The Civil Foundation?—?A New Fund to Support Ethical Journalism Around the World

Last week, we announced that 100 percent of the proceeds from the CVL token sale will go to the Civil Foundation. This is a really exciting development. It means that if you purchase CVL tokens, you are directly supporting quality journalism in two ways. First, the payment you make for your tokens goes towards grant making. And second, you now hold the CVL tokens that allow you to participate in Civil’s governance, as well as to financially reward Newsrooms. In this post, I hope to share a bit more about the Foundation, both our current activities and where we’re going.

The Civil Foundation is on its way to being an entirely independent, 501(c)(3) not-for-profit entity. We’re not there yet only because it takes time to get set up, as anyone who has been through that process can tell you. We have bylaws to draft, a board of directors to empanel, and applications to file for the appropriate tax status. We hope to have all this completed by the end of the year. But in the meantime, we’re behaving as if we were completely independent and have made some great progress including partnerships with widely-respected organizations like the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) and the European Journalism Centre (EJC), as well as potential collaborations with other journalism grant-making peers.

Here’s a diagram that shows where the Foundation sits vis-a-vis the Civil Media Company. It’s no accident that the decentralized community owned and operated network sits between the not-for-profit company and the for-profit entity that set Civil in motion. While our missions may align, our activities and our means of operating are quite distinct.

The mission of the Civil Foundation is to uphold the values of Civil — that is, the long term sustainability and growth of a global network of independent, ethical journalists and those who support and work with them. We are pursuing that via three sets of activities:

1.   Governance

The Foundation houses the Civil Council, an appeals body that will review community decisions based on the tenets of the Civil Constitution and, when appropriate, reverse the outcome of community votes deemed to have not been carried out in accordance with the constitution. Depending on the volume and complexity of those reviews, the Civil Foundation will support the council with research and data needed to make those assessments. We already have nine terrific council members in place today, and will look to add another 6 or so in the next few months.

2. Grant making

We will become a grant making organization that supports worthy news organizations covering underreported regions or subjects. We will also consider funding open source technology development that supports news organizations. We’re looking to collaborate with media grant making organization we admire and that share our mission such as the Knight Foundation, Ford Foundation, Lenfest, Pulitzer Center, Tow Foundation, News Integrity Initiative and Democracy Fund and in doing so, extend our reach. We’ll be soliciting feedback from the broader community on where our grant making can be most effective. In the broader spirit of Civil, we want this to be an inclusive and transparent process.

3. Research

This Civil experience will yield a lot of learnings and insights into how news organizations can support themselves both on the blockchain and off. We aim to gather that insight and conduct original research into reader engagement and sustainability that can benefit the global news community in the form of articles, data, convenings and the like.

Some of the above will entail overhead and out-of-pocket expenses. But our aim is to keep those as low as possible so that most of the proceeds from the token sale can support our grant making. We will of course communicate all those numbers transparently via 990 filings.

We hope this answers some of the questions you may have. We’ll have more to say soon but welcome your feedback in the meantime.

For more information about Civil and how to participate in the token sale — and directly support journalists on Civil in the process — visit us here.