About us? Charlottesville Tomorrow is all about you!

Before we tell you about ourselves, a quick question: Are you already a subscriber to our email newsletter? Because the best way to learn about our work is to become part of our community of subscribers and experience what we do. The emails from our reporters and editors are amazing and, a lot of times, offer you the context you need to make sense of the news and participate in our community.

Just kicking the tires? OK, here goes: Charlottesville Tomorrow is a community-driven, socially conscious news organization and we serve our neighbors (that’s you!) by connecting them to each other (that’s our community!) and to the issues that affect them most. In other words, the Charlottesville area is our place and Tomorrow is our focus.

We center our organization and news processes on our values — truth, community, and equity — and we work to improve the health of our local news community and ecosystem through our inclusive practices in hiring, journalism and partnership.

We believe in journalists and in journalism, but we get that the status quo local news model is broken and we have to earn your trust every day. 

Race is a big part of that conversation, so let’s address it right up front. Legacy news organizations have largely failed communities of color and news business models have punished both journalists of color and POC-owned companies. No one can fix that overnight, but being part of the solution is a north star for us. That’s why we are a co-founder of the Charlottesville Inclusive Media project.

We believe that giving more people ownership of news will make the journalism stronger, and will also make our community stronger. It’s why you’ll see a focus on equity in our stories and an emphasis on inclusivity in our staffing and sourcing. And, hopefully, it’s part of the reason you’ll feel  proud that our community isn’t just helping rebuild local news, but build it to be stronger and healthier for all of us.

Here’s where you come in. 

We love you because you understand that local news and media isn’t entertainment or a conversation about somebody else. The way we tell our own stories in news media is part of the DNA of our community’s future. Today we are a small nonprofit news organization. Tomorrow we could be the model for how socially conscious local news makes things better for all of us.

Already in? Then please support our work financially at whatever level you feel comfortable

We love you because you don’t just want stories from us. You want to join a community of readers so that shared truth can center your actions. You want to help create what our local news looks like in 10 years.

We can’t do this work without the community’s support.

Our community partners and sponsors include over 9,500 email subscribers (we need more of these!), 900 individual donors (we need more of these, too!), and the many foundations and companies that support our work. And we’re just getting started.

Here’s a little bit about the team. We are a group of journalists, community leaders, volunteers and engaged readers who believe that local news ecosystems are broken. We can’t accept that, so together we are creating the kind of local news organization that our community can be proud of. We are passionate about the profession of journalism and committed to helping our industry be healthier and do better.

Read about our editorial independence policy and how we choose what to cover here.

We are not too proud to realize that we don’t have all of the answers, and that’s why we always center our work with our community of readers. Charlottesville is a place full of conscious people who want to be a part of making our community better. We believe that if we can create a just news organization with a large and diverse audience, we can improve all of our local systems and make them more responsive and accountable to the people they are designed to serve. We believe that this kind of social change relies on radical creativity, interdependence and intentionality. We are trying to do something that feels both impossible and necessary.

As we work toward our goals, we are creating new allies and relationships that will open up new possibilities, so it is OK that we don’t have all of the answers today. We believe in Charlottesville and Tomorrow!