Foundation Strategies for Social Change

If you were able to control a foundation with $1 billion in assets, and your goal was to promote a more diverse array of public-spirited media, what tools might you use to achieve that end? And which might be most effective?

1. Grants at 5% a year of corpus to start up alternative media
2. Buying stock in big media companies and voting the proxies
3. Selling stock in big media companies and shunning them
4. Studies that might influence regulatory policy
5. Lobbying (within legal limits) regulatory officials
6. Honors and prizes for good reporting
7. Funding education for journalists
8. Investing corpus itself via loan and equity in alternative media.

Lucy Greenholz, Tracy Gary, and Albert Ruesga, to name three people, have professional expertise in issues like this. I do not. My background is more in personal finance. But as a citizen, I am intensely interested in how we can revive an open society in an age of media concentration, marketing, and mass propaganda. Of the options above, the one that seems most powerful to me (as a concerned citizen) is #5. A billion invested in loans and equity into internet start up media might change the game. Buying or selling Viacom, say, or ClearChannel, by contrast seems pretty trivial, or ameliorative at best.

Comments

[Daniel F. Bassill]

If I had these assets I'd invest in social networking capacities so that people who care about an issue are more likely to bypass traditional media and go directly to circles where the groups share information, discuss ideas, and work to solve problems.

I'd also invest in organizations/universities that are teaching people to innovate, be creative, be problem solvers and complex thinkers, and who learn to learn from each other on an on-going basis. Thus, as we increase social networking capacity, we also increase the people who are using the knowlege available through the Internet to inform their decisions and their own innovations.

A lot of smart people in a room who just draw from their own wealth of knowledge is not nearly as powerful as a lot of average people who know how to draw from the knowledge that is available throughout the world.

Putting money into this process would be a tipping point that accelerates the rate of change that is already taking place because of the Internet.

[Phil]

I deeply agree. Seems almost surreal how the media, celebrities, big philanthropists, government officials, almost conspire to make public life an insider game, for an august few, casting us in the role of dupes, or churls forming a cheering crowd.

Leadership emerges from the informed populace, that is your ideal, mine too. A little money and leadership from "above" would go a long way to this kind of transformational wave. But do those on top want it? Would they not prefer to lock down the electorate with soundbites, and frames and think tank logic, and divide neighbor from neighbor with wedge issues, precisely so we don't toss the rascals out and take responsibility for our own future as a nation.