Blog / Vesper Society

Our response to The Chronicle of Philanthropy story about ZeroDivide

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.

Grooming young storytellers for the Imperial Valley

Ten high school students fled the Imperial Valley's desert heat to spend a week in the cooling fog at San Francisco State University for a crash course in storytelling and video production. They capped the experience with an emotional graduation ceremony that their families and friends—600 miles away—could watch live through the magic of the Internet.