About RJC

The Renaissance Journalism Center (RJC), a project of San Francisco State University’s Journalism Department, incubates innovative approaches to journalism and storytelling that serve, strengthen and empower communities. Created in 2009, the Center provides grants, technical assistance and training, and forges entrepreneurial partnerships with journalists and their news organizations; ethnic media and hyperlocal news sites; philanthropic and nonprofit organizations; scholars and students. The Center is operated in partnership with ZeroDivide, a nonprofit organization that leverages technology to benefit people in low-income, minority and other disadvantaged communities.

Our Projects

• Vietnam Reporting Project, a journalism fellowship program that produced powerful, award-winning multimedia news coverage on the enduring legacy of Agent Orange contamination in Vietnam. More than a dozen journalists and students—from the mainstream and Vietnamese American media—participated in the project, developed in collaboration with Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy and funded by the Ford Foundation.
• Online Community Building & Health, a collaborative project with USC Annenberg’s California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowship, aimed at educating bloggers and editors of online news sites on ways to chronicle the health of their communities while at the same time helping participants improve the “health” and sustainability of their websites through strategic and technical advice.
• New Media Lab & Incubator, a yearlong pilot project that provided grants and technical assistance to five nonprofit organizations, enabling them to test and experiment with innovative ways to utilize journalism, media and social media tools to engage audiences in civic dialogue.
• Media Greenhouse provides support—grants, technical assistance, training— to ethnic media, community media and nonprofit groups in an effort to spark and test new models for gathering and distributing news. In 2009-2010, RJC awarded $20,000 grants to three Bay Area projects:  Bay Area Video Coalition, Nichi Bei and Oakland Local.
• LearningLab is RJC’s multimedia training component, designed to help journalists in the ethnic and community media, as well as nonprofit professionals, learn new practices in storytelling, multimedia, social networking and business operations. 

Our Supporters

The Renaissance Journalism Center has been created in partnership with ZeroDivide and receives financial support from Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy, The California Endowment, Chicago Instructional Technology Foundation, Denver Area Education Telecommunications Consortium, Ford Foundation, Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, Instructional Telecommunications Foundation, McCormick Foundation, Panta Rhea Foundation, Portland Regional Education Telecommunications Corporation, Twin Cities Telecommunications Group, The Whitman Institute, The Wyncote Foundation and ZeroDivide.

Leadership Team

• Jon Funabiki is the Executive Director. A professor of journalism, Funabiki is the former Deputy Director of Media, Arts & Culture at the Ford Foundation, one of the world’s leading philanthropies, where he was in charge of grantmaking initiatives in journalism.  Funabiki has also served as founding director of SFSU’s Center for Integration & Improvement of Journalism. During a 17-year career in journalism, he was Pacific Rim Correspondent for The San Diego Union, reporting from Japan, South Korea, China, the Philippines and other countries. He also has worked for community and ethnic news media.

• Valerie Chow Bush is the Deputy Director. A former journalist, she has more than 15 years of experience in communications and media relations, writing and editing, and nonprofit management. Prior to joining the Center, Bush was the communications and marketing director at California Institute of Integral Studies, where she spearheaded the university's integrated communications strategy and new brand identity. Her experience includes serving as the executive director of the Asian American Journalists Association, as well as working as a reporter for the Marin Independent Journal and as editorial director for the Maynard Institute. She holds an MA from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
  

• Jaena Rae Cabrera is the Web Producer. Prior to joining the Center, she worked as a freelance multimedia producer for RJC, and has also worked for the San Francisco Public Press and Nichi Bei Weekly. Jaena has a B.A. in journalism from San Francisco State University, where she was art director of the Golden Gate [X]press. She is studying for her M.S. in Library and Information Science, with a specialization in digital libraries and social media. Follow her: @jaenarae.