Funding with purpose: a dialogue with funders on how to provide meaningful support

The Journalism Funders Forum (JFF) is an open community of funders working together to ensure more and more impactful funding of journalism in Europe. We, as funders ourselves, realise funders can have the tendency to turn inwards, thinking we can solve the problems of the world by setting priorities from behind our desks. JFF believes the opposite is true: how the distributed funds can be best put to work to help strengthen and enliven European journalism can’t be determined in isolation. At IJF, JFF wants deepen the understanding between funders and journalism. To this end, we propose a session in which we encourage journalists to participate and engage.

Firstly, according to us, funders need to publicly display vulnerability and openness by reflecting on the choices we’ve already (implicitly) made. Therefore, we want to discuss with the participants the trends we as funders ourselves identify in the current funding landscape. Do those trends actually strengthen the impact of funders or do they in reality steer funders towards superficial hypes and ‘donor darlings? Secondly, we would like to listen to the participants when they discuss what the trends in funding should be? By taking the backseat, we want the offer the opportunity to journalism to be heard by funders without the restriction of pre-existing criteria, strategic priorities, etc. General themes will be provided, including underfunded topics in journalism, accessibility and transparency of funders, etc.

Ask a journalism funder anything! Please take a moment to tell Journalism Funders Forum-members what they are missing in their grant-making. We’ll discuss as many of these issues as we can during our session. You can provide your input at any time by following this link.

Organised in association with Journalism Funders Forum.