Given the rise in fake news and disinformation, news and media literacy is a vital skill for young people to cultivate. However, funding sources for initiatives that address this issue have recently been decreasing, putting pressure on non-profit organizations operating in this sphere.

The Guardian Foundation is an independent charity working to promote global press freedom and access to liberal journalism. It does this through impactful work in three areas: news and media literacy in schools; increasing access and representation in the journalism industry; and capacity building for independent journalism around the world.

Through its workshops and classroom materials for primary and secondary school students, The Guardian Foundation is considered a leader in the news and media literacy space. Its leadership team was therefore particularly keen to identify opportunities to continue scaling up their work on in this area. They also needed to evaluate their financial sustainability, developing options to ensure stability for the years to come.

We worked closely with The Guardian Foundation’s central team and program leads for eight weeks to co-create a clear roadmap with full buy-in from the team, focusing on three key opportunities for the coming year. We started by reviewing the full portfolio of programs and multiple opportunities to scale up impact, gathering input through interviews and a survey of key stakeholders. We then led the team in multiple workshops to prioritize opportunities, based on potential to scale in the short term and depth of impact. 

Although all the work The Guardian Foundation does is incredible, we were able to hone in on the key initiatives that would help it expand its reach in the next few years: creating videos for teachers and students, setting up a robust contractor and volunteer system to deliver live workshops, and further developing its classroom resources.

Through this work, a key gap in its funding strategy was also found, and so we ran workshops with the team to help them develop and test their approach to actively seek corporate and other sponsorships. We carried out a current state cost and breakeven analysis to support the development of longer-term financial stability, and gave the team the framework for a forward-looking cost assessment.

The recommendations we developed maintained a core tenet of The Guardian Foundation — depth of impact working directly with young people — while providing clear, actionable next steps for the team to scale up their impact and reach immediately. We helped reframe the team’s thinking about financial sustainability, and they have already started reshaping their funding and sponsorship strategy to enable further program development. Our engagement with the full team and their stakeholders (including beneficiaries and board members) left them energized to action the strategy and new opportunities.