The horrific killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers and the COVID-19 pandemic’s ruthless attack on communities of color has galvanized people’s attention to the vast inequalities and systemic forms of racism that permeate American society. Rev. Al Sharpton declared at Mr. Floyd’s funeral in Minneapolis that there is hope for change because the swelling protests show that it is “a different time and a different season.”
With hopes that we can move from anguish to action, Renaissance Journalism is taking new steps to help journalists tackle inequality, systemic inequities and racism in America, which is at the heart of our mission.
Renaissance Journalism announced in May 2020 that it has created the Covid-19 Relief Grants for Local News Organizations and will award $185,000 to 20 nonprofit community, ethnic and university news organizations that are covering the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The goal of the project is to provide emergency funding relief to a select group of nonprofit news organizations that, at great risk to their own journalists, are struggling to cover the pandemic and its impact on our area’s diverse and most vulnerable communities. At the same time many of these local news outlets face financial difficulties as the accompanying downturn in the economy has led to lost advertising, donations and other revenues.
Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia is a writer, poet and activist who describes herself as a “poverty scholar” because she and her mother used to live on the streets.
She has a pointed message for both journalists and U.S. Census bureau officials concerned about how so-called hard-to-count demographic groups may get overlooked by—or simply choose to evade—the 2020 U.S. Census.
“I don’t trust corporate or independent media because our stories are told about us, without us,” said Gray-Garcia at a media briefing organized recently by Renaissance Journalism. “I don’t know that my (Census) information won’t become a part of a body of information that is going to further enhance my criminalization, incarceration or citation, the way it happens every day.”
