The Center for Community Media (CCM) at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY is pleased to announce the inaugural cohort of Fundraising for Community Media, the first such program exclusively dedicated to building fundraising strategies in AAPI, Black, and Latine-led newsrooms in the U.S. Fifteen newsrooms have been selected to be a part of this three-month, tuition-free, online program. The training program, designed in collaboration with The Lenfest Institute for Journalism’s News Philanthropy Network (NPN), is explicitly aimed at supporting community-based news media that have been historically underserved and underrepresented in philanthropy.
“Community media upholds many of the values that philanthropy cares about,” said Cheryl Thompson-Morton, CCM’s Black Media Initiative Director. “Our aim with this program is to help the newsrooms leverage their unique strengths to build more financially resilient news organizations that can meet the information needs of these underrepresented communities.”
The selected newsrooms represent both traditional media and digital-first organizations, and serve Black American, Cuban American and Indian American communities, as well as wider Asian American, Latine, Multiracial, and Pan-African communities, from across the country, including California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina and Washington. Their coverage centers on women and girls, elders, millennials, multiracial families, undocumented immigrants, and diasporic communities, in outlets ranging from daily newspapers and digital information hubs to glossy magazines and multimedia storytelling platforms.
Three leaders from the AAPI, Black, and Latino media landscape will serve as coach-mentors: Melanie Figueiredo, Vice President of Advertising and Sponsorship Sales at URL Media; Kimberly Griffin, Publisher and Chief Revenue Officer of Mississippi Free Press; and Vandana Kumar, Publisher and CEO of India Currents. Drawing from their hard-won insight and expertise over decades, they will support cohort members as peer leaders of color who have navigated similar challenges to successfully build their own fundraising strategies.
More than 80 newsrooms applied for this first cohort, demonstrating the overwhelming need and enthusiasm for these skills in a journalism industry that far too often excludes them from funding opportunities. The pool of applicants hailed from 26 states in every region of the country. More than a third serve Black communities, and about a quarter each serve AAPI and Latine communities.
Philanthropy has a history of giving organizations led by people of color less money, while also burdening them with more requirements than their white-led counterparts. Due to the historic reliance on advertising revenue, and the systemic racism that has plagued the system, many community media outlets haven’t built out a philanthropic revenue stream. The goal of this program is to empower these publishers to seek funding for their non- and for-profit news organizations to help ensure financial sustainability.
As Lenfest Institute Chief Advancement Officer Annie McCain Madonia explains: “Philanthropy is an essential part of the revenue mix for sustainable local news organizations. As an increasing number of funders and donors take an interest in supporting local journalism, it’s important that publishers have the fundraising skills necessary to make the most of these opportunities.”
The cohort is almost evenly split between nonprofit and for-profit news organizations. Nearly three-quarters are from small newsrooms with five or fewer full-time employees and most of the participating publishers reported having little to no experience or success fundraising.
The program will kick off on April 9 with biweekly virtual sessions to expand the teams’ grant writing skills, donor prospecting, and fundraising campaign planning strategies. Teams will walk away with a better understanding of the news philanthropy field as a whole to uncover new opportunities for funding in the future.
Meet the inaugural cohort
Newsrooms are listed below in alphabetical order
Asian Avenue Magazine is a full-color, glossy-paged monthly print and digital publication serving the Denver metro area, to build bridges of awareness, knowledge, and understanding between the diverse AAPI communities and the general public through cultural insights, community stories, and news.
📍 Location: Denver, Colorado
➡️ Participants: Annie Guo VanDan, President | Mary Schultz, Editorial Director | Christina Yutai Guo, Publisher
🌎 Visit Asian Avenue Magazine
Better to Speak is a movement media platform and community for young and emerging Black storytellers that amplifies the voices and stories of Black people and communities, equips them with storytelling tools, and cultivates a cultural narrative of self and community actualization through content, community engagement, and communications.
📍 Location: Atlanta, Georgia
➡️ Participants: Kesi Felton, Founder and Publisher | Desiree’ Amboree, Development Coordinator
🌎 Visit Better to Speak
BlindianProject is a collective of dreamers, healers, visionaries, and thought-leaders that aim to inspire the Global Majority through creative storytelling and placemaking to live unapologetically and authentically.
📍 Location: Silver Spring, Maryland
➡️ Participants: Jonah Batambuze, Founder and Chief Executive Officer | Ayesha Syeddah, Managing Editor and Strategic Advisor
🌎 Visit BlindianProject
Education in Atlanta is an equity-led newsroom committed to covering one of Atlanta’s most underreported stories: the effort to improve schools for all children within the metro Atlanta area, especially those who have been disenfranchised to quality education due to race, socioeconomics or disability.
📍 Location: Atlanta, Georgia
➡️ Participants: F. Warren, Publisher | Cheryl S., Editor | Christina Norris, Writer
🌎 Visit Education in Atlanta
El Tecolote is the voice of San Francisco’s “pueblo,” located in the heart of Mission District, that documents and amplifies the Latinx community’s vibrant role in the city’s political, art and cultural scene.
📍 Location: San Francisco, California
➡️ Participants: Fátima Ramírez, Executive Director of Acción Latina, the nonprofit publisher of El Tecolote | Erika Carlos, Editor-in-Chief | Kari Vides, Business Manager
🌎 Visit El Tecolote
El Toque, the flagship project of Más Voces Foundation, is an online platform serving Cuban communities with content and services for civic participation, human rights, and sustainable development. Más Voces Foundation’s mission is to strengthen Cuban American and Cuban civil societies, providing legal and financial support to independent media and individuals using communication methods and tools to empower our communities and make them more resilient.
📍 Location: South Florida
➡️ Participants: José J. Nieves, Executive Director | Ana L. García, Operations Director | Beatriz Valdés, Business Growth Director
🌎 Visit El Toque – Más Voces Foundation
International Examiner is a multimedia pan-Asian Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander American (ANHPIA) nonprofit publication based out of Seattle’s historic Chinatown International District, that produces a monthly newspaper and publishes news, features, and stories on a daily basis on its website and social media platforms with a hyper-local focus on independent community journalism and in-depth storytelling.
📍 Location: Seattle, Washington
➡️ Participants: Alexa Strabuk, Editor-in-Chief | Carmen Hom, Community Relations Manager
🌎 Visit International Examiner
Jambalaya News Louisiana is a media outlet located in the city of Metairie, Louisiana, dedicated to informing, educating, and serving as a bridge of connection between the Hispanic community and the local governments, to fill the information gap or the inaccessibility to information in Spanish, with relevant and quality content that reflects the interests and needs of our viewers, listeners, or readers.
📍 Location: New Orleans, Louisiana
➡️ Participants: Brenda Murphy, Founder and Editor | Rocío Tirado, Operations Manager | Fernando Guillén, Content Manager
🌎 Visit Jambalaya News Louisiana
Latino Press, Michigan’s largest Hispanic media outlet, distributes a free weekly newspaper with a circulation of 15,000 copies at over 300 news racks in local restaurants, small shops, grocery stores, child care centers, healthcare providers, and community centers across metro Detroit. It celebrates 30 years of delivering vibrant news to the flourishing Hispanic community throughout the state of Michigan and is the only Hispanic media in Michigan certified by the Michigan Minority Supplier Development Council.
📍 Location: Detroit, Michigan
➡️ Participants: Elías M. Gutiérrez, Publisher | Ivanna Rubio, Fundraising Specialist
🌎 Visit Latino Press
Diya TV aims to bridge the gap of bringing relevant content across platforms to the South Asian American community that consumes media in English, but is starved for culturally relevant content in addition to coverage of issues that matter to them. Diya TV currently airs 24/7 in New York, San Francisco Bay Area, Greater Los Angeles Area, Chicago & Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Seattle, Fresno, Detroit, Orlando, Miami, Tampa, Bakersfield and Providence.
📍 Location: San Francisco, California
➡️ Participants: Deepti Kapur, Partner, Co-Founder and COO | Ravi Kapur, CEO
🌎 Visit Major Market Broadcasting / Diya TV
Migrant Roots Media is a multilingual, multimedia organization that seeks to unearth the root causes of planetary migration, rooted in the U.S. South and carrying the vision for collective liberation of the people with roots in the Global South.
📍 Location: Durham, North Carolina
➡️ Participants: Roxana Bendezú, Founding Director
🌎 Visit Migrant Roots Media
Mochi Magazine is the longest-running digital publication by Asian American women for our community.
📍 Location: Renton, Washington
➡️ Participants: Giannina Ong, Editor-in-Chief | Melody Ip, Copy Chief
🌎 Visit Mochi Magazine
QCity Metro serves the Black community in Charlotte, North Carolina
📍 Location: Charlotte, North Carolina
➡️ Participants: Glenn Burkins, Publisher | Bethany Lane, Revenue Strategist | Madeline Holly-Carothers, Editor
🌎 Visit QCity Metro
TANTV is a digital media company, home of the African Diaspora, that produces smart journalism across multimedia formats that inform, inspire, engage, and educate, to advance and elevate the inclusion of the African and multicultural Black diaspora.
📍 Location: Washington, D.C.
➡️ Participants: Adedayo Fashanu, Chief Executive Officer | Abolaji Omitogun, Chief Operations Officer | Juliet Anine, Senior Editor
🌎 Visit TANTV
The Intersection Magazine is a digital publication that reports on the convergence of local politics, religion, and technology, located in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
📍 Location: Prince George, Maryland
➡️ Participants: Delonte Harrod, Chief Executive Officer, Reporter, Visual Content Director, and Editor
🌎 Visit The Intersection Magazine
Meet the coaches
The three coach-mentors are listed in alphabetical order
Melanie Figueiredo
Vice President of Advertising and Sponsorship Sales at URL Media
Melanie Figueiredo is the Vice President of Advertising and Sponsorships, spearheading URL Media’s advertising sales, ad operations and client servicing efforts. From 2013 – 2021, Melanie led national corporate sponsorships for a majority of the PBS KIDS national television roster and NOVA out of GBH, launching, renewing and upselling corporate sponsorships for over a dozen award-winning series and shepherding upwards of $40m to the public media system.
In her previous role as the Director of Member Services at the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, Melanie engaged high-level members with strategic Chamber offerings, networking at more than 100 business programs per year. Prior to her time at the Chamber, Melanie directed the Trade Services Department at the South Carolina World Trade Center and managed operations at the Global Trading Consortium.
Melanie hails from Boston, and holds a B.A. in Communications and Culture from Clark University, graduating Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She has been a contributing writer to several publications including Business Insider, and sits on the advisory board of EPIC, a non-profit for young leaders with disabilities. She’s a former Americorps alum, and the proud mother of two children.
Kimberly Griffin
Publisher and Chief Revenue Officer of Mississippi Free Press
Founding Publisher and Chief Revenue Officer Kimberly Griffin has worked as the advertising director and then as the associate publisher, also known as the vice president of business and revenue, of the Jackson Free Press for more than a dozen years.
She is a graduate of Mississippi University for Women and the University of Southern Mississippi where she studied journalism and public relations. She currently serves on the Mississippi University for Women Alumni Board and The Mississippi Boy Choir Board.
Kimberly previously served as chair of the Greater Jackson Chamber Ambassadors and has held various leadership positions in the Junior League of Jackson. She is also a member of the Rho Lambda Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. and president of the Capital Care Sunset Rotary Club.
In 2021, the Institute for Nonprofit News selected Kimberly as one of 11 national emerging leaders for nonprofit media. She also directs the MFP’s project for the 2021 Facebook reader revenue accelerator, alongside 29 other newsrooms in North America.
Kimberly was featured in the Saturday Evening Post in 2021, along with Mississippi Free Press co-founder Donna Ladd. She is an auntie, a decent cook, and an avid traveler. She’s not fond of small talk and wants every conversation to be important.
Vandana Kumar
Publisher and CEO of India Currents
Vandana Kumar is a publishing executive and co-founder of India Currents, an award-winning publication for the Indian American diaspora. She has a 37-year track record in the industry. Fully digital today, India Currents has the largest following among Indians in the United States. It is indexed by Lexis/Nexis and the Ethnic Watch database. Vandana has won the Asian American Hero Award from the County of Santa Clara, the Leadership in Business award from the California Legislature Assembly, and was an American Leadership Fellow, Class XXXIX.