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Despite an abundance of narratives pushing for green and just transitions, many fail to engage those capable of instigating real change. Laudes Foundation aims to disrupt this status quo by determining and disseminating compelling narratives grounded in solutions, tailored to spark meaningful action among key decision-makers across business, finance and government. Megan McGill, Senior Programme Manager explains how supporting journalism contributes to these goals, and what the most important lessons they have learned so far are.

Why did the Laudes Foundation start supporting media?

McGill: The Laudes Foundation is focused on inspiring and challenging industry to deliver a green, fair and inclusive transition. We apply system change principles in how we work, which means we also work at the level of mindset shift. In other words, if the stakeholders we are trying to influence don’t hold the right mindsets about what needs to change, why and how, then there is an intrinsic motivation entirely missing to move on the solutions we have at hand.

With this in mind, we designed a grant programme called “Narrative” of which journalism plays an important role. Journalism is a field with the reach to hold decision-makers accountable and highlight through evidence-based arguments where industry needs to and can move with more urgency and more ambition on a green, fair and inclusive transition. What this looks like in practice in our grant-making is helping newsrooms and staff (either directly or indirectly via capacity-building programmes) increase coverage of climate reporting across all beats of the newsroom – more evidence-based stories highlighting greenwashing or green-delay to hold laggards accountable, more solutions-driven stories to inspire other decision-makers to act, and more stories from workers and communities illustrating the intersection of climate and labour to show why industry action on climate must be just and how it can be. And media is an industry itself with investors and business leaders making decisions about media companies. So, in that respect, journalism is certainly an actor, not just a channel.

It was in early 2023 where we intentionally decided to increase our focus on this aspect of our Narrative grant programme. This was in some part due to what we saw as an increase in polarised reporting on climate, where progress is being undermined through mis- and disinformation, and also through headlines climate-related creating a sense of paralysis on what to do about the crisis. This means fact-based journalism is losing out, making it harder for progressive players to see that momentum is on their side or getting the laggards to feel like they need to start moving.

What is the most important lesson you have learned from this programme?

McGill: It is difficult to know if the news media grants are getting cut through with a broad swath of decision-makers. I think that the field of narrative shift relies significantly on metrics related to reach or even sometimes just a belief that the more a story is told, the more people who read it, it’s just going to change someone’s way of thinking. We can definitely agree that if something is not being talked about, then for sure it won’t be acted upon. But we are taking for granted that when something is talked about that it will get acted on.

I think my biggest learning is we’ve got a lot more work to do as a field, both the funders and the organisations that we fund to show the impact of narrative work. For sure with journalism, you can find cases where a reporting project has led to a policy change. That kind of pathway of impact is easy to explain, but I think the mindset shift, where you really start to get people to internalise a problem and to feel responsible for acting on it, which is what we need for wide scale action on the climate crisis, we haven’t started yet to systematically measure that kind of mindset shift. To get more effective at funding this kind of work, we have got to get better at measuring impact.

What kind of other challenges did you encounter?

McGill: The main challenge is that stories catalysed by Laudes-funded grants on just transition most often are not specific to the industries Laudes is trying to shift: built environment, finance, fashion and food. There are some, but not that many, and often they are not explaining what to do about just transitions. I think to motivate the private sector to move on just transition, we need more solutions-driven storytelling, because, in the absence of strong legislation to bring up the laggards, we will rely heavily on inspiration and a sense of a race to the top to move more progressive actors.

So, it has been a challenge to show that an increase in reporting on just transition more broadly will support the transition of industries Laudes is focused on.

What was the biggest success story? In general, how do you assess the success of your programs?

McGill: One of the things we can highlight as progress is that our partners have contributed to just transition entering mainstream news coverage. Evidence we are using is still focused on reach, but it’s certainly acting as a strong complement to the advocacy of other organisations on just transition.

Three years ago, when Laudes made its first grants in the space, just transition did not feature in mainstream news. I think it’s great progress to build, but again, there is still a push needed on measuring the real influence of this reporting on the mindsets of people with influence to act on the political, finance and business solutions to a just transition.

In which regions are you supporting media, and what kind of media do you work with?

McGill: We haven’t had a specific geographical scope in our grant making. We share with our partners the geographies of importance to Laudes Foundation, but it’s not a requirement to focus on these regions.

The media organisations that we work with and want to continue working with are nonprofit media organisations. Those who write and publish themselves, but we also work with organisations that are trying to enable the news industry to increase reporting on climate and just transitions like the Oxford Climate Journalism Network, Arena for Journalism in Europe and most recently, Solutions Journalism Network.

Do you have any special advice for organisations that have not funded journalism yet, but are thinking about doing so? How should they prepare for such a programme?

McGill: What we quickly learned is that it was smart to focus on news media rather than any media. Given we are trying to reach decision-makers more directly with compelling narratives on just transitions, news is a good place to start rather than trying to also work on, for example, social media, film and entertainment. Where we could create more clarity is whether we as a funder should also start to address the more structural issues of the news industry rather than simply building the capacity of the industry to report more on climate and just transition. Can we do the latter without doing the former?

So my advice would be to create a clear scope boundary for working in journalism, to learn, and then grow from there.