Invest in Europe’s information infrastructure
Your support keeps essential reporting steady across borders, beats, and crises.
When Facts Crumble, Democracy Follows
The Pressure on Information
Across Europe, independent journalism is becoming harder to sustain. Newsrooms operate with fewer staff and less time. Legal threats are used to slow or silence reporting. Distribution is shaped by platforms whose priorities are profit, not people's interests. Stories still exist. The ability to investigate them safely, follow them over time, and publish them without interference is what’s under strain.
How Power and Money Fill the Gaps
When verified reporting weakens, oversight collapses in measurable ways. Corruption alone undermines economies globally by an estimated $3.6 trillion per year, eroding trust in institutions.
When scrutiny fades, power operates without accountability, shaping political and economic outcomes long before voters, journalists, or courts are able to intervene.
What Investment Changes
Stable funding determines whether investigations can continue when pressure rises. Innovation to strengthen reader revenue is not enough: public interest journalism rarely generates sufficient market revenue to sustain long-term accountability work. Long-term investment reinforces those conditions. It keeps reporting alive where it would otherwise disappear, and helps maintain access to information that holds power to account.
Why Fund Through Limelight
Discovery
Our team brings deep sector knowledge, stays close to the field, and builds long-term relationships with our partners. We handle due diligence, monitoring, and ongoing engagement, so that funders can support journalism with confidence, without carrying the full operational load.
De-risk
Public interest journalism is a fragile sector. Supporting it individually carries risk and can raise questions around influence. By funding through Limelight, risk is shared and reduced, editorial independence is protected, and decisions about coverage remain firmly with journalists.
Ambition & Scale
Many funders care deeply about journalism but lack the scale to make a meaningful impact on their own. Limelight pools resources, works across borders, and brings funders together around a shared strategy, making it possible to support work that is ambitious, sustained, and capable of real impact.
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What Your annual Support Makes Possible
We aim to build a €150M fund, the minimum required to sustain at least one independent newsroom in every European country over the next decade.
€3M
Move Europe toward a resilient, €150M democratic backbone
This level fuels structural change: multi-year stability for cross-border networks, investigative collaborations, and safety and legal systems that protect journalists continent-wide. This is where we can move beyond keeping journalism afloat and invest in systemic change.
€1M
Secure the future of a major investigative newsroom
A €1M investment gives a newsroom multi-year certainty: the ability to retain reporters, follow public money across borders, withstand legal threats, and reach people despite platform decline. It keeps core reporting alive in a moment when stability has become the scarcest resource.
€600K
Strengthen reporting where press freedom is under attack
A €600k commitment supports two to three organisations per year.
It helps keep independent reporting available in countries where press freedom is under pressure, allowing newsrooms and support organisations to plan, retain staff, and collaborate across borders.
€150K
Keep crucial reporting available where it’s most vulnerable
With €150K we can help a local newsroom, or provide urgent legal and digital protection for journalists under threat. Even at €150k, the impact is real: a story is published, a team is protected, and the public retains access to facts.
our Patrons
Our patrons are leaders in journalism, human rights, technology, and public life who recognise the value of our mission and lend their perspectives to our work.
Mabel van Oranje
Serial Entrepreneur for Social Change
Mabel van Oranje is a serial entrepreneur for social change committed to advancing equality, freedom and justice. She has founded, led and advised numerous network organisations, campaigns and initiatives promoting international human rights and development.
Most recently, she played a catalytic role in global efforts to end child marriage, co-founding three leading organisations: the Girls First Fund, Girls Not Brides, and VOW for Girls.
Across her career, Mabel has worked on a wide range of issues, including independent media, international justice, conflict response, HIV/AIDS prevention, and democracy innovation. Mabel serves on the boards of Crisis Management Initiative, Fondation Chanel, More in Common and VOW for Girls (Chair), and advises organisations including Better Politics,Co-Impact's Gender Fund, Global Witness and the Graça Machel Trust. Mabel is also a co-founder and Chair Emeritus of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Mabel van Oranje
Serial Entrepreneur for Social Change
Jimmy Wales
Co-Founder
Wikipedia
Ranked by Forbes Magazine as a “Web Celeb”, Jimmy Donal Wales is a U.S. Internet entrepreneur, wiki pioneer, and technology visionary, who is best known as the Founder of Wikipedia, an international collaborative free content encyclopedia on the Internet, and the Wikimedia Foundation. He is co-founder of Wikia, a privately owned free web hosting service he set up in 2004.
Jimmy Wales
Co-Founder
Wikipedia
Maria Ressa
Co-Founder & CEO
of Rappler
Maria Ressa has been a journalist in Asia for nearly 40 years. As Rappler’s co-founder and CEO, she endured constant political harassment and arrests by the Duterte government. She is a Professor of Practice at Columbia University and co-leads it's Technology Initiative.
Maria was named 2021's Nobel Peace Prize laureate along with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov, for “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.” For her courage and work on disinformation and ‘fake news,’ Maria was named Time Magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year, was among its 100 Most Influential People of 2019 and one of its Most Influential Women of the Century. She was also part of BBC’s 100 most inspiring and influential women in 2019, and Prospect magazine’s world’s top 50 thinkers. She has won numerous awards for her contributions to journalism and human rights.
Maria Ressa
Co-Founder & CEO
of Rappler
Matthew Caruana Galizia
Director Daphne Caruana Galizia
Foundation
Matthew Caruana Galizia leads the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation, driving the fight for accountability after his mother’s assassination and strengthening protections for journalists who face similar threats.
Before founding the organisation, he spent five years at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, where he built and led the Data and Research Unit and engineered investigations including Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, Luxembourg Leaks, Fatal Extraction, thePanama Papers and the Paradise Papers.
His work has supported hundreds of reporters worldwide and contributed to ICIJ’s Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. He continues to push for justice, transparency and safer conditions for investigative journalists across Europe.
Matthew Caruana Galizia
Director Daphne Caruana Galizia
Foundation
Olga Rudenko
Editor-in-chief & Journalist
Kyiv Independent
Olga Rudenko is the chief editor of the Kyiv Independent, an award-winning media start-up launched in November 2021 by the former editorial team of the Kyiv Post. Olga is the former deputy chief editor of the Kyiv Post. She has written for global publications, and was a fellow at the Chicago Booth School of Business in 2021. She was featured on the cover of Time magazine in May 2022 as one of the publication’s Next Generation Leaders, and won the Women of Europe award in the “Woman in Action” category in December 2022. Olga Rudenko is the author of the Ukraine Weekly newsletter, which focuses on key events that have shaped the week.
Olga Rudenko
Editor-in-chief & Journalist
Kyiv Independent
Marietje Schaake
Non-Resident Fellow Stanford University
Marietje Schaake is one of Europe’s leading voices on technology, democracy and digital rights. A former Member of the European Parliament, she built a body of work that challenged surveillance abuses, strengthened press freedom, and pushed the EU to confront how technology shapes power.
At Stanford University, she is a non-resident fellow at the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (Stanford HAI), and advises governments and institutions on global tech governance. She is the author of The Tech Coup, which traces how unregulated technology has tilted power away from democratic institutions and outlines what it takes to restore public oversight.
Marietje serves on multiple boards across the democracy and human-rights space.
Marietje Schaake
Non-Resident Fellow Stanford University
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does independent journalism need philanthropic funding?
Public interest journalism depends on work that is slow, costly: long investigations, cross-border collaboration, data analysis, and sustained follow-up after publication. It is also frequently threatened by legal action or digital attacks and occasionally even endangers journalists’ lives. Reader revenue rarely covers the costs of keeping this journalism alive. Public funding is often unavailable or restricted, and commercial models don’t necessarily prioritise the public interest. Philanthropic funding enables stable, multi-year support for this work. It allows newsrooms to plan ahead, withstand legal and political pressure, and pursue investigations that would otherwise not be viable.
Why focus on Europe?
Europe plays a global role in regulating technology, ensuring it protects our fundamental rights. At the same time, funding for journalism is scarce, leaving many newsrooms in countries of the Council of Europe under-resourced. This gap is structural but solvable.
What makes Limelight different from other journalism funds?
We fund journalism as infrastructure, not as charity. That means long-term thinking, flexible support, and an approach that connects strengthening journalism and promoting tech accountability for lasting, systemic change.
How do you balance funding journalism with protecting editorial independence?
Limelight does not interfere in editorial decisions. We fund organisations, not stories. We will never influence what a grantee partner will publish and have no say over its editorial direction
How do you manage risk?
We accept that achieving meaningful change involves risk. We manage this through careful selection, due diligence, references from trusted partners, and prioritising long-term relationships.
How can funders get involved?
Funders can support Limelight through multi-year commitments, pooling funding, or strategic partnerships. We also engage actively in donor networks and value dialogue with funders who want to understand the sector, not just fund it.
How do you measure success?
For us, success goes beyond reach alone. We look at whether journalism reaches the right audiences, helps newsrooms build durable and diversified funding, and contributes to accountability of those in power. We recognise that impact and growth do not follow a single pattern, and not every story leads to immediate results.
Why give through Limelight?
Limelight reduces risk, increases reach, and connects funding to a broader strategy. One contribution supports multiple actors working on interconnected challenges, across borders and over time.
Speak with Our Team
If you want your philanthropy to have a lasting effect on Europe’s information infrastructure, our team can help you navigate where support is needed most. We advise donors and family offices on major gifts, long-term commitments, and opportunities with systemic impact. Use the form below to reach us; we respond to every enquiry personally.
