On July 17, 2025, Alaska’s locally owned public media stations and providers learned that $15 million in Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding — $12 million in direct grants plus $3 million in shared services like statewide news, engineering and compliance — had been canceled. Normally, the funding would have arrived on October 1, but now, leaders at the state’s 27 public media stations, most of which are located in remote and isolated locales, had only a few weeks to find ways to fill the gap.
Stakeholders did what most civic leaders would do when confronted with a time-sensitive and hyper-local crisis — they asked their local community foundation to fill the gap and support a coordinated statewide response. Within days, the Alaska Community Foundation (ACF) established the Voices Across Alaska Fund (VAA), a pooled fund that aims to keep every station on the air after October 1 and to develop a longer-term statewide sustainability plan.
ACF formally announced the fund on August 1. Six weeks later, the Rasmuson Foundation, the largest private funder in Alaska, announced a $1.5 million grant to the VAA. “The fund is designed to do two things,” said President and CEO Gretchen Guess. “Keep stations on the air now and give leaders time to plan for a stronger, sustainable future without federal funding.” On September 14, Anchorage Daily News’ Iris Samuels reported the fund had raised $3.5 million.
VAA is drumming up support at a time when local media outlets are scrambling to fill CPB funding gaps with private dollars. Philanthropy is also taking the initiative. Most notably, last month, a group of funders, including the Knight, MacArthur and Ford foundations, committed $36.5 million in emergency funding for at-risk public television and radio stations, focusing on outlets serving rural, Indigenous and other underserved communities.
The investment comports with these large and nationally focused funders’ long-standing support for local media. But news out of Alaska is a reminder that mega foundations can’t do it alone. Building sustainable local media ecosystems also requires the involvement of community foundations that bring four distinct advantages to the table — deep ties with local outlets, discretionary grantmaking dollars, experience in quickly rolling out pooled emergency funds and, as of 2023, collective oversight of at least $54.9 billion sitting in donor-advised funds that can fill federal funding gaps.
“Voices Across Alaska emerged out of urgency, relationships, and trust,” said ACF President and CEO Alexandra McKay in an email to IP. “We had to act quickly so no Alaskan community lost its voice.”
How the Voices Across Alaska fund came together
Founded in 1995, ACF has a long history of supporting Alaska’s public media ecosystem through donor-advised and designated grants to stations, journalism initiatives and community storytelling projects. “Public media has always been one of the ways Alaskans care for each other — our donors have backed stations and storytelling for years, and ACF has often been the platform to make that support simple and effective,” McKay said.
The termination of CFB funding presented VAA’s advisors with a challenge that, I suspect, is also confronting stakeholders coordinating emergency response plans elsewhere: How to most effectively provide support for the state’s public media stations, especially when some have been independently raising money since first learning of the CPB cuts on July 17.
Advisors determined that the fund would adopt a two-step approach to governance and fund distribution to address this question.
First, each station gets “credit” for the emergency funds it has raised locally since July 17, measured in months of operating runway. The pooled fund would then bring every station up to the same minimum coverage level, such as three months. If there’s still money available after that time frame, all stations are lifted together to the next milestone, such as six months, and then nine. This model, MacKay said, is “fair, simple and keeps every community’s station on air for the same amount of time.”
Rasmuson Foundation also approved of VAA’s approach. “It looks out for all the stations, from Unalaska to Utqiagvik to Ketchikan to Homer,” said Guess. “This grant is about meeting the moment with the long view in mind.”
Guess’ perspective suggests that no fund can indefinitely operate on emergency footing, nor can its advisors plan on a future administration reinstituting terminated federal support. As a result, VAA advisors plan to have the state’s outlets pivot to opportunities that lay the groundwork for long-term sustainability once they achieve operational stability. These opportunities “could include multi-year support, donor matching efforts, policy engagement and continued collaboration on shared services to reduce costs system-wide,” McKay said.
Donor-advised fund support can stem the impacts of federal cuts
Rasmuson Foundation’s $1.5 million contribution to the VAA builds on its nearly $6 million in total funding for Alaska’s public broadcasting system since 1981. Previous grants helped to support the system’s infrastructure, statewide reporting collaborations and Indigenous programming such as “Molly of Denali,” the first nationally distributed children’s show to feature an Alaska Native as the lead character.
The foundation joined a mix of individual donors, corporations and national funders that have committed to the VAA, with some choosing anonymity at this time. (ACF will share names once additional funders authorize public recognition.) “Having Rasmuson’s early support and promotion of Voices Across Alaska was both appreciated and reflected the trusted partnership we’ve built through past rapid-response efforts,” McKay said.
Four words in McKay’s quote — “past rapid-response efforts” — speak to community foundations’ unique value proposition at a time when nonprofits are reeling from federal funding cuts and bracing for more reductions that will further increase demand for services. Community foundations are the first line of defense whenever a crisis hits, which explains why Alaska’s public media leaders reached out to the ACF upon learning that CPB support had evaporated.
In addition, community foundations have direct and indirect access to substantial financial resources. Together with its affiliate foundations, ACF supports donors and nonprofits, distributing over $15 million in grants annually. It also manages over $250 million in assets and administers more than 2,800 funds established by donors. It seems perfectly plausible that VAA can close the remaining gap in terminated federal funding with support from ACF’s DAF account holders and other donors. Indeed, Alaska Public Media President Ed Ulman told Anchorage Daily News’ Samuels that since July, new donors have begun giving, or existing donors have upped their contributions.
Community foundations are also using their bully pulpit to push back against cuts. In May, the Orlando Sentinel published an op-ed by Central Florida Foundation President and CEO Mark Brewer, titled “Public Media is a Vital Community Asset.” “Cutting funding to public media is a profound mistake, with consequences far beyond the loss of popular programming,” Brewer wrote. “It erodes a crucial source of trusted information when the nation and our community struggle with disinformation and division.”
Meanwhile, in the Twin Cities area, the Minneapolis Foundation will be convening national and local journalism thought leaders for the October 8 “Minnesota Meeting: Next in News,” where they’ll sketch out a roadmap for a sustainable news ecosystem. Last month, the foundation committed $75,000 to Press Forward Minnesota, an affiliate of the national journalism coalition, from its OneMPLS Fund, a collective impact fund designed to respond to urgent and emerging local needs.
“Local news fosters community connection, provides essential information and plays a critical role in our democracy by helping people engage in issues that affect their lives,” said Minneapolis Foundation Vice President of Collective Impact and Giving Patrice Relerford in an email to IP. “It’s important for all of us to work together to ensure that our news ecosystems continue to thrive.”
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Funders can be doing more to address federal funding cuts
VAA may not be the largest Trump 2.0-era emergency response fund, nor does it cover a broad swath of the United States.
That said, by providing an exportable roadmap for community foundations looking to help outlets serving remote and underserved areas, it’s a constructive addition to the national philanthropic dialogue. “Because rural stations operate with high fixed costs and extremely small revenue bases, they cannot quickly replace lost federal funding,” McKay said. “If a station goes dark, it is costly — and sometimes impossible — to bring it back.”
Moreover, community foundations already have the muscle memory for rolling out emergency funding. VAA’s governance model builds on this core competency by showing how funding can equitably stabilize a state’s stations before pivoting to activities that ensure the field’s long-term financial sustainability.
The VAA is also a reminder that the ongoing debate as to whether philanthropy can “fill the gaps” in terminated federal funding isn’t a zero-sum proposition.
No one, to my knowledge, is asking funders sitting on a combined $1.93 trillion — that’s $1.68 trillion currently sitting in private foundation coffers and $254 billion in DAF accounts as of 2023 — to cover $425 billion in congressionally authorized funding that’s been frozen by the Trump administration. But saying funders can only do so much takes a page from the scarcity mindset that has unfortunately pervaded the philanthropshere for years, when in reality, the sector has formidable resources to mitigate the impacts of federal cuts.
Philanthropy’s collective resources — financial and otherwise — are bountiful, and community foundations can help build resilient local news ecosystems by acting as a trusted convening partner, allocating discretionary grantmaking dollars and encouraging their DAF holders to support organizations through pooled funds like VAA.
“Alaskans look out for each other,” said ACF’s McKay. “Voices Across Alaska is how we stay connected — working together so every community’s voice continues to be heard.”
