Inside MIF’s Film Funder Gathering

Our annual film funder gathering in Park City, Utah brought together 65+ philanthropic organizations for a morning of collaboration and learning ahead of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

To set the stage for the morning, we opened with a conversation featuring Candice McFarlane (Chief Creative Officer of Cinereach), Craig Cichy (Founder & Executive Director of Social Impact Fund), and Brian Newman (Founder of Sub-Genre). The panelists explored constraints in the documentary field and how nontraditional funding approaches might offer new pathways forward. The conversation surfaced these three key takeaways:

• Avoid duplication: Before building something new, tap your network to identify collaborators who already have proven track records and engaged audiences.
• Center impact goals—not just the film itself: While this may be difficult for artists, leading with impact goals can break down silos and bring your supported film into unexpected spaces with new audiences. In some cases, this might mean creating parallel content across different formats.
• Be open to new kinds of allies, and get aligned early: Audiences are consuming more content and moving faster than ever. Funders should engage key stakeholders early by fostering open and honest dialogue between filmmakers and impact partners from the start of a project. By embracing social research, audiences strategists, influencer allies and community organizers as part of the team, you increase the chances of authentic engagement around your content.

After the panel, funders broke into groups for facilitated table discussions and examined the limitations and constraints shaping their work. They also explored what stronger funding approaches could look like over the next several years.

Tables were organized around MIF’s four newly-introduced learning pillars, which reflect the core challenges and opportunities facing media funders today:

1. The Future of Public Media: Supporting funders working to strengthen public media as a trusted, resilient civic institution. This includes questions of sustainability, governance, innovation and public service in a rapidly evolving media environment.
2. Platforms & Audience Reach: Helping funders understand how platforms, algorithms and distribution systems shape who sees and trusts information, and what it takes for public-interest media to reach and engage audiences today.
3. Effective Practice: Advancing shared learning about best practices in funding media effectively.
4. Safeguarding Media & Journalism: Addressing the threats facing independent media and journalism, including political pressure, legal risk, safety concerns and challenges to press freedom, integrity and trust.

Each group then shared their key findings with all attendees. While the notes below capture only a portion of the full discussion, they highlight ideas that attendees want to continue exploring in future MIF programming and beyond.

The Common Constraints represent roadblocks that surfaced repeatedly across our learning pillars, while the Emerging Themes summarize the solutions funders proposed to address the constraints. Together, these insights can be used to guide future funder conversations toward greater alignment, inform the development of field-wide tools and prompt deeper investigation of individual strategies.

Common Constraints

• Risk aversion in a challenging political climate: Increased political threats and censorship are creating pressures that make it harder to take bold risks.
• Siloed approaches: Different funding strategies, media formats and grant requirements can create confusion for grantees and dilute external messaging for narrative change philanthropy.
• Audience Access & Distribution: Distribution opportunities continue to narrow while audiences are more fragmented and fatigued than ever before.
• Insufficient Funding: There isn’t enough funding to support the full spectrum of work needed to reach diverse audiences—particularly long-term, flexible, general support grants.
• Lack of shared infrastructure: The field lacks common tools and systems for impact assessment and distribution. Without shared values, messaging and resources, alignment across funders remains elusive.

Emerging Solutions

• Build funding models that reflect the reality of narrative change work: This work includes long timelines, unpredictable outcomes and requires support for practitioner wellbeing. Application and reporting requirements should also be created with this understanding.
• Redefine impact expectations for narrative change: Storytelling works toward cultural shifts, not immediate political outcomes. Funders can lead by demonstrating how cultural impact differs from direct structural change—and advocating for realistic timelines that honor the nature of this work.
• Close the gap between engagement and action: Funders can help create new connections that extend the reach of their grantees’ cultural content. Consider how documentary grants can link to movement grants, community organizers and other strategic partners when making funding decisions.
• Develop shared tools and infrastructure: The field needs common applications, agreed upon metrics, and potentially pooled impact funds to help reduce risk aversion for new and existing funders. On the audience side, this might look like supporting an issue-based streaming platform or public media streamer.
• Shift from competition to collaboration: Funders can help leverage content, reducing the burden on single projects and decreasing friction between similar efforts. This requires more transparency—both among funders and with grantees—and an embrace of plurality.

Interested in seeing a list of participants from the event? Check it out here. If you’d like to have your email address added to the list, please email Shannon Thomas at shannon@mediafunders.org.

In the coming months, MIF will be hosting programs and discussions that expand on the themes and ideas from this funder gathering. We’re also working to keep members connected in the field, so please fill out this short form to let us know where you’ll be, and we’ll circulate a list of who’s attending which events to help you stay connected.

In the meantime, check out the following resources from our resource library and the field to keep the conversation going.

• MIF January 2026 Network Call: This program covers audience-centric approaches to project selection, ways narrative funders can be more collaborative and discusses new methods for impact evaluation.
• Beyond the Impact Report: Written by the Center for Media & Social Impact and supported by MIF Member Perspective Fund
• Documentary at Risk: A report from the Documentary Ideas Symposium at the Shorenstein Center
• Reimagining Public Media: A report from MIF Member the Wyncote Foundation