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- Board Chair Ayesha Khanna said ACC could not secure consistent funding, forcing the organization to cease operations.
- Founded by Maria Saporta and Bill Bolling, ACC was led by Executive Director Saba Long since 2021.
- POV civic engagement initiative will transfer to partner Neighborhood Nexus, fiscally sponsored by the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta.
- Ayesha Khanna warned Atlanta’s fragile media ecosystem loses watchdog coverage; social reaction noted the gap in local housing reporting.
Nonprofit news organization Atlanta Civic Circle is closing on June 2, after four years of covering affordable housing, labor, and city government.
Board of Directors Chair Ayesha Khanna said in an email that “despite our best efforts, we were unable to secure the consistent funding needed to sustain our work.”
“Our belief, from the beginning, has been that Metro Atlanta deserved journalism that genuinely engaged and was informed by residents, and we think we fulfilled that promise,” Khanna wrote. “ACC played a key role in contributing to solutions journalism in our region.”
Atlanta Civic Circle was founded in 2018 by veteran Atlanta journalist Maria Saporta and community leader Bill Bolling. It was run by Executive Director Saba Long since 2021.
Khanna said the organization’s civic engagement and policy initiative, POV (Priorities, Opinions and Values), will be transferred to its partner, Neighborhood Nexus.
Neighborhood Nexus is a “civic data intermediary” helping organizations find, understand, and use data to create smarter strategies, and is fiscally sponsored by the Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta.
Khanna said ACC is also working to archive its website to keep its reporting accessible to the public.
“We worked to connect the dots – explaining why an obscure policy or a little-watched elected office mattered, and how it affected the rent residents paid, the wages earned, and the choices our government made on behalf of the community it serves,” Khanna wrote. “Through our award-winning voter guides, we gave people the trustworthy information they needed to cast informed ballots in local and state elections, the kind of races that shape daily life but too often go uncovered.”
Khanna called the media ecosystem in Atlanta “fragile, with newsrooms across our city on precarious financial footing.”
“The loss of any one of us leaves our communities with fewer eyes on the institutions that affect their lives. A free press is essential to our democracy, and a community that loses its trusted news and information loses something it cannot easily get back.”
ACC reporter Sean Keenan wrote about the closing on social media, reiterating Khanna’s sentiment, calling it “another casualty of the current, unforgiving journalism ecosystem.”
Editor’s Note: Rough Draft was a media partner of Atlanta Civic Circle. We published several of its articles in our print publications and collaborated on debates and other election coverage over the years.
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