Place, pace, and progress: An invitation to the medium term
How multiple horizons can build effective local news funding coalitions near and long term
by Lizzy Hazeltine
All the people building collaborative local news funds across the United States used to fit on one Zoom screen. Now we fill hotel ballrooms, like we did at the Press Forward Summit in Charlotte.
The energy is real, and so are the questions 40-plus Local Chapter leaders are asking about how to build with the initial spark and the urgent need for locally relevant news and verified information. We can draw from deeper wells to do what we can, even when nationalized narratives pull us away from our neighbors and our locus of control feels small.
Like other local news funds, the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund began with a spark and urgency. Eight years on, the light that now invites people and institutions to walk forward together across uncharted territory couldn’t have existed without the power of place and a long view.
Only in retrospect after more than 10 grant cycles can I tell you the story of how we got here. Local news funding coalitions work when we build them around people and places in common and pace ourselves for the timelines of how change happens. I can only dream of what we’ll understand after 10 more, and I want to offer what I’ve learned now.
As I've written about before, funders can make real progress when they focus on seeding and scaling solutions locally. The specific places where people call home are where the national trends are actually felt. As funders, we're working within complex, interconnected systems. The work we do to improve one facet of people's lives—like increasing access to trusted news and information—cannot be untangled from the other issues our neighbors face on a daily basis. Stepping into that complexity and effectively shifting these systemic dynamics requires thinking near and long term.
Starting with place and holding a deliberate pace make for strong funding coalitions.
Place is the key to building together.
Shared places and people create common interests with other funders across programmatic focuses on health, economic mobility, disaster recovery, or other strategic themes. Every local chapter leader can use place as a galvanizing commonality to bring funders together to fund local news and information, regardless of where they are in their chapter development or what strategic themes motivate their members.
When the Fund started, two NC funders named news, journalism, or media as grantmaking priorities. Now, the Fund has more than 18 contributors to our pooled fund who invest in these places together. Each year, many more make their own aligned grants that expand who in NC can find, trust, and use the info they need.
More funders are understanding how local news systems are interconnected with the economic, social, and geographic factors that shape North Carolinians’ lives. It’s no coincidence that places that need more local news and information are also food, healthcare, broadband, and other kinds of deserts. It should also come as no surprise that these are places where local leaders have stepped up to start newsrooms and community organizations to answer their own and their neighbors' needs.
Place makes it easier to find who we can work with because we know where to look. The Fund measures our impact in how our grantmaking and network building help people thrive, so we’ve stepped into a philanthropic community where people have long been at work on the other dimensions of holistic wellbeing. We find common ground with other funders who focus on health, families, digital access, local democracy, science, and community development because we are each working on interconnected pieces of the forces shaping our communities.
Place also gives us a bounded universe to observe what’s working and amplify it. Early on, we prioritized grants to communities, knowing that legacy commercial news didn’t serve everyone in our state. We learned in our first two rounds of grants that where newsrooms couldn’t reach, like farmworker labor camps or inside prisons, community-based organizations are the trusted communicators. Stories of success chip away at skepticism and build momentum by showing what’s possible and connecting it back to specific people and places, rather than staying theoretical.
Below the strategy level, place is tangible, concrete context we share. We can literally go there together, which makes it easier to go there together figuratively. A shared physical reality supplies the history, texture, details, and nuances that bust through the context-collapse created by nationalized narratives and assumptions about how people get their news and information. Place is a lever against the placelessness of being lost in the internet. In a physical place, we can observe and learn shoulder to shoulder, rather than assume we can know the answers without engaging.
Place gives us back a human connection to tell a story of us. Marshall Ganz’s work and writing names the power of narrative in cultivating shared interests that create a sense of common purpose, an Us. Shared place is a direct line to shared interest that connects the individual funder’s goals with the We of a collaborative funding vehicle, and the Now of community needs. We know misinformation and mistrust thrive without this grounding, and we know that trust blooms when local news is produced by and with the communities it serves, rooted in a place they share. There’s a parallel process for building the trust needed to fund together that works with how our human hearts and minds work when we’re trying new things.
A steady pace fosters insight, builds on impact.
All of the Fund’s deepest learning is because we made grants with others, and then did it again as soon as possible. Moving money to the field regularly, hosting open calls, supporting organizations beyond the check, and attending to what happens next has moved us from following up on crises and emergent needs to seeing signals, patterns, networks, and successes to build on.
In 2019, my first summer at the Fund and a year after Hurricane Florence, we funded both newsrooms and community organizations for the first time, powered by a generous match from the North Carolina Community Foundation. That cohort gave us a chance to build relationships in rural Eastern NC, whereas our first round of grants was largely to organizations based in NC’s major cities. That expansion of geography was critical for the pandemic we didn’t yet know was coming 9 months later. A few cohort calls and enough mutual visibility meant organizations were calling each other with tips and connections when so much was upended.
We baked what we learned about how to run a selection process into a 2020 open call that accounted for both types of organizations and further expanded grants. I count more than 22 content and funding collaborations across different members of our portfolio, which I see as tangible evidence of the ways different types of organizations are lending each other their relational capital and playing complementary roles in community-facing events, coverage, and fundraising. Funding this diversity of roles around specific people and places is the kind of idea that’s now in reports like Press Forward and Commoner Company’s recent one about “information stewards.”
I live with the restless tension between the pace of fundraising and the patient curiosity I need to tune in to what emerges. It’s an animating, sometimes frustrating force, yet I’ve come to know it as a generative one. Medium-term results, spanning the two to five-year time horizon, are unknowable before making the best-informed round of grants focused on specific people and places. Moving forward steadily reveals those results.
The desire to know outcomes before we fund can be a stumbling block to making grants. We celebrate investigations that hold powerful people to account, technology that expands access, and storytelling that interrupts hate and knits us back together, yet we don’t expect these outcomes from any one-year grant. Grant reporting and network mapping, rather than applications, have been key to what I’ve learned about the critical last-mile role of community health workers and food pantry organizers who sometimes go door-to-door to distribute information along with other basic resources.
The desire to see an organization achieve financial viability without philanthropic support can also undercut the service we seek to expand. Local news organizations deeply rooted in place can’t escape the context they’re working in economically, socially, politically, and culturally. For some, that’s an economic boost, and for others, not. It’s not possible for all organizations in our portfolios to achieve the same economic outcomes as peers in population centers with access and proximity to wealth.
As funders, we can back away from expecting specific outcomes from one organization or for individual leaders to bear up financially under the sum of systemic forces in their communities by thinking about a medium-term horizon. Near term, we can buy organizations and leaders enough breathing room to do what’s needed while looking to build a financial future that’s more abundant. That’s doubly needed for organizations in places usually cut out of power and philanthropy.
We seed progress on multiple horizons.
Progress unfolds on overlapping, interdependent timelines from near to long term. What we learned in the initial ecosystem study and are learning now demands both a bias to make grants and patience about how and when change happens after the check is written. Making material change in complex systems at the local scale happens on multiple timelines: immediate intervention, the medium term of emergence, and long term contribution.
I think of how Code the Dream and Student Action with Farmworkers built a texting app to reach farmworkers at scale across rural NC after families were left out of hurricane alerts in prior storms. Later, this technology and the distribution network that got it on people’s phones were critical to NC Governor Cooper’s administration’s early pandemic outreach to farmworkers and their families. This past summer, the app helped workers know when heat could threaten their lives and understand their rights to mandated breaks.
Near-term grantmaking answers the truth that people can’t wait for the local news and information they need, especially in crisis or when solutions are growing from long-unmet needs. Steady-enough, regularly available funding with continuity buys partners in the field the time they need to navigate and adapt without leaving swaths of our state behind who can’t pay for local news or aren’t hubs for philanthropy.
A crisis often surfaces what is less visible, but still happening day to day. Sticking with those places after the frenzy of response yields deeper insight. Wading into, and waiting for, the messy-but-fertile medium term keeps a coalition pointed toward making progress for our people and places, playing our roles in changing circumstances, and staying attentive to what’s working. I’ve often written about how funding before a disaster sets the ecosystem up for resilience when the unexpected happens, and that’s the fruit of working at a pace that we can maintain over the ground we’ve set out to cover.
Each round of grants both intervenes in the present moment and sets up possibilities we can only define in retrospect. Local news systems’ interconnections with the economic, social, and geographic factors that shape North Carolinians’ lives have made me impatient to make grants and more patient with what comes back to us from the field. Making an individual round of grants sets up a starting point to build and learn from.
There’s power in moving deliberately enough to meet changing needs and investing in a system that will be there to adapt in an as-yet-unknown future. Sometimes it’s harder to see that when the pressures of the moment feel like whiplash, and that’s where the medium-term is an invitation.
An invitation to the medium-term.
I trust and believe that over time and through more cycles of the medium-term, the Fund and our partners can add our work to the deepest drumbeat of generational change. I see the beginnings of us playing our role with funding and relationships that make real the future where everyone in our state can thrive. I know there is much more to do and more to set in motion right now.
We help other funders find traction in this insight-rich medium-term, where we collect and connect the dots about what helps our neighbors find, trust, and use local news and information and what it means for their core program areas. Working in one state across moments of opportunity and times of emergency has honed our ability to localize confusing national trends and point to what’s at stake and what’s possible for the people and places at the center of our vision.
The medium-term has happened faster than I dreamed, and it’s proven more than worth wrestling with cash flow, time horizons, and urgency. Continuity of modest funding since 2018 allowed organizations to solidify the teams needed to answer WhatsApp messages, host events, print flyers, show up at meetings, verify what’s happening, and be useful. The people who did that are the same reporters, publishers, community health workers, and organizers who have responded to the unthinkable, from Hurricane Florence to COVID-19, national elections, and Hurricane Helene.
Whether you have a spark of collaboration, a fresh new ecosystem study, millions in grants out the door, or heartache and hope, I hope you hear an invitation to start with and return to the people and places where you work. I hope you hear that what you’re best positioned to contribute now, next year, and 10 grant cycles from now can each create future possibilities.