Knight Foundation supports the New Americans Campaign, a non-partisan national coalition working to modernize and streamline access to naturalization services. The following guest blog post is written by Eric Cohen, executive director of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. 

Early this past Saturday, hundreds of immigrants and their families from all over the world trekked to South Los Angeles and eagerly waited in line for their chance to take the crucial next step to becoming an American citizen. The huge Inglewood church quickly filled with the sounds of many languages, from Vietnamese to Hindi to Spanish, as volunteers and immigrant service providers smoothly filtered and ushered groups of eligible legal permanent residents through a step by step journey through the naturalization process.

Many of the attending immigrants had been eligible for citizenship for years, but were intimidated by the confusing paperwork, the long struggle to navigate the inefficient system and the expensive $680 application fee.

“I’ve had to wait for so many years to finally apply, but today all of these really helpful people made it much easier than I thought it would be,” said Mr. Mohamedali, a Sudanese immigrant who came to the U.S. to complete his master’s degree at UCLA. “I wish more people would come see this and take this step… and it makes me want to become a volunteer after I’m done.” Mohamedali has lived in California for 24 years and confidently states, “I want to stay in this country for the rest of my life.”

The Super Mega Workshop was hosted by dozens of partner members of the national New Americans Campaign. The workshop is just one example of how the New Americans Campaign is transforming the way aspiring citizens navigate the path to becoming new Americans.

 

A new waiter’s uniform allowed a homeless man to get a job and move out of a shelter. Welding gear led a single dad to pursue a skilled trade. Clothes and school supplies helped a 20-year-old provide for her little sisters while their mother was in jail. 

Community connections that fill small gaps can make big differences.

This is the idea behind Benevolent, a crowdfunding website that lets anyone make donations to help low-income individuals get past their most immediate challenges. The project was successfully piloted in Chicago, Ill. and is now being expanded to Detroit, Mich., Charlotte, N.C. and San Jose, Calif. with $285,000 in funding from Knight Foundation and the Marjorie S. Fisher Fund of the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan.

Benevolent, the brainchild of clinical social worker, Megan Kashner, partners with various nonprofits to help lift low-income Americans out of poverty. Through these nonprofit partners the service connects with people in need. Their stories along with videos and photos are then posted on the Benevolent website. People are able to visit individual profile pages to browse stories and donate to those that resonate.

The site is a great example of the power of technology to build positive community interactions. Fundamentally, it also reveals the importance of engagement in developing social capital, so that citizens can support one another productively and grow strong networks.

The Saguaro Seminar an initiative of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, which focuses on the study of social capital, reveals that:

“Communities with higher levels of social capital are likely to have higher educational achievement, better performing governmental institutions, faster economic growth, and less crime and violence.”

The reason: when people are more socially connected they are better able to tackle community problems like high unemployment, poverty and lack of social support.

Through Benevolent's expansion, three new communities will now benefit from this investment in social capital. They will develop a network of people who help each other overcome unforeseen hurdles like getting a car or computer fixed, pursuing job training and even paying for proper healthcare. And they will get to see impact beyond these immediate benefits by applying practical solutions to community challenges that affect everyone.

Above: “Employable?” a Data Toy designed by a team at The New School's PETLab

In recent years, data visualizations and infographics have become a common way to relay news and information - an addition or sometimes a replacement for the traditional written narrative.

The folks at The New School's PETLab, though, want to take storytelling a step further, by creating a new approach to expressing the news.

Enter Data Toys, a Knight-funded prototype, which allow people to play with information as a way to reveal the complex systems underlying news and trends. The toys also offer ways to help readers make sense of large data sets or changes in data over time.

We recently asked the Data Toys team, Colleen Macklin, John Sharp and Heather Chaplin, what kinds of toys they’re building and what the implications are for how people consume news and information.

Data Toys is doing something different from story-centric journalism. Can you describe what you've already created?

So far, we’ve developed seven toys around the immigrant experience in America for a project with Public Radio International. As we write this, we’re embarking on a new set of toys with Radiolab about decision-making and human nature.

A few examples:

• “Job Roll” explores the challenges immigrants have finding work in different cities by representing the data as a 3D topography. As players tilt a tablet to roll a marble on the surface, they begin to feel how some cities are more easily “settled in” than others by experiencing the bumps and valleys of a given urban job market. 
• Another toy, “Employable?” (pictured above) uses reconfigurable dolls that represent different immigrant populations to activate an iPad app and show players how likely it is that immigrants will find work in different cities based on their experience.