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Last month, Prism, which “investigates systems of power with communities most impacted by injustice at the center of our reporting,” announced that it lost a cumulative half million dollars of philanthropic support this year and is in need of twenty-five thousand dollars by the end of the summer to continue. As a young, Black, first-generation Nigerian organizer who has written for the site, I was crestfallen. Amid so many headlines eulogizing the news industry, Prism, which started up in 2019, had been among a number of movement journalism organizations that provided a source of hope.
Movement journalism, or journalism in service of liberation, is a term coined by the group Project South in 2017, putting a name to a practice and set of ethics that existed for hundreds of years, exemplified by the work of Ida B. Wells, the anti-lynching crusader and investigative journalist. In recent years, it has felt like a force, unscathed by market hardships and backed by dedicated supporters. In 2020, I cofounded a movement journalism organization to spread its ideas to young people in Houston.
But now Prism and other movement journalism organizations, including Scalawag and Press On, are seeing a troubling shift. “As nonprofit newsrooms, we’re struggling with both the attacks on journalism and the attacks on philanthropy,” Lara Witt, Prism’s editor in chief, said. “We did deal with the COVID years where philanthropy retracted a little bit, but this is different because it’s legal, it’s structural, it’s fascism.” The visibility of Prism’s work, along with the organization’s focus on BIPOC communities, makes it a “walking target” for the Trump administration, she said—noting its clampdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and “leftist organizations.”
Witt considers the heightened risk a motivation to continue Prism’s mission, rather than a deterrent. Yet she believes many foundations have decided to avoid funding organizations the federal government may target, keeping their wallets full in order to fight incoming attacks. This year, she told me, two foundations opted not to renew multiyear grants for Prism, which meant that the organization laid off two staff members, cut its freelance budget in half, and restructured the newsroom. Witt said the summer fundraising goal is an attempt to cover freelance expenses and diversify funding sources, because the organization is more than 90 percent grant-funded.
Scalawag, to which I have also contributed, has experienced its own share of backsliding from large funders. In April, Da’Shaun Harrison, the organization’s executive director, revealed that a foundation rescinded a three-year grant, claiming a Scalawag newsletter conflicted with the foundation’s commitment to “dignity for all people.” The newsletter, which was published on October 7, 2025, commemorated the lives of Palestinians lost in the past two years. In an email shared with me, the funder said that Scalawag “appears not only to condone but actually celebrate” violence because the newsletter hyperlinked to a source from the Hamas Media Office, which functions as the communication arm for Gaza’s Hamas-run government. “A lot of people in philanthropy are Zionists, and a lot of the folks in philanthropy who are running these foundations are true and explicit Zionists,” Harrison said.
Scalawag became one of the first independent media outlets to publicize a punitive philanthropic response to Palestine coverage. In its loss—amounting to 210,000 dollars, Harrison said—the organization joined a list of nonprofit and advocacy groups that have experienced the same. And soon after, Harrison told me, another of Scalawag’s funders said on a virtual call that the organization would not receive 425,000 dollars remaining of a promised 575,000-dollar grant. (Harrison told me the funder informed Scalawag only that it had failed a “compliance review.”) Harrison is “cautiously confident” that Scalawag can stay alive, but the newsroom is still sorting through next steps. “This is a very large-scale and concerted effort on philanthropy’s side to close all independent media, to disrupt any possibility for independent media, and to disrupt any possibility for media that is not in service of the state and its propaganda,” Harrison said.
Press On, a Southern media collective, has trained and supported movement journalists across the United States since 2019. Nadeen Bir and Coral Feigin, the group’s codirectors, view the federal government’s recent attacks on journalism as part of a longer history. They’ve seen media organizations “punished and starved” for covering Palestine long before Trump came to office, they told me in a statement. “Philanthropy needs to get creative and courageous,” they said. “They have financial cover in a way that small nonprofits and outlets do not.”
Press On’s movement journalism principles, they have found, have made it difficult to scale with legacy-journalism funders. “Philanthropy is a product of racial capitalism, and it behaves like every other system under capitalism,” they said. “We look to the example of spend-down foundations and high-net-wealth individuals who act as class traitors and give away their excess wealth without attempting to benefit beyond what they genuinely need.”
Bir and Feigin believe that a growing list of Funders4Ceasefire shows that alternate modes of philanthropy are possible. One of the signatories is Borealis Philanthropy’s Racial Equity in Journalism (REJ) Fund, which continues to support Prism and Scalawag and annually moves upwards of four million dollars to Black, Indigenous, Latine, Asian, and Arab publishers. When I asked Alicia Bell, REJ’s director, about the impact of recent political and economic conditions on grantees, she replied: “Folks are more depressed, they’re more anxious, they’re more nervous, they’re more worried, and the way that that stress lives in people’s bodies makes them die early. And even if they don’t die early, it causes all these other health issues.”
In journalism, Bell has seen misalignment on the purpose of philanthropy. “I think for some folks they would say, ‘Well, newsrooms just didn’t meet market conditions,’ but we know we live in a market that’s not meant for a lot of us, and literally the reason that philanthropy is supposed to exist in writing is to make up for those market issues.”
While philanthropy rearranges its priorities and the Trump administration rearranges the country, Prism is focused on rebuilding with readers. So far, Witt said, Prism’s emergency fundraiser has reached about 30 percent of its goal. “I haven’t had non-anxiety sleep for I don’t know how long now,” she said. “I’m confident that the decisions that we’ve made are the best thing for our future, and I think that Prism will be okay given the decisions that we made. But it doesn’t mean that the decisions were easy to make, and it doesn’t mean that I feel good about them.”
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