Draft:Taz Panter Foundation

The taz Panter Foundation is a legally capable foundation based in Berlin. It was established in 2008 to award the taz Panter Prize, which has been presented since 2005. The foundation is named after Peter Panter, the alias of the German writer Kurt Tucholsky. The goals of the taz Panter Foundation are in particular to strengthen independent journalism and civil society, to provide journalists with further training and to network them internationally.

History
Since taz was founded, it sees itself not only as a publishing company, but has always acted as a political and social project. The legal form of a foundation makes it possible to separate these non-profit activities from the business activities and to further expand them with the help of supporters. The idea of taz will have a lasting effect on the taz Panter Foundation - regardless of the changes in the media landscape.

In 2008, over 800 founding sponsors responded to the call "From words to deeds!" and provided the basis for the project with 700,000 euros. Just one year later, the Panter had doubled its capital thanks to donations and other contributions and the developed structures started to work. So far more than 6,000 sponsors have raised around 8 million euros to realize the taz Panter Foundation´s projects.

The taz Panter Foundation is currently working on several goals: It regularly holds international workshops to qualify foreign colleagues, who mainly come from countries where press freedom is under threat. The Panter Foundation also provides journalistic trainings and further education programs, especially for younger people. It awards the taz Panter Prize for civic engagement and organizes events with the aim of communicating civil rights. A particular focus is on the climate crisis and the fight against the shift to the right in society.

Management, Board of Directors, Board of Trustees
In addition to the operational management, the Board of Directors and the Board of Trustees are the central bodies of the taz Panter Foundation.

Gemma Terés Arilla took over the management of the taz Panter Foundation on January 1, 2024 and manages the operational business. Konny Gellenbeck and Andreas Maggraf constitute the Executive Board. They implement the decisions of the Board of Trustees in figures and measures.

The Board of Trustees decides on all activities of the foundation. It nominates and relieves the Management Board, approves the business plan and makes recommendations for the management of the foundation's capital and the use of its funds. It currently consists of eleven members, including Bascha Mika, Michael Sontheimer and Barbara Junge. Some of the trustees are appointed by the taz cooperative, others by the board of trustees itself. The trustees appointed by the cooperative carry a part of taz in their biography and are long-standing supporters of taz.

International exchange
When seven young female journalists from Belarus joined our workshop in 2011, it marked the start of the foundation's international activities. Further seminars with participants from eleven post-Soviet states followed, as well as workshops with media professionals from Cuba, Asia and Africa. Since 2016, the foundation has been offering individual journalists who are facing danger in their home countries the opportunity to take a time-out as part of the "Refugium Stipendium" programme.

So far, over 200 journalists from different regions have taken part in the Panter Foundation's international workshops, the majority of whom are still connected with both each other and taz. The approach of bringing together people from diverse, sometimes directly conflicting countries, to encourage dialogue and mutual understanding, has proven to be a successful model.

The current focus is on the regions of Africa, Eastern Europe, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria:

As part of the Africa workshops 2021/22 and 2023/24, the magazines "trans.continental - African-European Reflections" and "trans.continental - Africa's Future and the Competition of Global Powers" were published in German as well as in English. Since autumn 2022, journalists from Eastern Europe have been attending meetings in Berlin and Riga on the invitation of the taz Panter Foundation and the Federal Foreign Office. In addition, authors have written about the impact of the Ukraine conflict on their lives and their home countries, leading to the publication of the diary " Krieg und Frieden" (War and Peace) in German and Russian. In 2023, the "Climate Journalism Handbook" was published in English and Arabic as part of the workshop "Her Turn II", in which participants from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region took part.

Support journalism
The taz Panter Volontariat is a central programme of the foundation which aims to integrate people into the media landscape who are underrepresented. The programme brings talented young people into the newsroom who do not come from traditional, educated middle-class backgrounds. Since 2011, the taz Panter Foundation has trained eleven trainees from migrant backgrounds, eight of them now work in for taz. Over a period of 18 months, the trainees learn the skills of journalism, while the taz itself benefits from their experience.

Since 2009, around 520 participants have taken part in the taz Panter workshops, in which special articles have been produced under the guidance of taz editors. These workshops are designed to encourage young people to engage with journalism and have focussed topics such as "envy", "guilt", "fairy tales", and "violence". A more recent project is the taz Panter summer camp, which promotes intergenerational exchange. Younger and older participants discussed their perspectives on current issues and brought them together to make concrete demands of political decision-makers.

The Panter Foundation also supports the development of new journalistic formats. These include a column in taz FUTURZWEI and the talk format " Stimme meiner Generation" ("Voice of my generation"), in which Generation Z writes about itself. In addition, the foundation supports the prisoner newspaper "Der Lichtblick", in order to provide an uncensored voice for prisoners, as well as conferences on the topic of constructive and non-profit journalism.

Civil courage and climate crisis
Since 2005, the taz Panter Prize has been awarded annually for the protection of basic democratic rights and civil courage and represents a significant motivation for social commitment. In recent years, the taz Panter Foundation has broadened its perspective in order to recognise the fight against the climate crisis as an essential commitment to civil courage and democratic values. Since 2020, the focus of the taz Panter Prize has been on climate protection under the motto "Climate activist wanted!".

The foundation also supports the podcast "klima update" and runs the taz-Klimahub in cooperation with the independent online magazine klimareporter°. Every Friday, it summarises developments on the climate crisis and presents the most important climate news of the week.

In addition to regular activities, the foundation is also involved in specific projects. One example is the organisation of a memorial event in Berlin for the lawyer and politician Christian Ströbele ( Bündnis 90/Die Grünen), who passed away in 2022, as well as the publication of a special magazine in his honour. Ströbele, one of the co-founders of taz in 1978, was actively involved in the committee of the taz Panter Foundation until his death.