An Essential Ingredient to Rebuild Public Media

Among the many casualties of the current U.S. federal administration's slash-and-burn policies is the media landscape.

The federal government's aggressive budget cuts have gutted support for journalism, independent arts and media production, and public broadcasting, fields that were already suffering from scarce resources. Most recently, Congress defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which folded soon thereafter. 

The result of this attack on our public media isn't simply a loss of funding – it's a loss of the infrastructure that supports stories rooted in social justice, lived experience, and structural inequality. What's at stake isn't just coverage, but care.

In this crisis, fiscal sponsorship can be both an immediate lifeline and also a long-term foundation for rebuilding our media infrastructure. Rather than waiting for new media institutions to form or existing ones to adapt, fiscal sponsors provide an agile support framework that allows community-led storytelling to flourish now, while building toward the media landscape we need for the future.

The importance of narrative infrastructure

We need to understand what we're really losing, and we also need to know what to build. To address the latter, my organization, the Center for Transformational Change, has been working on articulating a concept of narrative infrastructure– that is, the interconnected systems that underpin the creation, dissemination, and impact of narratives within a community or society.

Throughour analysis, a strong narrative infrastructure has four essential components:

• Storytelling (an ecosystem of creators producing transformational artworks)
• Advocacy (leaders exercising narrative power to connect stories to change efforts),
• Platforms (channels that distribute content and engage audiences through ethical technologies)
• Resources (funding and support deployed in partnership with communities).

The collapse of public media forces a breakdown across all components. We're losing the systematic capacity to create, connect, fund, and distribute community-rooted stories at scale. When this infrastructure functions properly, storytellers can leverage platforms to hold power accountable and advocate for change through journalism – which is why media has long been considered democracy's fourth estate.

We need a fully functioning narrative infrastructure that can support thousands of storytellers, advocates, and platforms working together. And in this moment of change, fiscal sponsorship can provide an essential piece of connective tissue that allows this infrastructure to function across all components simultaneously.

Fiscal sponsors as connective tissue

Fiscal sponsorship is already playing a connective tissue role for emerging media experiments.

Over the past few years, thousands of new, innovative media platforms have emerged around the world: media collectives, cooperative storytelling networks, small experimental teams of creative technologists, and independent artists who work on project-to-project bases. They are creating media grounded in solidarity, self-governance, and long-term collective investment.

These projects are building alternatives to dominant systems – yet they operate within a funding landscape designed for established nonprofits. For that reason, many have launched with the support of fiscal sponsors, or continue to be fiscally sponsored.

Indeed, a number of organizations have developed fiscal sponsorship programs specifically for journalists and documentarians, such as Tiny News Collective, Association of Independents in Radio, and Fractured Atlas. Meanwhile, a number of funders support individual artists and filmmakers with fiscally-sponsored projects, such as Perspective Fund, a nonprofit philanthropy, and the Asian Giving Women’s Circle, a donor-advised fund of the Ms. Foundation.

In the United States alone, fiscal sponsors have enabled the development of powerful media platforms like Brown Girls Doc Mafia, Color Congress, the BLIS Collective, the Bitchitra Collective, and ZEAL. Each of these is an example of how fiscal sponsorship can help create the operational capacity that these media initiatives need to do the work of centering global majority voices and challenging traditional power structures. 

In my own work, I have seen how fiscal sponsors have provided a foundation for individual media projects. For our social impact multiplatform documentary project on migration journeys, Who Is Dayani Cristal?, we worked with Women Make Movies to manage funds supporting media production and audience engagement, and with NEO Philanthropy for funds supporting community capacity and aid/development. For the collective arts intervention and documentary project In Plain Sight, which centers immigrant, LGBTQIA+, and Black and brown creators leading arts-based movements toward liberation, we are supported by OUTsider Fest. 

And for an upcoming book series on collective leadership and community narrative power from my social enterprise Center for Transformational Change (organized as an LLC), we are planning to establish fiscal sponsorships.

None of these initiatives, which each brought together a loosely affiliated collective of artists and activists to address wicked social problems, could have functioned without fiscal sponsorship structures. Traditional institutions are simply not equipped with the speed, flexibility, and innovation needed to meet these challenges.

Where fiscal sponsors can lead

Fiscal sponsorship reduces legal and administrative barriers while preserving creative autonomy, allowing organizations to collaborate across boundaries, share resources, and scale their impact. It offers a flexible and inclusive infrastructure for the future of media, supporting integrated ecosystems where storytelling, advocacy, platform development, and community engagement can thrive together. 

It also bridges critical gaps in resource mobilization by providing agile funding mechanisms that support both innovation and narrative work, addressing the mismatch between traditional philanthropy's requirements and small collectives' capabilities. For audiences, this model creates pathways for deeper community engagement and participation in storytelling processes, moving beyond passive consumption toward active involvement in narrative development and distribution.

Most crucially, fiscal sponsorship enables community ownership of distribution platforms by providing the legal and financial infrastructure for communities to build their own platforms without complex nonprofit formation processes. As the Center’s senior strategist Keefe Murren notes, "every platform you don't own has a kill switch you can't control," making this community-controlled infrastructure essential for sustainable media independence.

The strength and potential of fiscal sponsorships lie in the ability for small innovation cores, experimental collectives, and independent media projects that are developing tomorrow's media landscape today. Rather than forcing these groups to navigate the complex process of forming their own nonprofits or adapt to rigid institutional frameworks, fiscal sponsorship provides the administrative and legal infrastructure they need while preserving their autonomy and creative vision. A robust set of fiscal sponsors who understand the needs of media creators and distributors can help create networks of interconnected projects that can collaborate and amplify each other's impact, building the resilient, community-rooted media ecosystem that democracy requires.

The current political landscape makes this work more urgent than ever. From the defunding of CPB to the broader assault on public media, we are witnessing the systematic dismantling of the very infrastructure that sustains storytelling underpinning a vibrant democracy. This crisis demands that we move beyond lamenting what we've lost to actively building what we need. 

This requires supporting the small collectives, digital communities, and experimental networks developing new approaches to storytelling and community engagement. Building a media landscape that serves democracy rather than profit depends on fiscal sponsorships that operate as connective tissue, enabling others to build the stories, movements, resources, and platforms we need. The work of building narrative transformation can’t wait for institutional permission. It needs to happen now, across all the systems that shape how we understand our world, and a strong fiscal sponsorship structure is essential to our success.iic