Two years ago, an anonymous philanthropist in Spokane worked with the Innovia Foundation to start a new fund at the non-profit entitled the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund.

The stated goal of the fund was to create and host local events that would bring the Spokane-area together in multiple ways that would encourage people to engage with their community.

But the fund’s very first stated goal was to help fund local journalism in this region at a time when the news industry’s economic realities were changing quickly. The local journalism funded through this special fund at Innovia would not be owned by The Spokesman-Review or any other news organization, and instead would be owned by the community, carrying a Creative Commons copyright. This would allow any organization or group that wanted to publish the stories funded in this manner the to run these stories without cost.

Last year, this fund – along with primary funding from Report For America, as well as additional funding assistance from Innovia and the Northwest Passages book club – helped bring the region its first health reporter who would focus on one of the most-undercovered topics in America: rural health care. Arielle Dreher started at The Spokesman-Review last summer and began to tell the health stories from a part of this country that rarely gets covered. Those stories were made available to anyone to publish free of charge.

As the COVID-19 virus began to become the health story of the century, Dreher began to focus on its effects throughout Eastern Washington and North Idaho, helping to give this region some of the most in-depth coverage on the subject anywhere in the nation.

The Spokesman-Review has since received two other Report For America grants, establishing a second full-time reporter in Olympia to cover statewide issues with Spokesman-Review senior reporter Jim Camden and to help the newspaper hire a full-time reporter in Washington, D.C., to cover national issues through the very specific lens of this region. All stories from these two new reporters also will be made available free to all who would like to publish them, but the Report For America grant requires that half of the funding come from a local philanthropy and the host organization.

The Spokesman-Review also was informed this week that Report For America would like to try to add even more reporters to the Spokane area under this same arrangement.

This is where we need your help.

The Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund at Innovia is set up in a way that allows anyone or any organization to contribute to it. For us to continue to keep our region’s only full-time health reporter, as well as to add these other new positions, this fund needs more money in it.

We hope you will consider donating to the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund at Innovia. All donations are tax deductible. You can do this by simply visiting spokesman.com/thanks or by contacting Spokesman-Review newsroom office manager Mary Beth Donelan at (509) 459-5485.

Local journalism has never been more important, and we hope you will help our region to have some of the most in-depth local journalism of any similar area in the nation.