If you have ever been to a meeting with donors and journalists, you’ll know that both sides can get a hard time. Each accuses the other of not understanding their priorities and processes. And yet, they are increasingly vital to each other’s work and often want the same things.

Our Journalism Funders Forum seeks a more productive approach. At this Forum we crafted blueprints — structured solutions to challenges that our experts identified. Then, in this collaborative document, we’ve listed blueprints for solutions to all these problems. These are the potential low-cost interventions that should have an outsized effect. Here are just a few of the ten problems and solutions we discussed:

  1. Better understanding between foundations and journalists. Potential solution: Unconference, expert circles, face-to-face meetings, panels and forums. Bonus solution: Both parties wanted to engage in a role-play exercise that puts them in each others’ shoes.
  2. Address power dynamics. Potential solution: More cooperation between grantees to increases their collective leverage. Regular surveys from funders to grantees and open forums at journalism conferences would also help.
  3. Sharing new information. Potential solution: Some kind of hub collecting scientific and heuristic findings, and pushing them out to the community, could be really valuable.
  4. Consultants to support grant writing. Potential solution: There are many way to solve this, but one of the most promising is a database of consultants.
  5. Raise visibility of funding opportunities. Potential solution: Structured and categorised database of funding opportunities.

Read the rest of the problems and solutions regarding blueprints for better collaboration by Adam Thomas at Medium.