The Guardian Foundation is a registered charity. It concentrates its effort in three areas: education, human rights and the right to education.
Education
The Foundation runs the Scott Trust bursary scheme. The scheme helps students who are facing financial difficulty to get the qualifications they need to pursue a career in media. A bursary pays for tuition fees and includes a subsistence allowance of £6,000. The benefits also include several weeks of work experience at the Guardian Media Group.
There are five bursaries available: two at City University, London (MA in Newspaper Journalism); one at Goldsmiths College, University of London (MA in Journalism); and two bursaries at the University of Sheffield (MA in Newspaper Journalism).
The Foundation particularly encourages graduates from diverse social and/or ethnic backgrounds to apply, to help ensure that all groups in society are represented within media. Past beneficiaries have gone on to successful careers at a variety of media organisations. Recipients include Guardian journalists Gary Younge, Homa Khaleeli and Lanre Bakare.
Access to information
The Foundation’s work in the area of rights to information focuses on increasing the capacity and working lives of journalists in Turkey and the Balkans. The Foundation is working with Article 19, a charity whose mission is to defend the right to freedom of expression and freedom of information across the world; and P24, an initiative that promotes editorial independence in the Turkish press (find out more here).
Project
A recent project saw 10 journalists, drawn from a variety of backgrounds, receive a grant to investigate a range of research topics. The topics included proposed renewal of nuclear warheads in 2015, abortion practices in public and private hospitals, the 1915 Armenian deportation records, government expenses and urban renewal projects.
Article 19 and P24 organised a training programme for the 10 journalists on how to use freedom of information laws for investigative journalism. Heather Brooke, the Guardian journalist who broke the story of the MPs’ expenses scandal in the UK, delivered the training along with Yaman Akdeniz. Akdeniz is the Turkish professor and lawyer who took the Turkish government to court over the banning of YouTube in Turkey last year and won.
The project will be followed up with an online guide for journalists, based on the training course materials, that will cover the basic principles of international law on the right to information; how to request information under Turkish law; tips and case stories from other countries.
The Foundation is also responsible for the upkeep of archive material that charts the histories of the Guardian and Observer, the Education Centre and exhibitions at Kings Place (the home of the Guardian and Observer) designed to highlight the Scott Trust values in a very public way.
