We are honored and excited to announce that we have been selected as a winner of the 2022 Amazon Web Services (AWS) IMAGINE Grant, a public grant opportunity open to registered 501(c) nonprofit organizations in the United States who are using technology to solve the world's most pressing challenges. The grant will support our efforts to prototype a new Democratic Media Index which will measure the effects of media content on U.S. public values, norms, attitudes, and beliefs that shape democratic culture.

We first conceived of this index in May of 2022. We began imagining a pipeline of insights and reporting on how democracy shows up in the media for different audiences in the U.S., along with narrative opportunities to increase the relevance of democracy as a topic in the media. This funding from AWS will allow us new opportunities to impact how our media systems are constructed as well as the media content that flows through them, better understanding how media has become elemental to our everyday lives in democratic society.

We were named a winner in the Go Further, Faster category which recognizes highly innovative projects using advanced cloud services. Proposals were judged on several factors including the innovative and unique nature of the project, impact on mission-critical goals, and clearly defined outcomes and milestones. You can read more about the AWS IMAGINE Grant here, and stay close to this space for updates as we move forward with this early prototype.