“Shift and Share Power.” An Ambitious Fund Supporting BIPOC-Led News Outlets Takes Shape
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After arriving from Venezuela, CEO Monica Pirela built NotiVisión Georgia into a bridge between Georgia’s Hispanic population and local business and government. the outlet depends on facebook to reach its 25,000+ followers, but Pivot Fund support will help widen distribution options. Photo: Tracie Powell, The Pivot Fund
In 2019, Borealis Philanthropies launched the Racial Equity in Journalism (REJ) Fund to bolster the capacity and sustainability of news organizations led by people of color. Under the leadership of its founding manager Tracie Powell, the fund became a vital financial lifeline for historically undercapitalized BIPOC-led news organizations, particularly during the early days of the pandemic.
Powell left Borealis in May of 2021, but her phone continued to ring off the hook. “I was still getting all these calls,” Powell told me. “People wanting coaching, people wanting help around organizational development strategy, people asking, ‘Who should I hire first?’” The requests reaffirmed Powell’s belief that early-stage BIPOC-led outlets need “more than just dollars. They also need capacity-building support and strategic or technical assistance.”
Powell began providing support, coaching, and consulting services to these individuals and Borealis REJ grantees. Then she began raising money from small donors. All the while, her phone kept ringing. “It all started coming together,” she said, “and that’s how the Pivot Fund was born.”
In January, she officially launched the fund with the goal of investing $500 million into independent BIPOC-led community news. The fund has received support from Heising-Simons Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and plans to announce more commitments in the coming months.
Pivot Fund announced its first grantees in July. Seven Georgia-based news organizations serving Black, Hispanic and Asian-American audiences received a combined $2 million in grants and consulting support to help them increase revenue, develop digital and reporting capacity and expand audiences. The grants are part of the fund’s plan to invest a total of $6 million in Georgia news organizations across the next three years.
“I started the fund to add structure to the work I was doing,” Powell said. “I saw an immediate need that we needed to fill, because these dollars would go to waste if we didn’t do it right.”
The “huge myth” of journalism funding
The Pivot Fund’s work lies at the intersection of many key themes from our white paper on journalism and public media giving. Due to the prolonged demise of the newspaper industry, funders are operating in an environment in which millions of Americans live in “news deserts” bereft of trusted local outlets. Bad actors fill this vacuum on social media, peddling hyperpartisan content and false information on everything from claims of a “rigged election” to the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, all while frequently targeting communities of color and immigrants.
The good news, Powell said, is that there are “oases in the news deserts that are working hard to provide credible fact-based information for their communities. We only need to be more intentional about how we look for them.”
Some funders ramped up support for BIPOC-led organizations in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. But if there’s one thing that Powell has learned over the years, it’s that not all funding opportunities are created equal. “Some funders think they’re solving the issue if they fund training or programming opportunities that target BIPOC founders,” she said. “But that’s a huge myth. You can provide all the training in the world, but if he or she doesn’t have a capacity to put those learnings to use, then that money is going down the drain.”
Most BIPOC organizations can’t properly absorb training programs or deploy cutting-edge software because their staff are overworked. A majority of outlets have five or fewer employees; others are one-person operations. “I can’t tell you how many times someone has said to me, ‘Well, a foundation paid for my training, but I just don’t have the time to do it,’” Powell said.
I asked Powell why funders would make this mistake, and she cited the fact that some leaders hailing from the corporate media world assume that what works for an established and sufficiently capitalized outlet will translate to a BIPOC-led organization. She sees parallels between this approach and how these same leaders hire staff. “The reason there are so few people of color in journalism is that people hired their old colleagues and friends,” Powell said. “We’re seeing the same practices in the nonprofit journalism funding space, and I’m trying my best to not let that take root.”
Persistent funding disparities
Another big takeaway from our research on journalism funding was the huge disparity between established outlets and those led by and serving communities of color. Powell, who has been raising money for these historically undercapitalized organizations for many years, can attest to this trend.
The American Journalism Project, which launched in 2018 to rebuild local news and was an early supporter of the Pivot Fund, raised $42 million in six months. In contrast, the Pivot Fund kicked off with approximately $300,000. “It certainly highlights the discrepancy and disparity of support that BIPOC news outlets get,” Powell said. “I’m grateful for every dollar that we raise, but it’s been very hard.”
Powell is also concerned about ongoing economic uncertainty, which she cites as the culprit behind a “rollback” of funders’ pledged support for BIPOC organizations after Floyd’s murder. “I have yet to see it fully materialize,” she said. “Some of it is due to economic conditions, but it’s also funders falling back on previous habits, and that, to me, is very concerning.”
On the heels of the Pivot Fund’s inaugural round of grants to outlets in Georgia, one of Powell’s top priorities will be building awareness with donors across the state. “The goal is to help them understand that if you’re concerned about housing, or education, or food insecurity, then you also need to have journalism as part of a strategy to impact your community.” Powell is optimistic on this front, noting that she’s already seen donors’ eyes light up once they realize that local journalism can advance their priorities and bring communities together.
For example, back in May, three people died in a tragic car accident in LaGrange, Georgia. Some initial news reports only cited the deaths of two white college students, omitting the fact that a 24-year-old Black person was also killed. BEE TV Network, a local news organization and Pivot Fund grant recipient, picked up on the story, interviewed the family members of all three victims, and covered the subsequent candlelight vigil. The network’s efforts “allowed a local funder to see that BEE TV was a critical news and information source, not just for Black folks, but for everybody in the community,” Powell said.
“We’re still having to change hearts and minds”
I asked Powell what advice she would give leaders at BIPOC outlets looking for funder support at this time. “Building relationships is important,” she said. “But don’t ask for money right off the bat.” Powell encourages outlets to get to know the funder and its priorities while also recognizing that leaders may be inclined to dial back giving in light of the current market volatility. She also encourages nonprofit leaders to reach out to intermediaries like the Pivot Fund or Borealis’ REJ Fund since “we already have the relationships with the funders.”
Speaking of Borealis, in November, Powell’s former employer hired a new director, Alicia Bell, to oversee the REJ Fund, and has also brought on a new program officer and program associate. Prior to leaving Borealis, Powell raised more than $10 million for the fund, “so there is money to keep it going,” she said.
Despite a series of recent wins, Powell admits she and other advocates for BIPOC-led journalism have more work to do. “I had one funder tell me they didn’t think supporting BIPOC media works. Why wouldn’t it?” she said. “We’re still having to change hearts and minds. But at some point, funders are going to have to realize that the country is browning and that they have to start figuring out how to support these communities right now.”
Powell also believes that many funders legitimately want to support BIPOC media outlets, but aren’t sure how to do it properly. “To them, I would say there are partners out here like Pivot Fund who will work with you to help you identify who to support,” Powell said. “The fund was created, in part, to disrupt the status quo of journalism philanthropy and to shift and share power. If organizations are interested in learning more about how to make that happen, the Pivot Fund is here.”
