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Ark Valley Voice (AVV) raised a bit more than $40,000 through NewsMatch last year, joining 300+ other @INN Network newsrooms in a collaborative fundraising campaign to support #nonprofitnews. This funding includes $19,000 in direct donations from our local community to our local nonprofit news, and $21,000 in matching funds through the NewsMatch program which arrives this week.

This included $6,000 awarded to Ark Valley Voice through the Miami Foundation specifically recognizing our news coverage in support of democracy. It was an unexpected honor.

This level of investment in local nonprofit news was a first for AVV, which shifted from a for-profit to a nonprofit format in mid-2022, at the same time its membership in the Institute for Nonprofit News was accepted. INN (originally incorporated in Colorado) also became our  501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor. Until this NewsMatch fund drive, the most we had ever raised in local donations during a fund drive was $9,000 — so this is a huge step for AVV.

As publisher and Managing Editor Jan Wondra said during the AVV Donor Thank You event last Friday, “Gratitude is too small a word for what we feel about this local support. It means so much that our readers recognize and support our mission that “truth has a voice,” and believe in our nonprofit mission focused on news as a civic good.

NewsMatch 2022 kicked off in November with $4.6 million in matching funds from a group of national, regional and interest-based funders designed to incentivize giving from local partners and individuals. The 303 participating newsrooms — all members of the Institute for Nonprofit News Network (INN Network) — leveraged fundraising training and tools provided through NewsMatch to replicate the national model.

Together these more than 300 nonprofit news organizations secured more than $5.5 million in additional matching gifts from community foundations, local philanthropists, and small businesses. But this amount of foundation and corporate support was dwarfed by the person-by-person. tax-deductible, local support for nonprofit news organizations, which exceeded $270 million — including the local donations to AVV.

Also for the first time during this NewsMatch nonprofit news organizations attracted more matching funds from local funders than from national and regional foundations.

For AVV this year-end matching-gift campaign makes our existence possible and every penny goes to pay our journalists. It is sustaining, transforming, and expanding our news coverage. It is funding our ability to dig deeper into investigative news stories, to offer more comprehensive coverage to hold our governments to account, and addressing the issues so important to this valley, from agriculture, water, and wildfire to recreation, economic development, and how to handle the inevitable growth while protecting the reasons we all live here.

For more information follow this link.