proximate
What is Proximate?
Published: July 30th 2023, 1:26:48 am
Hello from Ben, Meg and Kevin, and welcome to our Patreon page!
We're so excited to launch Proximate and our beta website to the world. We thought we'd share a quick overview of what we are, what our vision is, and how we plan to operate.
Q: What is Proximate?
Proximate is a new media platform that produces solutions journalism about public participation and democratic innovations. We're a home for stories about creative, community-driven models that shift power to people with lived experience, or those proximate to the problem. If you're curious about our name, check out an explanation here.
Q: Why did you create Proximate?
Back in 2021, two of us (Meg and Ben) published Letting Go: How Philanthropists and Impact Investors Can Do More Good by Giving Up Control, a modern history of public participation focused on three separate movements: participatory grantmaking, participatory investing and participatory democracy.
We saw that the book was valuable for both activists and institutional leaders who wanted to learn more about these innovative, and sometimes complicated, models. Proximate is our effort to pick up the conversation where Letting Go left off.
Q: What does Proximate produce?
We produce solutions journalism about movements for participation, including those covered in Letting Go but also movements like participatory action research, citizen science, community-driven healthcare and locally-led climate action.
We have a number of different styles of articles, including Analysis pieces, Q&As, and Dispatches. We're particularly excited about Dispatches, which are heavily-researched stories about participatory models, written by local journalists on the ground – like Brazilian journalist Marcela Martins' investigation into the country's new participatory budgeting project, or activist Casper Love's dispatch from a sex worker-led film festival in Amsterdam.
Q: What topics do you cover?
As you've seen, we take an intentionally broad lens, covering a wide range of issue areas and sectors in an effort to break silos and lift up shared storylines.
For that reason, our website is organized into a number of Verticals - clusters of stories that answer a specific question, or revolve around a theme, and grow over time. Some of our early Verticals include Grassroots Grantmaking; Participatory Democracy; and Climate. We're excited to build out these Verticals, and launch new ones, over the next few weeks and months.
Q: What's the larger vision?
At the end of the day, our goal is to drive movements for participation forward. Our journalism does that in three ways: by amplifying the movement leaders who are driving participatory problem-solving; by educating industry leaders with new ideas and best practices; and by creating a broad, cross-sector narrative around a more participatory future. You can view our full deck and theory of change here.
Q: How do you operate?
We have a small team, composed of our three co-founders and a number of advisors, freelancers and consultants.
So far, we've been self-funding this work. We're exploring a few different kinds of partnerships with like-minded organizations and supporters in order to help us reach sustainability:
- Content Partners work with us to commission, write or repurpose content. They may help brainstorm ideas, introduce us to writers and sources, or send us existing content that can be repurposed for Proximate
- Platform Partners work with us to cross-post or share Proximate content, for greater amplification. They often share an audience with us, and can double as Content Partners
- Funding Partners support our work by sponsoring a Vertical or providing unrestricted funding to help us grow our team
More to come soon. If you're curious to learn more, or want to talk about partnership, reach out at [email protected].