Rest of World has received a $200,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to expand its mission of covering the impact of tech by highlighting the experiences of everyday people.
The grant, which is made available through the foundation’s Future of Work(ers) program, will fund a one-year reporting fellowship at Rest of World designed to support the publication as it deepens its coverage of tech’s relationship with labor, and report on the influence tech has on both the nature of work and the state of workers.
Ford Foundation’s support will make it possible to hire a team of reporters based in some of the regions of the world where tech is having some of the most pronounced impact, and is reshaping the definition of work, said Anup Kaphle, Rest of World’s editor-in-chief.
“With the grant, we are able to double down on our mission to challenge expectations about whose experience with tech truly matters, while allowing reporters who are native to the regions to tell the stories they understand the best,” Kaphle said.
Rest of World will be entirely responsible for selecting and hiring the four reporting fellows under this fellowship — one each in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America — to join the publication’s reporting team. The fellows will help shape Rest of World’s coverage of labor by contributing original ideas for stories and working alongside Rest of World’s reporters and editors based around the world.
Founded in 2019, Rest of World is an independent nonprofit newsroom focused on the collision between technology, culture, and the human experience outside the Western bubble. Since its inception, the publication has produced over 1,000 stories from around the world for a global audience. Its team of reporters and editors are from the regions they cover, and its local, on-the-ground approach to reporting ensures that the journalists accurately capture the diversity of cultures and views held by the communities they write about, in a way that is always dignified and factual.
The Ford Foundation is an independent organization working to address inequality and build a future grounded in justice. For more than 85 years, it has supported visionaries on the frontlines of social change worldwide, guided by its mission to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement. Today, with an endowment of $16 billion, the foundation has headquarters in New York and 10 regional offices across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
