Lindsey Linzer serves as the Vice President of Community Investments at The Miami Foundation. In this role, she partners with private and family foundations, nonprofit organizations, and community members to advance social change. Lindsey helps donors turn their philanthropic visions into reality by designing and implementing innovative donor collaboratives and grantmaking initiatives.
This month, Rebecca Fishman Lipsey and I spent three days in Chicago at the inaugural Press Forward Funders’ Summit to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Press Forward, the national movement we are incubating to strengthen the civic health of our communities by revitalizing and investing in access to local news and information.
If the idea of Press Forward itself is bold, doing it collaboratively is even bolder. Though collaborations move slower, they’re multitudes more powerful because they represent funders coming together to do something that they may not have capacity to do themselves. It’s leveraging a national network’s power to make major investments.
If you surveyed foundations and individual donors about their giving priorities, journalism and local news do not rise to the top. With Press Forward, we’ve united more than 60 funders from across the country to ignite a paradigm shift that positions journalism as a philanthropic priority.
Just as our communities need access to healthcare and housing and arts education, they also need access to local information that drives important community decision-making.
The summit, which brought together 100 of our private foundation and community foundation partners from across the country, afforded us a moment to look back at what we’ve built together, reflect on our wins, learn from each other, and strategize on how to bring more funders into the fold and make the next four years of this initiative more impactful.
It was a ‘Proud Mama’ moment for me personally — to think that just a year ago we bravely launched Press Forward with no staff, website, or detailed plan – just a group of deeply dedicated and passionate funding partners who believe deeply that revitalizing local news and information with strengthen our democracy.
In the past year, we’ve accomplished so much but most importantly, we hired an incredible team to lead this work. The team is located across the country and brings an immense about of subject matter expertise to this work. Meet the team here.
One of the most powerful things we did was launch a movement to create local Press Forward Chapters. There are now 25 city, regional, and state chapters led by local funders that have emerged in the past year that are advancing the Press Forward mission at the local level. We are supporting them with grant funds, capacity-building resources, and other infrastructure supports so that the Locals are empowered to fundraise and make investments in local news in their communities. These Local chapters are taking our national message and bringing it into their communities.
We recognized that for this to be successful, it can’t only be a national funder initiative – you can’t have a local news initiative without engaging local funders. Our intention is that these Local chapters will live on in perpetuity to continue supporting investments in local news and local access to information efforts even after a nationwide initiative like Press Forward winds down. This five-year initiative is about seeding these efforts all around the country and building up a base of funders who see local news as a priority area.
We also launched and closed our first Press Forward open call for funding with a focus on closing local news coverage gaps. We received an incredible response with more than 900 proposals coming in from small news providers across the country, more than double what we expected, and had 113 advisors supporting us in reviewing these proposals and providing recommendations. We are proud that we could put some of the decision-making power back into the hands of media experts from across the country.
The grants will be announced in October, but we expect to award upwards of $10 million to at least 100 media outlets. The grants will follow The Miami Foundation’s trust-based philanthropy approach and will be awarded as two-year, general operating support grants to provide newsroom leaders with the flexible support they need to serve the local news needs of their communities.
As The Miami Foundation continues to be the backbone for this powerful national effort, we are also bravely leading the effort to launch a local movement – Press Forward South Florida. South Florida faces critical, regional issues that the public needs to know about to be able to act on. Ensuring a thriving local news ecosystem is such a pressing issue that five of the region’s community foundations have come together to create a shared vision and a way forward. The Press Forward South Florida coalition includes the Broward, Coral Gables, Key Biscayne, Miami, and Ocean Reef community foundations. Stay tuned in the coming months for more details about our approach and how you can get involved.
We are deeply grateful for our local and national funding partners who boldly stand with us in this work and are excited to continue building this collaborative movement alongside you.