PINF has launched a new grants programme: the PINF Impact Fund. We are grateful for the support of the Neal & Dominique Gandhi Foundation for making this pilot programme possible.
What is the Fund?
The Impact Fund aims to explore the impact of local journalism on civic or democratic engagement, partly through the 2022 local elections. We aim to the keep the process as open as possible, to help us learn for future programmes.
The programme aims to award five grants of £8,000. Each grant should fund a new journalism intervention at an individual electoral ward level, from January 2022 through to May 2022. PINF aims to track the impact of those interventions with the help of an academic learning partner.
In August 2021, we invited brief expressions of interest from news publishers in London and Birmingham. Both London and Birmingham have all-out elections in 2022 and their size gives us the best opportunity to find comparable wards to act as quasi-control areas. We suggested that ideas for interventions could include things like a new weekly email newsletter for a ward, an intervention in an existing ward-level social media group, or a new distribution effort specific to an individual ward.
We received 11 eligible expressions of interest from news publishers. Those publishers will be invited to a workshop to discuss and develop their ideas and plans before making final proposals. We hope to be able to announce the grantees by the end of the year.
We are also continuing to seek an academic research partner who will help us to understand the impact of each ward-level project.
For any questions regarding the fund, including those from interested academic partners, please email contact@publicinterestnews.org.uk