Above: CALmatters team photo.

Kaizar Campwala is co-founder of CALmatters, a nonpartisan, nonprofit journalism venture committed to explaining how California’s Capitol works and why it matters.

“I don’t even know who they are.”

That’s a phrase we heard a lot last year as we traveled up and down the state, asking Californians what they knew about their representatives in Sacramento. These same people engage with, and care deeply about, their communities. Their kids attend public schools and many are graduates of the state’s higher education system. They enjoy and want to preserve California’s rich natural resources, but also worry about how environmental policies will affect their lives.

Immigration, health care, criminal justice, education — the policy issues that are debated in Sacramento have a profound impact upon the lives of 38 million Californians, and beyond. We formed CALmatters because we believe that our team of experienced journalists, with the time and resources to dig deep, could better inform Californians about the players, politics and interests that shape these important issues.

The need is more pressing than ever. Mirroring trends across the country, there has been a precipitous decline in the number of journalists covering the Capitol in Sacramento. This has meant fewer eyes on decision-makers, and reduced capacity of news organizations across the state to go beyond the daily headlines and truly unwrap and explain how important policy is made. Legislators themselves tell us that better reporting on what they do produces better policy outcomes, and can reward policymakers who try to do the right thing by highlighting their work to their constituents.

We’re humbled that Knight Foundation shares our vision. Knight’s support, in the form of a $250,000 matching grant, will help us build on the momentum we’ve generated with our existing partners and funders to build out our team, continue experimenting with our content mix and distribution partnerships, and begin testing earned revenue streams.

CALmatters reporters.

We began building our team in January, with our editor, Gregory Favre. Since then we’ve brought on three reporters, Kate Galbraith, Laurel Rosenhall and Pauline Bartolone, each of whom brings a breadth of experiences, skills and passions essential to informing and engaging with authority and intimacy. With Knight’s support, we hope to grow our team in the next few months to include a “data columnist,” a senior reporter and an engagement reporter.

We published our first series of stories in mid-July, in partnership with over four dozen radio stations and newspapers across the state. Knight’s support will help us build on this broad reach to engage audiences more deeply, with a combination of data products that map the influences upon, and actions of, individual actors in the policymaking process, and events that continue the conversation and debate in locations across the state.

Sign up to get these stories in your inbox, and learn a bit more about CALmatters, at calmatters.org.