Photo courtesy of Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque’s website
By Jesse Hardman, Founder | Listening Post Collective with K. Lovisa Railstrom, System and Operations Manager, Alex Baum, Director of Advocacy, Data and Learning, and Mary Jo Jean-Francois, Director of Impact | Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque
Iowa is good at growing things; it’s one of the top five agriculture states. If the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque has a say, robust civic news and information in the region will be headed for a bumper crop, too. They are one of a growing number of foundations around the country forming Press Forward Local chapters, and while funding media initiatives is new, it’s been on their minds for a while.
“A robust and trusted news ecosystem supports the many aspects of community that our work touches, including education, economic mobility and civic engagement.”
A little over a month ago we met with Lovisa Railstrom and Alex Baum from the foundation to talk about getting their new Press Forward initiative going and the ups and downs of mapping information needs around the seven counties they serve. They talked about wanting to understand how to create two-way conversations with growing immigrant communities as diverse as Marshallese and Mayan language speakers, and partner with existing civic spaces they have long invested in. This month, the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque team were kind enough to do a Q&A with us around this important work, and how they hope it turns out.
Talk about the seven-county region of Iowa you serve. Who lives there? What’s on people’s minds at this moment?
Our seven-county region is located in northeast Iowa along the Mississippi River. This area is home to small towns and families who raise cattle and grow crops like corn and soybeans. Like many rural areas, it also exhibits a great deal of economic diversity and community development. People love their small towns and want to see them thrive.
Our seven-county region faces similar challenges to places across the United States. Many people lack trust in national civic institutions, and poverty is increasing, especially for our minority families. In addition, demographic growth is often achieved through immigration. Between 2010 and 2023, 212% of the population growth in our region can be attributed to growth among immigrant families. While these communities bring vitality, cultural diversity and new ideas, such rapid change can disrupt the status quo. Relationships in small-town Iowa power everything, and without these longstanding connections, newcomers can struggle to thrive.
Photo courtesy of Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque’s website
What do you traditionally fund?
In short, we fund organizations that are addressing the most pressing challenges communities face today. These issues can be anything from youth development to civic engagement to economic mobility. The challenge for a community foundation like us is that the needs can change rapidly, and since we opened our doors in 2003, we have evolved and pivoted many times to help tackle a changing landscape. In that time, we have funded organizations that are, among other things, increasing access to brain health services, delivering resources for immigrants, building the region’s child care capacity, developing housing for a growing workforce, tackling impact investment projects, and supporting local news and information.
How did the local news and information ecosystem impact your traditional community investments?
We see the local news and information ecosystem as integrated with our traditional community investments. Local media are both partners in carrying out our work and vehicles for delivering information that can influence community decision-making.
We have a long and productive relationship with our local media outlets. They provide editorial coverage of our work and turn to us as an expert source that can provide insight on local issues. They also serve as community partners that fund and promote special projects. Our local media outlets are integral pieces of our strategic communications and marketing strategy, helping inform the public of our organization and our work.
We consider local journalism essential to our focus on driving systemic change – in other words, the way that local systems like education and health care work, and not just short-term, individualized impact. The models we use to guide our work focus on essential conditions that we try to transform, such as policies, resource flows and power dynamics.
System transformation cannot occur, though, without changing mindsets. It doesn’t matter how hard you advocate for policy change or try to invest in a new area; if your community isn’t behind you or is thinking about the problem in a fundamentally different way, it is tough to achieve change. Local journalism and the information ecosystem are essential for helping to shift those mental models and chart a course toward change.
“We consider local journalism essential to our focus on driving systemic change – in other words, the way that local systems like education and health care work, and not just short-term, individualized impact.”
When the idea of supporting news and information access in your region through forming a PF Local chapter came up, what interested you? How did it fit your existing goals as a foundation?
Through our 20-plus years of working on various issues, we have come to understand the importance of a healthy local news ecosystem to strong, thriving communities. So, when the opportunity to form a Press Forward Local chapter in Northeast Iowa came up, we knew that it would be a great opportunity. Helping people access information and keeping them informed is critical to their ability to participate in community-building.
Our region’s growing immigrant communities are a prime example of where local news can make a difference. As an organization, we’ve focused a lot of our work on being a community that’s welcoming and where people feel they belong, no matter how long they’ve lived here. At the same time, we know some community members fear newcomers and talk about them in terms of what they see on 24-hour news networks or read on social media. In learning about this, we have realized that even though people see one another as neighbors individually, regardless of origin, collectively there is a fear of people coming into the region.
Photo courtesy of Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque’s Instagram
The national discourse and attitudes about immigration have become localized, creating a barrier to a unified community of neighbors. Local media play a huge role in breaking down this barrier by highlighting stories of neighbors supporting one another and telling the stories of why people choose to live in Northeast Iowa. In addition, local media outlets share critical information about community successes, needs and opportunities to come together.
In telling the stories of our region’s immigrant communities and covering the issues that are important to them, local media outlets also can better reach these people are families. In turn, immigrant residents can become regular consumers of local news and access the information they need to participate in the community-building we strive to facilitate.
One of the most exciting parts about participating in Press Forward is seeing more and more each day how the effort to increase access to local news and information aligns and complements all the work we do.
The 36 (and counting!) Press Forward Locals, photo courtesy of Press Forward’s website
Where does your journey of becoming a PF Local chapter start?
It starts with our president and CEO, Nancy Van Milligen. Nancy was invited to Springfield, Illinois, for the Community Foundation of the Land of Lincoln’s own Press Forward launch announcement, which inspired her to pursue a chapter in our region. Nancy understood that establishing a Press Forward Local chapter in Northeast Iowa could be a natural solution to simultaneously help build community engagement and develop new pathways toward sustainability for local media.
Tell us about your experience setting up a Press Forward chapter.
Establishing funds that could support the salaries of local reporters and access to news was the first step. From there, we spread the word to donors and other community members. Through these conversations, we learned that we had sufficient support to build a successful Press Forward chapter. A key to building support among donors has been conveying the message of why access to local news and information is important to an issue they have long cared about: Building strong, thriving communities.
What have you done so far? And how is it going?
Since the early months of this work, we have engaged with local donors and have established three funds that have grown to exceed $1 million in support of local news and information.
We also have done considerable community engagement. Presentations have helped bring this opportunity to the attention of potential supporters, and a listening assessment has helped us collect valuable insights about how people view the news, where they look for it, and what they want to see from it moving forward.
What’s been the most significant learning curve as a local foundation participating in a national philanthropic movement like Press Forward?
While we are thrilled to see so much enthusiasm for our Press Forward venture among our supporters, we are still in the early stages and continuing to learn.
We have longstanding relationships with local media, but these relationships have primarily been in the form of mutual sponsorships or being a source of information for reporters. Until now, we have not needed to understand the inner workings of the media business or how the public consumes information.
That is changing as we venture farther down the Press Forward path. We are gaining new knowledge about the operations of our media partners that will help us, through our Press Forward work, develop ways to help sustain the region’s existing news outlets while also developing new avenues for people to access information. We also are learning more about people’s views on the media and the types of information they access. These insights will help lead to opportunities for providing communities with accurate information in engaging formats.
We are excited to learn from other chapters and funders so we can adapt their models to our region.
Photo courtesy of Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque’s Instagram
Knowing local foundations have smaller pools of funding than national ones to tackle issues, how do you add a category, like local news and information, to your portfolio with an eye on sustainability?
Very strategically!
Our key understanding is that local media is an integral component of a thriving community. A robust and trusted news ecosystem supports the many aspects of community that our work touches, including education, economic mobility and civic engagement. Press Forward enables us to view all our work through the lens of local media. We recognize that when people know what is happening in their communities, they can make informed decisions. In this way, a healthy media ecosystem can support our other community initiatives and investments.
Because resources are limited, we are taking a targeted approach to how we build and sustain local media outlets. This approach is guided by our mission: Empower communities and ignite generosity. We are identifying communities that face barriers to or have historically been underrepresented by local media and helping champion their priorities. We’re not just trying to maintain our current information landscape, but to build something better and more inclusive.
Photo courtesy of Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque’s Instagram
Thinking of sustainability, who else in the region do you think can be part of sustaining a responsive news and information ecosystem? What other kinds of actors might contribute financially to keeping the work you start going?
We’re excited to partner with local schools and community organizations. Groups like these have a high degree of trust among the people they serve and are powerful and impactful partners. We believe this will be key to improving access to accurate and local information throughout our region.
In addition, community journalism can also be a very valuable area for long-term growth. There are lots of passionate individuals in our region who feel strongly about sharing information in their community but might not see a clear pathway for how to get involved. We want to build that pathway so that these efforts can go from passionate startups to community institutions that will exist years from now.
You made our day when you told us you had our Civic Information Index bookmarked. How have you used it?
Our listening and news ecosystem assessment includes the civic information dashboard for each of the counties in our region that we refer to as a helpful grounding piece. We have combined these scores with local listening sessions to better understand the perspectives of and people behind the data. Comparing the counties to each other and counties outside of our region has also helped to find gaps.
We know that local news and information are important components of creating thriving, civically engaged communities. They can move the needle on important factors, such as better education, access to housing, and new jobs. The Civic Information Index illustrates the influence that education, housing, and well-paying jobs have on the strength of local news. By articulating the mutual connection between local news and other vital elements of thriving communities, the Index encourages us to consider this interconnectedness when designing regional solutions.
An excerpt from the Civic Information Index dashboard for Clayton County, one of the seven counties served by the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque
What do you see when you look at the seven counties you serve in the Index?
All seven counties have relatively high overall scores, ranging from 76 to 90. One area that is consistently lower than the others is the Health and Opportunity index. We have a higher unemployment rate, a lower percentage of the population with a bachelor’s degree, and high rental costs. Another interesting feature is that all seven counties score 100 on the total news outlet index (each has two or more outlets). However, the other indicators for news and information, such as number of library visits and literacy scores, are very low. So, even though the composite scores tend to be in the 70s for this pillar, we have room for improvement regarding how people can access and engage with information.
How do you all use data in general to inform your giving and measure your impact?
Data is vital to our holistic understanding of our communities and region. Data informs our core focus areas and guides what we fund and the community programs we facilitate. Through data collection, we can discover potential areas of need to investigate further and engage community members around. We also play a role as a “knowledge hub” for our community. There isn’t always a lot of community-level data or research accessible in our area. We have the capacity to find available data from many different sources and share it with our residents. By compiling and sharing data, we can help shape an accurate narrative for our region.
“The Civic Information Index illustrates the influence that education, housing, and well-paying jobs have on the strength of local news. By articulating the mutual connection between local news and other vital elements of thriving communities, the Index encourages us to consider this interconnectedness when designing regional solutions.”
What have you learned so far about the information ecosystem in your region?
The biggest takeaway from our assessment is that people don’t pay attention to or care about local news that fits into the critical information needs categories. While they care deeply about obituaries, local sports and regional events, they do pay less attention to local government, health issues and education. Another important insight is that most people get their news on their phone from non-traditional channels. For example, more people are likely to get their news from a Facebook group than the local newspaper. People are also looking for more positive news that focus on solutions instead of problems.
In 10 years, what is your hope this investment accomplishes?
Put simply, we hope that in 10 years, our region will be more civically engaged and informed. We aim to inspire local communities to seek out and report on the news that matters most to them while empowering young people to strengthen their understanding of real information. We want this to be through a robust information ecosystem that includes both legacy media like our local newspapers, as well as new sources of community journalism that reflect and report on our changing community.