people administering the democratic process.

Local Election Officials

More than half of election officials are elected – 57 percent overall, but in small jurisdictions with fewer than 5,000 registered voters that increases to 67 percent – while 27 percent are appointed, and 15 percent are hired to fill a position. Just over half of these races are partisan and the other half are non-partisan, and the vast majority of elected officials (81 percent) ran uncontested in the general election. The need to attract candidates and talent will only continue to grow as veteran officials leave the field in growing numbers.

In the 2018 survey, officials’ recent experiences with foreign interference in election cybersecurity impacted the complexity of their work. In 2020, the pandemic and extraordinary polarization of the candidates and the electorate created stress and rapid change in methods of voting that election officials had to manage. The 2022 survey illustrates more emergent challenges as election officials report coping with the combinations of mis- and disinformation about elections, violence against election officials, and extreme partisan disparities in the public’s confidence in election results.

All of this is happening in an environment where the biggest disparity in the election system continues to be geographic. Elections are managed by local jurisdictions and there are tremendous differences between election offices that serve the largest and smallest populations. Seventy-five percent of all offices serve only 8 percent of voters, and 8 percent of our election offices serve 75 percent of voters. This disparity is driven by the fact that the largest 2 percent of offices serve half of the nation’s voters.

The impact of an increased election-related workload is disproportionally higher on smaller jurisdictions than their counterparts in medium and large jurisdictions. This should not be surprising since one third of all election offices do not have even one full-time employee. In small jurisdictions that serve less than 5,000 voters that number increases to 53 percent. The increased workload for many may have been the result of concerted campaigns to flood election offices with Freedom of Information Act requests around the 2020 election based on conspiracy and conjecture.

Each election cycle, the Democracy Fund/Reed College Local Election Official (LEO) Survey has asked local officials about key aspects of their work including preparedness for the upcoming election, job satisfaction, and training needs for the election officials and members of their staffs.

LEOs retain a commitment to meeting the demands of their jobs and the challenges of finding adequate polling locations and poll workers – especially sufficient bilingual workers and accessible facilities – persist with varying degrees across jurisdiction sizes.

Overall job satisfaction among LEOs remains high, but there are cracks in the veneer. The percentage of LEOs who do not think they can maintain a work/life balance has increased and the percentage who say their workload is reasonable has dropped since 2018.

Among the 2022 survey participants, close to one third of the election officials are eligible to retire before the 2024 election—and 39 percent of those eligible plan to do so. Of these respondents, retirement eligibility is the highest reason for leaving the field (51 percent) but “I do not like the changes in my work environment that occurred during and after the November 2020 election” (42 percent) and “I do not enjoy the political environment” (37 percent) followed close behind. For those who are not near retirement age their number one reason for leaving the field was cited as “changes in how elections are administered make the work unsatisfying” (48 percent) and an alarming 28 percent citing that they plan to leave the field based on “concerns about my health or personal safety, aside from COVID concerns.”

Disruption in the Field

One in four respondents have experienced threats of violence. Officials across all jurisdiction sizes and political affiliations experienced these threats, but the threat environment is much more severe in larger jurisdictions compared to smaller jurisdictions. For example, while 14 percent of LEOs serving jurisdictions with less than 5,000 registered voters told us that they had experienced abuse, harassment, or threats, the percentage increases to two-thirds of LEOs serving in the largest jurisdictions. Similarly, 20 percent of LEOs who told us they were Republicans said they experienced threats, compared to 30 percent of Independents and 34 percent of Democrats. These differences should not disguise the overall result: threats against LEOs are far too real, far too regular, and far too common.

The preponderance of threats targeting election officials are politically based threats. Our 2022 survey showed that 63 percent of threats received were politically motivated. The narrative driving these threats—that the 2020 election was illegitimate and that LEOs were complicit in allowing the election to be stolen–-has manifested in threats to election professionals and their families, and changes to state election laws. More than half (55 percent) of the survey respondents said that they have had legislation passed that impacts how they conduct the election—with 35 percent saying those changes improved election administration and 46 percent saying the new laws did not improve election administration.

The majority – 66 percent – of election officials surveyed this year expressed concern about threats and harassment. When asked how seriously various organizations take the threats to election officials, 43 percent said that their state’s chief election official (in most states, the secretary of state) takes the threats “very seriously.” However, LEOs felt that others took the threats far less seriously: only 27 percent for local law enforcement, 25 percent for federal law enforcement, 17 percent for the state legislature and for the national media, 14 percent for the local media, and 12 percent for the U.S. Congress.

About the Survey and Interviews

The 2022 survey of local election officials was a self-administered web and hardcopy survey conducted from June 21 to September 22, 2022. This study used a LEO sample collected by the team, with a sampling frame based in part on national lists of local election officials and the sizes of their jurisdictions. From this frame, the team drew a sample of 3,118 LEOs, sampling jurisdictions in proportion to the number of registered voters they serve and targeting the chief election official in each jurisdiction to complete the survey. A total of 912 LEOs completed the survey, including 652 surveys completed via web (71 percent) and 260 (29 percent) completed via hardcopy with an overall response rate of 30 percent.

Survey findings are often presented by jurisdiction size to understand differences in experiences.

Fifty-seven percent of local election officials serve in jurisdictions of 5,000 or fewer voters.
Twenty-seven percent serve in jurisdictions of 5,001 to 25,000 voters.
Ten percent serve in jurisdictions of 25,001 to 75,000 voters.
Six percent serve in jurisdictions of more than 75,000 voters.

While most officials serve in small jurisdictions, the vast majority of voters live in large jurisdictions — over 70 percent of voters live in jurisdictions with more than 75,000 voters and are served by only 500 officials. It’s important to consider the possible differences in scale, responsibility, and resources between different jurisdiction sizes when interpreting results from any survey of this population. Where overall results are presented, they are weighted to ensure that means can be generalized to local election officials nationwide. Further information about the sampling and weighting process is available at the Reed College Elections & Voting Information Center’s project website.

Explore additional 2022 content and learn more about the Democracy Fund/Reed College Survey of Local Election Officials through Reed College’s Elections & Voting Information Center. Prior publications from the survey series are also available below.

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Introducing Our New Elections & Voting Strategy

Lindsay Daniels

October 11, 2022

In April 2022, Democracy Fund announced a new organizational strategy with a commitment to investing in the power and leadership of communities of color to strengthen and expand the pro-democracy movement, and undermine those who threaten the ideal of our inclusive, multi-racial democracy.

The U.S. voting system was not designed for an inclusive, multi-racial democracy and has always de-valued certain communities, including communities of color, people with disabilities, low-income citizens, and those with intersecting marginalized identities. As a result, people of color face a voting system that continues to be rigged against their participation and power. This flawed design is accompanied by an election administration system long underfunded and weakened by disinformation peddled by an authoritarian movement. False allegations of voter fraud have increased mistrust of election processes and outcomes, led to violent threats against local election officials, and provided a pretext for state legislators to try to seize control of election outcomes.

With these challenges in mind, the Elections & Voting program took a step back to review the past six years of investments and design a new five-year strategy that meets the moment. We seek an election system that consistently produces trusted results, fairly represents the will of the majority of voters, and reflects equitable participation—especially among communities of color. This new strategy builds on the invaluable expertise, accountability, and advice of the many grantees, partners, and leaders we have worked with over the years, all of whom helped inform the direction of this new strategy and to whom we are deeply grateful.

Supporting free, fair, and equitable elections

Our refreshed Elections & Voting program envisions a democracy where people of color hold equal power to influence election outcomes and build a fully representative and participatory democracy. The current election infrastructure needs to function effectively and impartially. As we work towards these goals, we must also reimagine the system to center the voters that have been historically marginalized and oppressed.

To support this vision, we are investing in two areas of work:

Resilient Elections to strengthen the election infrastructure so it is less vulnerable to election sabotage and election-related violence; and
Voting Power to focus on equitable participation, voice, and power for people for color.

These two initiatives are built on several assumptions about how Democracy Fund can contribute to the elections and voting field, and where our investments can complement work that is happening on the ground and through other funding partners:

We believe that robust election administration and election administrators are the last line of defense against authoritarianism. Over the past seven years, we have supported trainings, tools, convenings, and research to professionalize the field of election administration. We will now shift our focus to combatting the politicization of the profession through stable funding and staffing for election administration. When election administrators are well-funded and well-trained, they can expand access to voting and prevent attempts at election sabotage.

Communities must have the power they need to elect leaders who represent their interests and influence government to be responsive to their needs. Organizers working in communities of color often lack year-round funding to build organizational capacity and conduct essential organizing that would enable sustained political power. Grassroots organizing that centers communities of color needs year-round support that allows them to build sustained momentum for participation in civic life, issue advocacy, and elections.

More transformative changes are necessary to equalize voters’ power and address the fairness and legitimacy of the election system. Even when people successfully vote, anti-majoritarian structures can reduce their voting power based on where they live. Until we unrig the election system, it is impossible to describe our political system as representing the will of the majority. While we pursue these structural changes, we must ensure voting rights continue to expand.

Some changes you will see in our elections funding

After six years of investments and experimentation, we have taken a close look at our strategy and adjusted to meet both the moment and the needs of the field. Many grantees and partners contributed to our learning by participating in evaluations of the Voter Centric Election Administration and Election Security portfolios, and in our strategy planning process. A few shifts emerged from those reflections, including:

We will deepen our support for state and local organizing groups that are building power in their communities, particularly communities of color, to engage and connect individuals in their communities, empowering them to impact policy when they participate in civic life.

We will recenter our support for voting rights work at the national level to better complement grassroots organizing and state election policy and advocacy.

We will invest less in tools and trainings for election officials while supporting election administration in new ways, with an emphasis on how to properly fund and staff election infrastructure, infuse a racial justice lens into election administration, and disincentivize leaders from undermining election results.

In partnership with our Governance Program, we will move away from incremental changes and toward long-term structural changes in our democracy that support representative and equitable majority rule.

Looking ahead to the next five years

We are incredibly proud of and grateful for the important work our grantees and partners have led over the past six years. We will continue to champion the field and are committed to a responsible shift as we build toward an inclusive, multi-racial democracy.

As we prepare for the strategy launch in 2023, we will continue to learn, adapt, and grapple with several outstanding questions. We will partner with other funders to strengthen elections and ensure equitable voter participation. We will share more information and updates on our website about our work, and we welcome your feedback.

You can expect to see similar updates from our other programs as other organizational strategy decisions are finalized.

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Democracy Fund’s New Equitable Journalism Strategy

Josh Stearns

October 3, 2022

Our political system and our media have been designed from the start to exclude and marginalize people of color, who have nonetheless often been on the frontlines reinventing journalism and strengthening democracy. The authoritarian movement has leveraged the flaws in our media to spread hate, manipulate public discourse, and build news ecosystems to amplify its vision for America. With this in mind, our Public Square program has revised its strategies to better meet the moment we are in. We want to ensure that all people have access to news and information that advances justice, confronts racism and inequality, and equips people to make change and thrive.

Our new five-year strategies are rooted in and build on the wisdom, experience, and vision of many of our grantees: we are deeply grateful to them for blazing the trails. We also want to recognize the many other leaders who have pioneered the work of media justice, community reporting, and movement journalism. Their efforts have often centered solidarity with communities and understood the urgent need for journalism that stands boldly for equity and democracy. Their work didn’t always find a home in our earlier strategies, and we are working to change that as we move forward and learn from the past.

The strategies below are focused on our Equitable Journalism work, which makes up half of our team’s grantmaking. We will provide updates on our Digital Democracy strategy when decisions are finalized (and you can expect to see similar updates from other Democracy Fund programs). We are excited to share the strategy and ideas that shape our journalism and media funding, but we recognize that these are just words on a page until we live into them.

Journalism must build power for an inclusive multi-racial democracy

Our Equitable Journalism strategy envisions people all across America exercising their power — making decisions for their families, mobilizing their neighbors and friends, and organizing in their communities — fueled by local reporting that equips people for civic action and serves them as partners. To get there, we believe we need to foster a reimagined local news and information landscape and an explicitly anti-racist public square, led by people who have historically been marginalized in our media and our democracy.

Throughout American history it has been leaders of color, especially those who are women or queer, who have pushed democracy and media forward, pioneering critical new community solutions and pushing for our country and our newsrooms to live up to their highest ideals. Our strategy process was informed by that history, and by the imagination and vision of bold leaders working today.

In support of this vision, our Public Square program will be funding journalism and media through two areas of focus within our Equitable Journalism work:

Our News and Information Ecosystems initiative will continue to support the evolution of local news in America by building more vibrant ecosystems and equitable networks across the nation that reimagine news and information as civic infrastructure.
Our Journalism and Power Building initiative will expand support for leaders of color, and the coalitions and organizations they lead, who are changing journalism and using media to build power and catalyze movements for equity, justice, and democracy.

These areas of focus build on lessons we have learned over the last six years. We have listened deeply to what grantees were saying about how journalism needs to show up in this moment of democratic crisis, the longtime harms media has perpetuated that got us here, and the role of philanthropy in exacerbating these challenges. We have collected some of that learning in an evaluation Impact Architects produced, which covers the last six years of our work. We were also guided by an advisory group including Alicia Bell of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, Courtney Lewis of the Institute for Nonprofit News, Jessica Gonzáles of Free Press, Lizzy Hazeltine of the NC Local News Lab Fund, and Chenjerai Kumanyika of New York University.

Some changes you will see in our journalism funding

In the next five years, we are focusing our support on those leaders and organizations we believe can help create a more anti-racist, community-centered media and advance transformative change in our public square. Key to that work will be shifting from a focus on incremental change in journalism institutions to transformative change. This transformative change must be rooted in movements, trailblazers, and coalitions inside and outside journalism that are building a new vision for what journalism can be and do in our democracy, who it works for, and with.

A few of the key shifts include:

Our new strategy will more explicitly elevate equity and racial justice as defining values across our entire portfolio by centering the work of leaders of color and those who have long been marginalized from journalism and democracy. We will invest more in those leaders and will focus on moving others in philanthropy in that direction.
We’ve long talked about informed communities as key to our democracy, but our new strategy is much clearer that information is power. We want to support news and information that equips people to build power for an inclusive multi-racial democracy.
We will invest less in large institutions and more in coalitions, networks and campaigns that help organize innovators in journalism to change the industry.
We no longer have a separate stand-alone press freedom strategy. Over the last five years, we’ve come to understand press freedom as a key part of sustainability and so we’ll still be funding some press freedom work as part of the infrastructure necessary to grow and sustain a truly independent media sector. We’ll also be leaning into efforts to confront harassment and abuse meant to silence journalists, especially people from marginalized communities.

As we move into our new strategies, we’re excited to continue learning and growing, and will be transparent, accessible and accountable along the way.

Moving into the next five years

While the struggles facing our public square are profound, there is real momentum growing around civic media and local news right now. All across the country we see incredible examples of people reimagining, rebuilding, and renewing journalism and the role it plays in our democracy. Those of us in philanthropy have a critical role to play in catalyzing this movement to ensure that the next era of independent media in America is just, equitable and thriving. A key part of our new strategies will also be continuing to partner with other funders to ensure we can meet this moment.

There are still many decisions left about who and how we will fund to make this vision a reality. We’ll be sharing more information, updating our website, and considering new grantees in 2023 and we welcome your partnership and accountability as we go down this path. If you have questions about our new strategy, please reach out to me — my door is always open. Again, my deepest thanks for your ongoing partnership.

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How We Know Journalism is Good for Democracy

Josh Stearns

September 15, 2022

At Democracy Fund, we see every day how local news strengthens democracy. People rely on local news to figure out who to vote for, how to speak up at school board meetings, how to run for local office, where to find vaccines, when to organize for change, and more. From daily reporting that equips people to act, to huge investigations that reveal corruption, the health of local news is bound up with the health of our democracy.

Unfortunately, communities across the United States are steadily losing access to this kind of civic information. According to data released in June 2022, at least one fifth of the U.S. — 70 million people — live in a community without a newspaper or a community at risk of losing theirs.

Since 2018, we’ve been tracking academic studies that show in stark terms the impact journalism has on our democracy. This research review has become a critical guide for funders, policymakers, communities, and journalists who care about creating a healthier democracy. In 2022, we overhauled this resource, including adding a section that more clearly names the harms journalism has caused in our communities, especially communities of color.

These studies and articles provide an enormous set of rigorous data that help quantify what happens when local communities have strong local news — and what happens when they lose it. Understanding the impact of quality local news on our democracy in these sorts of specific, data driven, nuanced ways is critical as we think about how to build a more equitable and sustainable future of local news that truly serves all communities at a moment of threat and uncertainty in democracy.

Do you have additional research to add, or are interested in how you can be part of the solution? Email us at LocalNewsLab [@] democracyfund.org.

(Ed. Note: This post was originally published June 26, 2018. It was last revised on September 15, 2022. We will continue to update the date in this note for future additions. Andrea Lorenz, PhD candidate at UNC Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism and Media, contributed research and guidance for the update of this post in summer 2022.)

Strong local journalism = more people turning out to vote.

The amount of local political coverage correlates with increased voter turnout. Researchers in Denmark found that “local news media coverage has a positive effect on voter turnout, but only if the news media provide politically relevant information to the voters and only at local elections.”

Voters have been more likely to vote in down-ballot races in places with more local newspapers per capita. By comparing data on legislative ballot completion with news circulation data, researchers from St. Olaf College found that even the existence of local newspapers contributes to the likelihood that voters will fill out more of their ballots.

Local media coverage can increase voter engagement in state Supreme Court elections. David Hughes studied how these races can often be considered “low information elections” because of how little information voters can find about the candidates and stakes of the contest, but media attention can generate and distribute as much information about a race as a well-funded campaign.

People who consume local news are more likely to vote locally. The authors of a study from Pennsylvania State University examined the habits of people who consume local and national media, on both traditional and digital platforms, and found both types of news consumption are positive predictors of voting at both levels.

The act of reading a newspaper can mobilize as many as 13 percent of non-voters to vote, Matthew Gentzkow testified to the Federal Trade Commission in 2009. The statistic comes from a study which found that “newspapers have a robust positive effect on political participation” noting in particular that one additional newspaper in a region can boost voter turnout by approximately 0.3 percentage points.

Consuming local journalism is associated with consistent voting in local elections and a strong connection to community. Pew Research Center analysts found in 2016 that more than a quarter of U.S. adults say they always vote in local elections, and they also have “strikingly stronger” local news habits than people who don’t vote locally on a regular basis.

Reading local newspapers’ political coverage helps people understand how important local elections are and affects how much they participate in them. Researchers surveyed people in three small Midwest communities to learn more about their media use, political knowledge, and participation in local elections and found newspaper political news exposure strongly predicted political participation, people’s perceived importance of local municipal elections, and how much they voted.

Local news can boost voting by young people, and help them feel better prepared to go to the polls. Research by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement found that local news was a critical tool that young voters, especially people of color, turned to ahead of the 2020 election. The researchers say even more could be done by newsrooms to serve this population, and “local news media holds immense potential as a stakeholder in youth civic and political engagement.”

Weak local journalism = fewer people vote.

Voters in districts with less campaign coverage had a harder time evaluating candidates and reported they were less likely to vote. Jennifer L. Lawless and Danny Hayes used congressional districts as a lens through which to study political coverage (across 6,000 articles!) and civic engagement (through a survey of nearly 50,000 people) in the month leading up to the 2010 election. Then, the same researchers used longitudinal data to analyze how a decline in local political news coverage reduces citizen engagement. As political news about congressional elections in local newspapers declined over four years, so did citizens’ knowledge about those offices and voting.

When a major journalistic source of information declines or disappears, there are massive effects on local political engagement. This has happened in hundreds of communities where there have been large declines in local news. Danny Hayes and Jennifer L. Lawless also found that the “hollowing out” of American newspapers over 30 years — including a dramatic reduction in the amount of local news produced by newspapers of all sizes, with the most severe cuts in local government and school coverage — had massive effects on local political engagement, including decreased political knowledge, and less interest in political participation.

Places that lost a local newspaper experienced a “significant” drop in civic engagement compared to cities that didn’t lose one. Lee Shaker studied what happened to civic engagement in Denver and Seattle the year the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed. “The data from the [U.S. Census Bureau] indicate that civic engagement in Seattle and Denver dropped significantly from 2008 to 2009 — a decline that is not consistently replicated over the same time period in other major American cities that did not lose a newspaper,” Shaker writes.

When a newspaper shutters, fewer candidates run and incumbents are more likely to win. When the Cincinnati Post, which served both Ohio and northern Kentucky, shut down Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido observed that “fewer candidates ran for municipal office […] incumbents became more likely to win reelection, and voter turnout and campaign spending fell.”

Less local media can mean less election turnout. Jackie Filla and Martin Johnson used data on voting and weekly and daily newspaper access in the Los Angeles area to investigate how access to local government information affects turnout in municipal elections. “We find that absent local news, voters are less likely to turnout,” they write.

Cities and towns with shrinking newsrooms had “significantly reduced political competition in mayoral races” and lower voter turnout. Meghan E. Rubado and Jay T. Jennings used a data set including 11 local newspapers in California matched up with the municipalities they cover to study the impact of declines in newsroom staffing over 20 years. As Josh Benton notes in his overview of the research, the study is notable because most similar research focuses on newspaper closings, not just shrinking staff. In a follow-up paper, Meghan E. Rubado and Jay T. Jennings interviewed working journalists to understand the impact of newspaper employment cuts on the communities they cover. Journalists they talked to described “corruption, mismanagement, lower turnout, and incumbency advantages” as outcomes of reduced government coverage. (We also recommend Nieman Lab’s excellent summary of the paper.)

Thorough local journalism helps people be less biased when considering candidates.

Giving voters even the slightest bit of additional information on a candidate (like occupation) in addition to having just the race or gender, eliminated or mitigated gender and racial/ethnic biases. Researchers experimented with ballots mimicking different real-life ballot designs that have varying levels of information about each candidate while using names that signal different genders, races, and/or ethnicities. Online respondents pretended to vote using those ballots. The researchers found that “When respondents have the least information, candidates of color—particularly Black candidates—are disadvantaged, among respondents across party, ideological, and racial attitude lines.”

Local news coverage helps voters assess down-ballot candidates. Looking at people who receive information about their local elected officials compared to people who receive information about officials in neighboring states, Daniel J. Moskowitz notes that local political news coverage provides voters with “Information that allows them to assess down-ballot candidates separately from their national, partisan assessment.”

Quality local journalism can counter divisive national narratives that aim to stoke polarization.

One local newspaper’s experiment of publishing only local editorials slowed polarization among readers compared to a neighboring town’s newspaper readers. Joshua P. Darr, Louisiana State University, Matthew P. Hitt, Colorado State University, Johanna L. Dunaway, Texas A & M University out the reasoning like this: As Americans consume increasingly nationalized news, they become more partisan. By consuming more local information, people are more likely to be concerned with issues that affect them locally and elect leaders using these criteria rather than relying on national partisan rhetoric or cues to choose leaders. This can create a better democratic system.

Local media establishes a trusted, shared public understanding of local issues, counteracting distrust of national media. Using focus groups, story diaries, and interviews with residents and local journalists in Kentucky, Andrea Wenzel examined how people navigate tricky conversations about politics and current events, locally and nationally, with neighbors. Wenzel found that recognizing place-based identities and media representations can help facilitate trust in journalism.

Local news availability keeps leaders accountable to constituents rather than the national party. Research by Marc Trussler shows that this accountability shows potential to mitigate the nationalization of politics.

Political polarization among voters increases after local newspapers close down. In research published in Journal of Communication, researchers compared data on split-ticket voting and ballot rolloffs in the context of local newspaper closures.They found that places where newspapers had closed saw more people voting for just one party up and down the ballot.. “It seems like it’s the very existence of a local option doing the work here,” Joshua Darr of Louisiana State University said in a writeup about the report. “Just staying open seems like a fairly important factor, regardless of the level of political reporting in the news.”

Every dollar spent on local news produces hundreds of dollars in public benefit by exposing corruption & keeping an eye on government spending.

Watchdog reporting has an outsized economic impact. In his book, Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism, James Hamilton is able to quantify the economic impact of watchdog reporting. By looking at the political and social change that resulted from journalism, and the cost of those stories, Hamilton was able to show that “each dollar spent on stories can generate hundreds of dollars in benefits to society.”

Local newspapers hold companies accountable for company misconduct. After a local newspaper closure, researchers found that local facilities increase violations by 1.1% and penalties by 15.2%, indicating that the closures reduce monitoring by the press. They used a data set tracking a wide range of federal violations and the resulting penalties issued by 44 agencies between 2000 and 2017, for a total of 26,450 violations at 10,647 facilities.

When elected leaders are under investigation, more media coverage can increase the chance that they’ll resign from office. Marcel Garz and Jil Sörenson studied examples in Germany and found “resignations are more common when the media covers the case intensely.”

Citizens are more likely to vote out elected officials when media outlets highlight the incumbents’ ties to corruption. These findings, from Harvard and Columbia researchers using examples in Mexico, demonstrate support for the media’s role in holding people accountable in a democracy.

Without watchdog reporters, cities faced higher long-term borrowing costs — that translate to immediate costs for citizens. Municipal bond data in the years after a newspaper closure showed that “cities where newspapers closed up shop saw increases in government costs as a result of the lack of scrutiny over local deals.” The study used data from 1996 to 2015 and tracked English-language newspapers in more than 1,200 counties in the U.S. “Without investigative daily reporters around to call bullshit on city hall, three years after a newspaper closes, that city or county’s municipal bond offering yields increased on average by 5.5 basis points, while bond yields in the secondary market increased by 6.4 basis points—statistically significant effects,” Kriston Capps wrote in explaining the study for CityLab.

“Congressmen who are less covered by the local press work less for their constituencies,” researchers from MIT and Stockholm University documented in a study by evaluating their voting records, participation in hearings and more. They also found that federal spending was lower in areas where there was less press coverage of the local members of congress.

Where there is unreliable internet access, there is likely limited government transparency and eroding local news capacity. “In areas where declines in local newsrooms and resources inhibit political reporting and scrutiny of government actions,” researchers behind this study of Australian communities write, “there is little impetus for governments to develop interactive digital practices (or to consider and respond to civic input) given that restricting such spaces is arguably an advantage in the maintenance of political power.” Taken together, these forces create “a ruinous triumvirate – ill-informed citizenries, illegitimate local decision making and minimally accountable local governments.”

A free press helps tamp down bureaucratic corruption, in many countries. “Of the probable controls on bureaucratic corruption a free press is likely to be among the most effective ones,” authors of this study examining corruption in various nations wrote. They found “a significant relationship between more press freedom and less corruption in a large cross-section of countries.”

Watchdog coverage is more effective when it includes possible solutions to encourage civic actions. Reporting on its own doesn’t always hold power accountable. To do it most effectively, watchdog coverage should include possible solutions to encourage civic action. This finding comes from Nikki Usher’s interviews with business journalists at The New York Times, Marketplace public radio, and TheStreet to understand how journalists retrospectively considered their responsibilities following the 2007–2009 financial crisis.

People feel a stronger sense of community in places with strong local journalism.

Local news — with local owners — keeps people engaged with their physical location and local government. Meredith Metzler’s research on this involved surveying people living in two different rural communities about their information habits and assessing their media landscape in the context of where they live. Metzler found a relationship between engaging with local media, affinity to local community, and engagement with that community.

Local newspapers build a community’s sense of shared connection and place, and it’s not easy to replace them. Researchers came to this conclusion after organizing focus groups of community leaders in Baldwin City, Kansas and discussing the impact of the loss of their local paper on business, technology proficiency, and community attachment. “The overall consensus was that residents miss having a single community information platform,” they write.

Community members can experience increased loneliness, disconnection, and diminished local pride when a local paper closes. Through 19 interviews with community members of Caroline County, Virginia, following the Caroline Progress’ closure after 99 years, researcher Nick Mathews compiled examples of increasing loneliness, disconnection from community, and diminished local pride.

Communication within place is critical to producing community. Lewis Freidland focuses explicitly on the intersection of communication, community and democracy in his research, and has shown compellingly how communication within place, especially the kind made possible through local media, is critical to producing community.

Newspaper reading correlates with respondents’ sense of social cohesion. Masahiro Yamamoto has shown that community newspapers are important to community engagement. (Interestingly, Pew found an alternative correlation to also be true. Those who feel “highly attached to their communities demonstrate much stronger ties to local news” than those without a strong local sense of place.)

It’s not just news outlets — storytelling in general is key. Connection to local storytelling was key to “neighborhood belonging, collective efficacy, and civic participation,” Yong-Chan Kim and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach found as they examined people’s relationship to community media.

Even when online news is not as tied to geography, it can build a sense of place. In two separate pieces of research Carrie Buchanan (2009) and Kristy Hess (2012) document various ways local news builds sense of place and connection in geographic communities even when online news becomes somewhat more unmoored from location

Local news keeps communities informed during times of upheaval, like disasters, protests, and pandemics — when people need critical information to engage their communities and leaders.

Epidemiologists depend on local newspapers to identify and forecast disease outbreaks. Helen Branswell wrote that “When towns lose their newspapers, disease detectives are left flying blind.” In other words, America’s journalism crisis is also a public health crisis.

Local media is often the first to reveal a crisis and draw sustained attention to it. The Pew Research Center studied how people looked for and found information about the Flint water crisis to help understand “how news spreads in our increasingly fractured information environment.” Their data shows that local media was reporting on the crisis long before national media was involved.

Media coverage can help reduce pollution. Newspaper coverage of polluters and emissions producers was correlated with a 29% reduction in the emissions compared to factories and plants that were not covered. “While coverage was generally lacking, [Stockholm University’s Pamela] Campa found that plants located in neighborhoods with more newspapers were more likely to receive negative coverage in the press. More significantly, she discovered that plants located in areas with more newspapers had lower emissions,” Sophie Yeo wrote for Pacific Standard about the study.

Hyperlocal reporting is vital to research efforts across an array of disciplines. When Gothamist and DNAInfo were shut down suddenly, Samuel Stein, a geographer at CUNY Graduate Center, spoke to a number of academics about how, for researchers, local news really is the first draft of history.

Local news isn’t inherently good for communities just because it’s local though, studies show.

Journalism clearly has positive outcomes for our democracy, but it is not in and of itself inherently good. Studies show how local journalism outlets have harmed many communities with their coverage. Shuttering local newspapers is not the only crisis in local news — we also have to work to reimagine and rebuild how newsrooms serve communities, who gets to lead those newsrooms, and how reporting reflects the diverse needs of our nation. It is not enough to simply replace what has been lost — the following studies remind us that we must build something even better as we move forward.

“Since the colonial era, media outlets have used their platforms to inflict harm on Black people through weaponized narratives that promote Black inferiority and portray Black people as threats to society,” Free Press staff wrote in their rigorous, seismic Media2070 essay. They documented instances such as the deadly overthrow of a local government in Wilmington, North Carolina where Black people held power and other situations that connects racist journalism to lynching, promoting segregation, and more.

Local reporting can fill information needs, but it can also replicate inequities. Local journalism, especially newspapers, provided critical information needed during the height of COVID regarding healthcare, emergency, and civic information. However, there were signs of information inequality, where people in wealthier, whiter counties had better quality and more local coverage than people in diverse, poorer counties.

Residents of a primarily Black community say they are not served by journalism that follows traditional practices of “objectivity.” In studying the development over 17 months of a journalism project intended to serve a majority Black community, Andrea Wenzel and Letrell Crittenden determined that “residents’ ideals for local journalism at times clash with dominant journalism norms and practices regarding objectivity.”

Paywalls limit access to information that operates as part of local media’s civic potential. While paywalls can become a helpful revenue stream for local media facing financial pressure, they also “challenge the civic function of the local news media,” researchers looking at Norwegian and Danish outlets assessed.

When purchased by corporate predators, local news becomes less frequent, relevant, and inherently local. The quantity and quality of local news decreases in correlation to these acquisitions by media conglomerates. Researchers came to this conclusion after studying more than 130,000 articles from the Denver Post, LA Weekly, the New York Daily News, and more.

Sensationalized coverage emphasizes short-term conflicts rather than social concerns. By studying the impact of a local newspaper in Australia reporting on a local climate change plan, researchers write “rather than providing an arena for public discussion and constructive debate, we find that the newspaper adopted a clear position rejecting the need for changes in planning for anticipated climate impacts.”

What’s on the horizon for journalism in our democracy?

These findings call us to take even more seriously the erosion of people’s access to news and information. The faltering of newspapers, the consolidation of TV and radio, and the rising power of social media platforms are not just commercial issues driven by the market; they are democratic issues with profound implications for our communities.

We have seen a lot of transformation and reasons for hope over the past few years since this post was originally published. News leaders are thinking about how to serve their communities, and reckoning with failures of the past. Journalism funders are coming together to fund projects to revitalize local news ecosystems. And funders who haven’t traditionally focused on journalism are joining in as well, realizing they will not achieve the change they seek in healthcare, education and more without information about their focuses. The research above makes the case for why we must continue working to expand support for quality local news that truly reflects and serves its communities. If you want to know more about how, or want to add additional research to this list, reach out to Josh Stearns at jstearns@democracyfund.org and Christine Schmidt at cschmidt@democracyfund.org.

Learn More

Explore Democracy Fund’s work funding equitable journalism and local news and information ecosystems
Subscribe to the Local Fix newsletter for regular updates on innovators in local news
Read “Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Journalism: What Funders Can Do” and learn what it means to care about equity in journalism.
Check out this Q&A with UNC PhD candidate Andrea Lorenz to learn more about her work researching the intersection of local news and democracy.

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Investing in our Vision of an Inclusive, Multi-Racial Democracy

Joe Goldman

April 28, 2022

As Democracy Fund and Democracy Fund Voice prepare for the next five years, our teams have been asking hard questions about how we can best leverage our assets to meet the greatest needs of the field. We still have work to do, but I’m excited to share that we’ve made great progress in setting our new direction.

We are committed to achieving an inclusive, multi-racial democracy that is open, just, resilient, and trustworthy. This long-term vision for the future requires:

A just and inclusive society that has reckoned with structural racism,
Equitable participation, voice, and power for communities of color,
Representative and accountable political institutions, and
Vibrant and equitable information ecosystems that meet the civic needs of communities.

If Democracy Fund and its allies are going to make progress toward these goals, we must first acknowledge that we are in a fight that threatens the fabric of our nation. While our democracy has long been profoundly and intentionally broken, today’s authoritarian actors further pervert the system to entrench their power and put the fundamental nature of our democracy at risk. The stakes before us are remarkably high.

Going forward, Democracy Fund will strengthen and expand the pro-democracy movement with a focus on the power and leadership of communities of color. We will weaken, dismantle, and defend against those who threaten our republic and oppose the ideals of an inclusive, multi-racial democracy. And we will pursue structural changes that can lock in new dynamics in this struggle.

Over the next year and a half we will move toward this new direction by refreshing existing portfolios and launching new ones. Over time, you’ll see us:

- Move from Incrementalism to Transformation. The depth to which our system is broken means that incremental change simply cannot get us to where we need to go. We will launch new initiatives and explorations aimed at shifting the fundamental dynamics of the system over the long term. We will explore how we can create a more representative, majoritarian political system, while we continue to support a healthier information environment.

- Defend Core Democratic Institutions. While we have our sights set on long-term, transformational change, we cannot ignore the threats that are right in front of us. We will strengthen our election system and put in place safeguards against abuses of power. We will learn from the experience of others who have successfully defended against authoritarian actors and explore ways to weaken and fragment the power centers of those who oppose an inclusive, multi-racial democracy.

- Center Racial Justice. We cannot achieve an open and just democracy without also achieving racial justice. All of our initiatives — from elections to journalism to government accountability — will continue their journey to embody a commitment to racial equity. We will expand our Just & Inclusive Society program, including our initiative to support and empower the immigrant and Black, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian (BAMEMSA) communities, along with a new effort to support movement and power building among communities of color. We will explore opportunities to ensure our nation’s leadership reflects the diversity of the country.

- Rally the Field to Step Up to the Moment. The challenges our democracy faces are great, and Democracy Fund’s resources pale in comparison. To defend against these existential threats, we will scale up our work dedicated to encouraging other philanthropists to join us in these efforts — with a significant focus on combating attempts to subvert our election system.

Our organization has learned a tremendous amount since we began our journey. We have had the privilege of standing alongside others in the fight to protect our democracy. They have pushed us to deepen our understanding of the foundational injustices of our system and to recognize the moment of opportunity also inherent in our current crisis.

Now is the time to redouble our efforts for our democracy. We must slow and eventually halt the precipitous backsliding we’ve experienced — and make real progress toward a brighter future.

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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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Envisioning a Just and Open Digital Democracy: Expanding Our Commitment to Platform Accountability

Paul Waters

September 14, 2021

Last month, after Facebook attempted to undermine the efforts of independent researchers — and Democracy Fund grantees — who were studying the effects of the platform on democracy, our President joined fellow NetGain Partnership leaders in releasing a joint letter calling for greater platform accountability and transparency. That open letter from some of the nation’s leading foundations noted:

“Our foundations share a vision for an open, secure, a nd equitable internet space where free expression, economic opportunity, knowledge exchange, and civic engagement can thrive. This attempt to impede the efforts of independent researchers is a call for us all to protect that vision, for the good of our communities, and the good of our democracy.”

Days later, the researchers who Facebook had sought to silence released a major study that illustrated how high the stakes are. Their research showed that during the 2020 election people found and clicked on misinformation on Facebook far more than accurate, factual news — further evidence that social media platforms are harming our democracy by amplifying content that accelerates hate, division, and misinformation.

At Democracy Fund, there’s never been a question as to why we would support and advocate for platform accountability — it is central to our reason for being. In this moment, we have unprecedented opportunities to make social media companies liable for their harms, to rein in the worst aspects of their business model, and to force changes in how they operate. If we are successful, we can move toward a world where social media companies enable multiracial and pluralistic democracy, instead of fracturing it, where facts are amplified, rather than discounted, and where there is accountability for hate speech and incitements to violence.

It took some careful and collaborative thinking for us to determine our theory of change, as well as what our support on this issue could look like. To meet this moment, here at Democracy Fund, we have started to significantly increase our grantmaking to nonprofit organizations who are working deeply on these issues, and often at the intersection of advocacy, public will-building, and litigation. We’re deepening our partnerships with a mix of grassroots organizers, researchers, communicators, lobbyists, and litigators, and building on our work with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

At the heart of our grantmaking will be Black and Indigenous people, and people of color, and the harms they face as a result of social media platforms. Conspiracy, extremism and prejudice are magnified on social media in ways that are vastly disproportionate to their actual representation in society and are normalized by the spread from harmful algorithms and networks.

Together, our grantees will be working on three key areas to transform our digital public square:

Anti-Discrimination and Data Privacy: Ensuring that social media companies and their systems cannot use personal data to discriminate or track and target people in ways that lead to disparate impact;
Platform Liability: Transforming the policy frameworks for how social media platforms are held liable for the online and offline harms their systems and choices produce; and
Transparency: Opening up social media platforms to new levels of transparency regarding the impact of their systems on our democracy and civil rights to enable audits and reporting by journalists, researchers and policymakers.

This work will spread across communities, courtrooms and the halls of congress, and will be built on a growing movement of organizations working at the intersection of civil rights and platform accountability. We are grateful for the work that others have done in this space and know we can’t do it alone. As Democracy Fund President Joe Goldman has said, “tackling democracy’s cybersecurity problem requires collective action” and our efforts will do just that. We’ll share more about this growing area of work soon.

If you’re interested in learning more, or partnering with us in this effort, please drop me a line at pwaters [@] democracyfundvoice.org.

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A call for funders on 9/11: invest in Black, African, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian communities

Omayma El Ella

September 9, 2021

Democracy Fund is joining funders in a pledge to raise $50 million over the next five years to support Black, African, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian (BAMEMSA) communities deeply impacted by the United States’ response to 9/11. We are proud to join in this effort together with Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, and The RISE Together Fund (a donor collaborative of the Proteus Fund) and encourage other funders to do the same.

Over the past four years, we have seen a rise in dangerous rhetoric and policies targeting BAMEMSA communities, such as the Muslim, African, and asylum-seeker travel bans. There continues to be a relentless amount of money dedicated to funding Islamophobia and hate. At the same time, many leaders in BAMEMSA communities are on the frontlines fighting for an end to discriminatory policies and legislation.

Democracy Fund has dedicated a grantmaking portfolio to BAMEMSA-led organizations as they challenge infringements to their civil rights and combat polarizing and racist narratives. As part of this work, we have supported BAMEMSA-led funding collaboratives who help build the “critical social infrastructure”* of BAMESA communities, as well as a number of BAMEMSA led organizations. These grantees include:

RISE Together Fund, the first donor collaborative dedicated to supporting BAMEMSA groups. Their support of grassroots organizations and collective advocacy efforts has contributed to decisions like the executive order rescinding the Muslim, asylum and African bans.
Pillars Fund, a Muslim-led foundation, is building on a decade of funding community organizations. In 2021, they launched their Pillars Artist Fellowship to promote more complex and accurate representations of Muslims in media.
The Institute for Social Policy & Understanding (ISPU), which educates and trains journalists across the country to accurately cover Muslims and issues impacting them. Their work reaches millions of people in diverse outlets such as the Chicago Tribune, NPR, and the Washington Post.

We invite you to read the letter we signed and consider joining us in supporting the BAMEMSA community. The attack on civil rights, violation of norms, and unfettered hate speech we have seen over the past 20 years harms our democracy and makes our society more vulnerable to fissures and violence. Supporting BAMEMSA communities is crucial to the fight for a more open, just, and inclusive society and democracy.

BAMEMSA-led grantees of Democracy Fund’s Just and Inclusive Society Project include:

*Brie Loskota, Executive Director of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School, uses this term to describe the organizations, practices, norms, and relationships that make up a healthy society.