For several months, at the suggestion of Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism Board President Felicia Sullivan—who has deep experience in such matters—BINJ Development Director Linda Pinkow has been leading our search for educational and vocational training grants that we can use to fund our truly large reporting intern program. However, we have discovered that such grants apparently don’t exist for young people training to be journalists in Massachusetts.
That is a shame because we just had to shut off our spring intern cohort at 30 (!) student and recently graduated journalists; so huge is the demand for the kind of practical training and work experience that we offer our reporting interns. We really want to be able to pay our interns more than the $150 per completed article that we’re currently able to offer them, establishing stipends for every intern we accept on a semester-by-semester basis. And, given that it’s grown to become BINJ’s second largest project next to our investigative reporting work, we would also like to better support the significant amount of staff time it takes to run it.
Undaunted, however, your faithful BINJ staff perseveres. So we thought we should just ask our readers if any of you have direct connections to any individuals or entities that might be willing to donate a major grant in support of the BINJ reporting internship program. Ideally this would be money from new donors. We’re not looking for existing major donors to switch over to specifically supporting our internship program.
A simple ask, but one we think is worth making.
If you know somebody who fits the bill (or you are that somebody or you’re a staffer, board member, or official of an organization or agency that could help us), we’d appreciate it if you’d drop us an email at info [at] binj [dot] news and we’ll set up a time to talk things over.
And if you’re aware of some cache of educational and vocational training funds that you think a reporting intern program like BINJ’s will qualify for, by all means email us straight away.
Regular readers of my editorials may recall that I recently wrote about the fact that we’re not yet sure if we’ll even manage to raise the general operating funds BINJ needs to make it past June, and that remains true. It also remains true that we’ve already started telling applicants for our summer intern cohort that we may not have the money to pay them even $150 per article.
What’s different with this ask is that we’re searching for large gifts solely in support of our excellent intern program. Because training the next generation of journalists is some of the most important work we do and we really want our interns to get more like the living wage they deserve for their work than just $150 per piece—or worse yet, nothing … if we don’t raise the rest of this year’s BINJ budget by late June.
Thanks in advance for any connections any of you can make for us.
This editorial was produced for BINJ.News, the independent weekly magazine of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service
