Renaissance Journalism is accepting proposals from news media organizations, journalists and other multimedia storytellers for innovative, community-focused Census 2020 projects that target hard-to-count groups in the Bay Area and help to educate, motivate and encourage residents to participate in the Census.
After a decade working to improve the news media, Renaissance Journalism finds itself as a subject of a news story. It’s about our efforts to track down and recover more than $600,000 in foundation funds that went missing. So far, it’s a story without an ending.
The news article by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, "A Foundation Collapsed. Its Money Is Gone. What Happened Is Shrouded in Mystery," published on Sept. 12, 2019, focuses on the collapse of ZeroDivide, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that worked on health and technology issues. Reporter Marc Gunther’s story asks how and why ZeroDivide, which started as a $50 million grantmaking foundation in 1998, reinvented itself into a grant-seeking nonprofit that eventually went broke in 2016.
Renaissance Journalism became a part of the story because we had been operating as a fiscally sponsored project of ZeroDivide at the time.
On August 21, Renaissance Journalism and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF) co-hosted a lively conversation among 40-plus Bay Area journalists and community leaders about the 2020 Census. We challenged these “trusted community messengers” to brainstorm creative ways they could work together to increase participation in the census, particularly in “hard-to-count” groups, such as immigrants, racial minorities and the homeless.
