Where does rural journalism connect with CivicLex?

I had a great time speaking on a panel at the Rural Journalism Summit last week with Duc Luu and Lillian Ruiz about philanthropic investment in the news ecosystem in rural regions and communities.

While Lexington is by no means rural, some of the observations I’ve made while building CivicLex have resonated with colleagues in much more rural spaces, including the below, which I shared at the summit.

In Kentucky, it sometimes feels like we are at a disadvantage because we’re just not physically/geographically in the relational networks that philanthropy operates in. As much as people like to shy away from this fact, philanthropic giving is relational and relationships depend, in part, on proximity and connection. Funders like to talk about open calls, but at the end of the day knowing a program officer or someone at a foundation will get you further in the door than not. There are so many equity issues in the ecosystem, but one of the ones that I’ve noticed folks don’t like to talk about is the geographic equity one. If funders can’t even see themselves coming to visit our place (a thing I’ve heard a number of times about my own place), why would they make an investment here?

This challenge is severely compounded in very rural communities, which only receives roughly 7% of grant making in the US.

This has been a real challenge for us at CivicLex. We always have trouble getting in the door. Over time, we’ve noticed a lot of folks in the democracy and journalism spaces like to talk about us, but few actually make investments in our work. With the exceptions of the Knight Foundation’s Community and National Initiatives side and a small investment from the Meta Journalism Project, we’ve never received and investment from a major journalism or democracy funder!

So how have we addressed this challenge? We’ve gotten creative!

We’ve tackled our mission of strengthening civic health and information through new lenses which has brought funding and relationships from unlikely places. Some of these lenses include public space and green space policy (Trust for Public Land), art and culture (National Endowment for the Arts), and K12 education (Walton Family Foundation).

We’ve built new earned revenue streams like community engagement consulting, which has helped us serve as the engagement leads on two major long term design projects with Gresham Smith.

We’ve also tapped into our local and regional philanthropy. The Blue Grass Community Foundation is one of our biggest allies, who has helped give us credibility with national and regional funders.

None of these are fixes for the relational challenges folks doing important work in “the rest of the country” encounter, but it has enabled us to survive and grow.