While the relationship between philanthropy and community journalism is still nascent in Canada compared to some other countries, the value of local news – and the need to support it – is being increasingly recognized by the sector.
Ask Eden Fineday how she keeps her online news site IndigiNews afloat and her answer is blunt: “Charity. One hundred percent charity.”
IndigiNews survives on the 2025 equivalent of duct tape and spit, lurching from grant to grant. When we spoke, she said she has been one grant away from placing the site on furlough, if not worse, and she figures she has about five months of runway ahead. She is constantly hustling, looking to meet new people, networking, anything that could lead to a new financial partnership that might give her some stability. “It’s beyond stressful. It makes literally no sense. If I believed in linear logic, I would not be doing what I am doing,” the IndigiNews publisher says.
If I believed in linear logic, I would not be doing what I am doing.
Eden Fineday, IndigiNews
But Inspirit Foundation, the McConnell Foundation, the Real Estate Foundation of BC and the All One Fund, a small, family-owned BC foundation, believe in IndigiNews and are backing their faith with grant money. But they’re not just trying to keep a struggling non-profit above water. They are investing in what IndigiNews provides: deeply researched investigative pieces from trusted correspondents who write from a trauma-informed Indigenous perspective. They don’t parachute in on breaking news, but provide deeper pieces from their reporters (all three hired from the Local Journalism Initiative) who live in the communities they report on. That perspective is shared with non-Indigenous readers (some 75% of IndigiNews readers are non-Indigenous).
“We try to cover stories that are about power and change and joy and reclamation,” Fineday says. “For too long, mainstream journalism has ignored or mistreated and mispresented Indigenous Peoples. We feel that we need our own voice, our own media to share our stories. We are sharing our worldview, a view that is powerful and is something that can help everybody today.”
We feel that we need our own voice, our own media to share our stories.
Eden Fineday
Page view by page view, some 40,000 per month, IndigiNews is providing news from a different point of view and doing something about the lack of diversity in the country’s newsrooms. They are also engaging readers and sparking debate, and without that foundations and charities would find it tougher to reach their mission goals.
“I hope we are creating cross-culture understanding,” Fineday says.
There is a growing awareness in the philanthropic sector in Canada that journalism and philanthropy need each other. If no one is reading about climate change – or only hearing it dismissed as a “con job” by Donald Trump – climate action is harder to champion. This relationship is still nascent in this country compared to other nations, but the value of local news is being increasingly recognized by the sector.
There is a growing awareness that local news is a pillar of our democracy. It can hold the powerful to account; it can provide a platform for the unknown who otherwise would never be able to muscle past an incumbent. It can juice debate during election campaigns and strip some of the protective armour of name recognition that holds such sway in elections that are sparsely covered, or not covered at all. Local news brings communities together. When you read about the local sports team or a community centre that has fallen into disrepair or a local resident who has excelled at an endeavour, the news outlet provides the public square for discussion of those developments. It can allow disparate neighbourhoods to meld as one.
Local news can take the sharp edges off the polarization that predominates in 2025, silencing some of the corrosive echo chamber by providing informed views in a non-partisan manner. It is crucial to pushing back on misinformation, stomping on runaway conspiracy theories, and grabbing some of the spotlight from social media partisans who trade in toxicity, not facts.
It can give a voice to the underrepresented or the marginal who otherwise do not have a soap box to illuminate their issues.
Whether your focus is poverty, homelessness, or climate, without journalism those missions are very hard to accomplish.
Niamh Leonard, Euphrosine Foundation
But local news urgently needs work on its foundation before it can save its house. “I am under no illusion that this is going to solve the problem [of local news],” says Niamh Leonard, executive director of the Montreal-based Euphrosine Foundation, which is providing funding destined for underserved communities. But she says the sector has the responsibility to provide a bridge to local journalism while a more sustainable future is sought. “Whether your focus is poverty, homelessness, or climate, without journalism those missions are very hard to accomplish.”
In late October, building on a successful conference last year, publishers, journalists, and philanthropic sector leaders will again meet in Charlottetown under the leadership of the Rideau Hall Foundation (RHF) and the Michener Awards Foundation (MAF) to plot next steps to fortify struggling local news outlets.
A study by Statistics Canada found that almost six in 10 Canadians get their news from the internet or social media, but almost an identical number (59%) reported being very or extremely concerned about the spread of misinformation, and 43% reported that it is getting harder to detect misinformation online. StatsCan cited recent studies showing that misinformation can erode trust in the media and public institutions while increasing polarization and undermining social cohesion. As credible local news fades further and further in the rear-view mirror, misinformation fills the vacuum.
Local news is also trusted – and missed.
A January 2025 Ipsos poll done for the Public Policy Forum (PPF) in partnership with RHF and MAF found that 87% of Canadians in smaller communities believe local news is important to a well-functioning democracy, and they trust local newspapers and radio (85%) over national newspapers (71%) or international online news sites (55%). That poll was done as part of the PPF’s The Lost Estate: How to Put the Local Back in Local News. For a subsequent PPF report, Uncovered: How to Build Back Election Coverage for a Better Democracy, PPF studied what effect news-deprived communities had on voters. For that work, Ipsos found that 70% of voters polled felt more local news would have made them better-informed voters, and 57% felt they didn’t have enough local news, or could have used more, to make an informed decision at the ballot box.
In the early days of the campaign, with lightning speed, a $525,000 Covering Canada: Election 2025 Fund was created by PPF with its RHF and MAF partners, providing grants ranging from $2,000 to $35,000 to small news outlets in remote and underserved areas to help depleted newsrooms allow reporters to travel to cover their local campaigns. The fund launched with an initial gift from the Rossy Foundation and received donations from the Donner, Echo, Metcalf and Gordon foundations. The PPF Uncovered report recommends the establishment of a pooled, permanent, non-partisan election fund going forward.
Then in September, Inspirit launched the Journalism Futures Fund, partnering with donations from the Euphrosine, Sonor and McConnell foundations. The fund will support small-to-medium-sized organizations that “produce impactful journalism, engage their audiences, are led by members of communities that are underserved in Canadian media and have a strong vision for their future.” The funding is earmarked for organizations that have been in business at least a year (no start-ups), have no more than 10 employees, and have budgets under $1 million.
For a Canadian funder just dipping their toes in journalism funding, being part of this starter movement can be appealing.
Ana Sofia Hibon, Inspirit
Two to seven organizations will receive grants of $50,000 to $200,000 per year for three years. Applications will be reviewed by an independent committee. The four foundations, along with individual donors, provided initial seed money of $3.15 million. An informational webinar drew 105 interested organizations in the English session and another 30 in the French session. The longer-term goal is to create a permanent, collaborative journalism-philanthropy model with $8 million in funds by 2029, based on successful models such as Press Forward and the Media Forward Fundin the United States, or Brazil’s Fundo de Apoio ao Jornalismo. Press Forward has 41 local chapters in the United States and has raised more than US$200 million for local news from 110 funders. (An unaffiliated Canadian organization with the same name was formed to strengthen independent media in this country. It also seeks philanthropic partners.)
“For a Canadian funder just dipping their toes in journalism funding, being part of this starter movement can be appealing,” says Ana Sofia Hibon, Inspirit’s program manager.
An example: the Euphrosine Foundation formally launched April 9, with a mission to support charities that strengthen democracy, hold power to account, and support human rights in this country. It was founded by Claire Trottier and is an offshoot of the Trottier Foundation, with an initial endowment of $60 million and a planned 30-year lifespan. It provided a $750,000 grant to Inspirit for the fund. “We see journalism as a core part of a functioning democracy,” Leonard says.
We fund hospitals, we fund universities. Journalism should be one of the institutions that philanthropy sees as worthy of upholding.
Niamh Leonard
“Journalism and philanthropy have not historically needed each other. These are sectors getting to know each other,” Leonard says. Euphrosine’s involvement will give it a better understanding of journalistic partnerships and a respect for the media’s independence – not as a “comms arm” of a donating foundation, she adds. “We need to figure out what the next chapter is,” she says. “We fund hospitals, we fund universities. Journalism should be one of the institutions that philanthropy sees as worthy of upholding.”
Hibon quotes the US-based Knight Foundation credo “Whatever your first priority, journalism should be your second.” Without journalism, she says, there isn’t an engaged readership or the reliable information funders need to assess the landscape and map out a more helpful future.
Inspirit has pioneered philanthropic support of local journalism and data collection, but Hibon doesn’t believe the sector has quite yet moved from the “why?” to “how?” when it comes to supporting local news. “I think we’re doing both concurrently,” she says. “The case for the ‘why’ changes as the times change and we see the rise of fascism and authoritarianism. As more funders get involved, then we can explore multiple ‘hows.’ This fund is one, and hopefully there will be many more initiatives for journalism.”
The case for the ‘why’ changes as the times change and we see the rise of fascism and authoritarianism. As more funders get involved, then we can explore multiple ‘hows.’
Ana Sofia Hibon
While much of the recent work has revolved around amplifying unheard voices and reaching underserved communities, Community Foundations of Canada (CFC) points to a long history of backing independent local news from the likes of the Vancouver Foundation and the Winnipeg Foundation. A May 2025 paper for PhiLab by Magda Konieczna and Jessica Botelho-Urbanski of Concordia University, In Defence of the Local: How Community Foundations across Canada Are Supporting Local News, points to the Winnipeg Foundation jointly funding an environmental reporter for The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press. It has provided $75,000 per year for three years to support the work.
The Vancouver Foundation stewards the Ross Howard Fund, named for the late journalist and instructor, providing $1,200 each year to a talented student at Vancouver’s Langara College, where Howard taught.
The Toronto Foundation made an extraordinary commitment of 10 years to The Local, an online publication that provides coverage of neighbourhoods and stories ignored by larger Toronto media. The commitment started at $25,000 per year, then ramped up to $50,000.
The Edmonton Community Foundation has funded The Narwhal and The Breach and provided funding for other journalism endeavours, and the Foundation of Greater Montreal provided funding for a local newsroom and has committed to more work with community journalism going forward.
CFC counts 208 community foundations as members, with $7.5 billion in assets across the country. Community foundations were responsible for 5.5% of all foundation support for media between 2009 and 2021, giving $1.1 billion over that period.
“There seems to be new energy around the table,” says Geneviève Vallerand, CFC’s vice president. “As a network, we’ve had this on the table for a long time, but this year the conversation shifted.” The rise of online misinformation has become more concrete, she says, adding an urgency to protecting local journalism.
This is too big for any single entity to take this on.
Geneviève Vallerand, Community Foundations of Canada
“My pipe dream is that we can, in the next few years, look at how community foundations can play a role and CFC can support a large-scale initiative on this topic,” Vallerand says. With that, CFC would be at the table alongside other organizations working with independent media. “We have to be. This is too big for any single entity to take this on.”
Clearly there has been an evolution in recent years, much of it chronicled in this publication.
In 2018, Ian Gill acknowledged that while foundations, such as the Vancouver Foundation, do fund journalism, it was very rare. He quoted from notes compiled from a Journalism Funders Forum in London in 2017, raising a provocative question: “What about funding journalism for its own sake? Not journalism that tightly binds to outcomes or impacts that funders want, or instances where ‘philanthropies . . . co-operate with media professionals who share the same thematic interest,’ but rather an embrace of a model of independent journalism, untied and indeed under no obligation to serve ‘as a mere amplifier of [philanthropy’s] own issue-related work. Indeed, how are funders supposed to support a sector that is frequently depicted as sleazy or wilfully confrontational?’”
Two years later, Chris Waddell, a long-time writer, broadcaster, and academic, took to these pages to make the case that new federal laws allowing media outlets to become non-profit entities were likely not worth the effort. “In Canada, there is no tradition of foundations or philanthropic giving to support journalism. Nothing in Canada compares to the Poynter Institute, the Knight Foundation, the Nieman Foundation, or the Gannett Foundation in the US, where there is a strong interest in freedom of expression and First Amendment rights. These foundations were all created by families that made their wealth from media ownership and now fund media and journalism ventures.”
By November 2023, the tone was changing. Angela Long wrote about the long history of failing media and questions of what to do about it (I worked on two newspapers that died over the course of three years, decades ago) but added a more optimistic outlook: “All over the world, those who believe in the power of journalism have been working to alter the course of this trajectory.” She interviewed 14 people for her piece – from media critics to academics to funders to journalists – and all agreed that philanthropy, if done right, is an important piece in the puzzle of how to sustain local news. Yet, even as recently as two years ago, philanthropy found funding journalism a daunting chore. The learning curve was steep.
Hibon told Long: “To put it simply, it became clear that philanthropists and journalists didn’t really know each other.” Funders had lots of questions surrounding editorial independence, she says, but it didn’t seem to be an issue among journalists, who made it clear they weren’t going to be influenced by a third party.
Nobody has ever approached us with anything other than ‘Here’s some money to stay afloat, and we trust you to do your journalism and we’ll step back and hang over here.’
Eden Fineday
This has never come up with IndigiNews since it began publishing in 2020. “Nobody has ever approached us with anything other than ‘Here’s some money to stay afloat, and we trust you to do your journalism and we’ll step back and hang over here,’” Fineday says.
Still, Fineday hustles every day, as do all who operate local news. Anyone who subscribes to The Walrus or The Narwhal, to cite just two examples, receives regular appeals for donations, beyond any philanthropic funding they receive, based on their excellent journalism. Toronto’s West End Phoenix filled a parking lot on a recent Saturday night for a fundraiser it called Start Making Sense,in which local artists put their own interpretation on the playlist of Talking Heads’ iconic Stop Making Sense movie. Calls to “support local journalism” followed the final chords of more than one number.
Fineday has 475 recurring donors, 300 of whom donate each month. That’s a significant portion of her revenue. Donations can be as small as $5 per month, part of a $95,000 total per year, accounting for 15 to 20% of the IndigiNews budget. Still, she dreams of sustainable funding. “I’m just hoping it won’t always be this way.”
Diversity in local news remains an elusive goal, but university programs are finding ways to change the landscape on the ground level. King’s College in Halifax, for example, covers tuition and incidental fees for up to three Mi'kmaw students per year in its journalism programs under an initiative launched in 2022. It has already led to a six-week paid internship for a graduate at CBC Halifax, but Trina Roache, a former journalist overseeing the program, says Mi'kmaw journalists can bring their perspective to any type of reporting.
“Mi'kmaw journalists don’t just have to do Mi'kmaw stories,” Roache says. “Being Mi'kmaw is just something you bring with you.” There is a need to bring more Indigenous voices to local news, she says. “You can do a soft story on a mawio'mi (a gathering such as a powwow) and it’s tough to screw that up. But if it’s a story about a conflict over treaty rights – Mi'kmaw people are well aware how that story gets told, and it doesn’t reflect the Mi'kmaw perspective, understanding, or reality. So it’s not hard to point out where Mi'kmaw voices are needed.”
Or, if you’re IndigiNews, you break stories, as it did in 2021, revealing how birth alerts (when a hospital is informed by social workers that a newborn may need protection, allowing it to be taken from an unknowing mother) were still being carried out even after the BC government had sent memos to hospitals calling the practice unconstitutional. The government tried to prevent IndigiNews from publishing and get them to retroactively redact parts of a document it already had.
“We refused,” Fineday says. Without philanthropic funding to allow IndigiNews to expose the government abuse, many more babies may have been unfairly yanked from their mothers. And that should be another compelling reason to help local news push back the financial and societal tides to remain tough, true to itself – and thrive.
