Home
Overview
Mission, Purpose, Principles
Focus
Structure
Comparison to typical venture funds
Use of Funds
Donor Social Network
FOCUS
Our focus is on highly scaleable tools and infrastructure that exploit the in-progress paradigm shift from "railroads" (e.g. media conglomerates built on distribution monopolies and artificial scarcity) to "ultralights", powered by:
-
open and egalitarian access to broadband, always-on, many-to-many media, and to the mechanisms of publishing;
- low-cost digital production and distribution;
- and audiences that "own" their own attention, and its value as a nutrient for media that matters.
In general, the fund is not intended for funding production of content (e.g. documentaries, shows, websites, etc.).
Top
STRUCTURE
Media Venture Collective is a donor-advised fund of the Rudolf Steiner Foundation, administered collaboratively with the Calvert Foundation.
It is a hybrid between a community foundation and a venture fund. It invests strategically and aggressively like the latter, applying profits to new projects to expand the fund's assets, with two fundamental differences: 1) its focus is on helping citizen-based independent media thrive; and 2) the funds come from grants and donations, not from investors expecting financial returns.
The latter quality allows purpose to take primacy over return-on-investment, providing great flexibility in pursuit of the former. The fund can thus invest strategically to change the rules of the media game, without basing its decisions on satisfying the needs of a few investors.
Overhead so far has been kept very low, with no paid staff yet. As we grow, we expect an overhead allocation of ~10%, to cover administrative, organizational, and legal costs, and, more importantly, to execute the due diligence necessary to ensure that the funds are well used.
The fund has been designed to efficiently pool small (20$-$1000, or more of course) tax-deductible donations, to greatly multiply the power of each donation through shared strategy and multiple re-use.
Donors get a tax-deduction because the fund is a non-profit that can then aggregate such donations into program-related investments in for-profit or non-profit enterprises that fit its focus, but are unlikely to get traditional equity investment.
Being formed from donations, with no expectations of personal financial return on the part of the donors, investments can be made based on their value to the community , as
opposed to how much money they make for investors.
Additionally, because of our structure, any returns from our investments are tax-free, and can be recycled into new investments. It also greatly simplifies startup and operation over that of a typical venture fund, because traditional securities regulations don't apply. (For a graphical comparison to other approaches, see
Comparables ).
Top
Top
USE OF FUNDS
Our intent is to have the aggregate of investments yield at least a net gain in terms of returns, so that the fund can grow perpetually. We plan to make a mix of investments from grants to loans to equity investments that average out to positive return on investment so that the fund will be perpetual. Grants will be targeted at efforts that are important but not necessarily profitable. Some equity investments will hopefully create large enough returns to offset those on average.
Depending on a variety of variables, particularly the size of the fund, projects will range from small ($10,000) to large ($2M+), and from short-term (e.g. purchase of airtime below) to long-term (e.g. timeshifting applications.)
Projects are identified and selected based on their systemic value in promoting media democracy, their economic viability, their synergy with other projects, and other criteria.
Example opportunities in today's media environment include:
Top
DONOR SOCIAL NETWORK
Those who wish to can participate in a peer-to-peer
shared interactive rolodex of the donors and 30,000+ other global citizens. It's
much more than just a mailing list, and very useful in
enabling the kind of "chaordic"
self-organization necessary for the donor community to
successfully govern the use of funds.
Top
So, please join us
in constructively making our own good news.
Read on, get involved, donate what you can,
and pass it on.
contact: info [at] mediaventure.org
