---

The Community Listening and Engagement Fund (CLEF) was a grant-making initiative to help news organizations produce more relevant and trusted coverage for the diverse audiences they serve. The fund subsidized the costs for newsrooms to adopt tools designed for this purpose. CLEF initially supported Hearken and GroundSource exclusively for the first two rounds of funding. CLEF then also supported the Listening Post Collective’s Membership Program, Coral by Vox Media, and DocumentCloud/MuckRock.

Here is a full list of the first 34 newsrooms to receive support from CLEF. You can learn more about the second cohort of 18 newsrooms here. There are 19 publications in the third group of CLEF newsrooms. 

CLEF was created by The News Integrity Initiative, the Democracy Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. At the height of the pandemic in 2020, CLEF offered a COVID-19 Response Fund to offer support to newsrooms to produce news coverage that used platforms to include community members in the reporting process to develop  news that actively reaches the community, especially silenced communities, informs and educates people who normally cannot access reliable information.

---