After receiving 500+ applications for $20M in Press Forward Infrastructure funding, it was great to see a thorough report and analysis by Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro on insights that can be gained from this process. I appreciate the chance to share high-level findings with a funder audience, and to surface some of the difficult considerations funders are trying to balance.

I wish there were a corollary to this report written for a journalist audience though. I had a bit of insight into the process last year as a reviewer and later project coach, and my main takeaway was how incredibly valuable the corpus that Hansen Shapiro analyzed would be for other journalists. It was a process that highlighted to me that journalism organizations themselves also suffer from the “inequitable access to information” that Hansen Shapiro notes as one of the “persistent challenges.”

I agree with Hansen Shapiro’s note that this is a collective, systems-level challenge as well. And as such, I hope we can find ways to democratize access to information about sustaining the work of journalism. To me, that challenge seems to be a lot about power. Who has access to information about what ideas are out there, what organizations are collaborating with each other, which ideas are being successfully funded (and for how much and for how many years!), what relationships result in partnerships that are financially beneficial and meaningfully help audiences? Too often the answer to those questions are only known by people who already hold tremendous power in the field, whether it be because of background or who they sat next to at a dinner one time (true story!).

These are also the kinds of answers that funders already have and would cost relatively little to share. They are also a lot of the content in the business training programs Hansen Shapiro mentions, either because one of the ways you gain knowledge is by joining an extremely well-connected alumni network (admitteldy, I am a member of a few) or because you learn the skills of how to suss out this information individually, on your own. It’s just a shame that either by accident or by design this information is then usually stuck within those silos. In my experience, one thing that is tough is to know what information would actually be useful to someone else, so in a way, this post is an attempt to break out of that. (Please do reach out if you have an org strategy or fundraising question you want a thought partner for!)

Instead of boiling this process down to the usual familiar takeaways ("you can’t rely on foundation funding forever, you silly nonprofit leaders!!"), I would love to see it as an opportunity to invite more sharing of information and relationships and reflections.

Last modified on March 10, 2026