The nine fellows who will deploy the Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s “Silicon Valley Stories” program. From left to right: Celina Rodriguez, David Wang, Giang Phan, Harvey Barkin, Henrietta Burroughs, Lisa Tsering, Melissa Hernandez, Rian Dundon and Veronica Taylor Avendano.

This post is one in a series on what four community and place-based foundations are learning by funding media projects that help to meet their local information needs. All are funded through the Knight Community Information Challenge.

For a growing number of community and place-based foundations, recent years have moved them from understanding that the communities they serve have a news and information gap, to beginning to act as information providers themselves to help meet that need. It’s no simple task to take a community foundation into what used to be the purview of others — most notably local news media, which have suffered nearly universally in recent years. RELATED LINKS

“Foundations take on projects to improve local news and information” by Steve Outing on Knight blog, 10/30/14

“Small news startups try to survive and cover ‘ignored’ New Jersey news” by Steve Outing on Knight blog, 11/19/14

“A foundation eager to act learns to listen first” by Steve Outing on Knight blog, 12/17/14

“In Wisconsin, a vacant newspaper building takes new life” by Steve Outing on Knight blog, 01/21/15

The Silicon Valley Community Foundation, one of the largest such institutions with $4.7 billion in assets, is in the thick of this learning curve, and worth watching as its leadership and staff figure out how to meet the news and information needs of, in their case, dozens of diverse municipalities and school districts that make up California’s Silicon Valley region. The foundation’s deep dive into becoming an important player in informing and engaging local citizens is ambitious, thanks in part to a $500,000, two-year grant from the Knight Community Information Challenge. 

Overseeing the “Informed Community Initiative” for the Silicon Valley Community Foundation falls on the shoulders of Mauricio Palma, director of initiatives and special projects. His team has pivoted (to borrow the term used by Silicon Valley startups) the initiative in recent weeks, so I interviewed Palma to learn about that, and the process of deciding which way(s) to evolve. Palma would switch the metaphor, actually: Recent weeks have been “more like preparing to take a photograph with a zoom lens”: focusing in, zooming out, and changing the viewpoint until the ideal picture emerges.

For this project, the community foundation’s initial focal point has been Common Core, the college- and career-ready standards for K-12 education in English language arts/literacy and mathematics. Common Core and the state of public education are important to “both Silicon Valleys” — (1) the world’s dominant collection of technology companies and startups, which look for well-prepared future employees to emerge from area schools, and (2) the residents of the valley region, whose children need to acquire the skills and knowledge necessary for the jobs of the future. Common Core started out as the initiative’s information focus because it is crucial to both valleys, and because research showed that many residents, parents, journalists and even some educators don’t understand it or know about it. That’s a clear community information need.

A broader, significant information need in the “second” Silicon Valley is for visibility of the stories about members of the communities that make up the region and critical issues affecting them. Because the area is so famous for the “first” Silicon Valley — the Googles, Apples, Intels and tech startups — stories about the people populating the region, especially ethnic minorities who make up about half of the population, tend to be overshadowed or not told at all. That’s even more of a problem with the decline of many local news organizations. (Tech coverage and the tech press, of course, are doing fine.)

The community foundation’s “Silicon Valley Stories” program will be deployed initially by nine fellows, who are mostly journalists working for area ethnic-media outlets that serve language-specific communities within the valley (such as Spanish, Indian, Vietnamese and Chinese). The fellows’ work is funded by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation in partnership with New American Media, a San Francisco-based news service that manages a content network of 3,000-plus ethnic news organizations. The fellows’ Common Core coverage will inform communities throughout the valley in part by way of ethnic-media outlets. Their work will be a mix of video, audio/radio and print content — whatever it takes to best reach local ethnic communities.

When Palma spoke to the new fellows at an orientation session, he discovered that two-thirds of them were not aware of Common Core, the topic that they would cover as part of the Silicon Valley Stories work. But through the journalist-fellows’ initial exposure to the foundation and its priorities, they also saw other community issues where the foundation was doing work, which opened up other possibilities for the journalists to dig into, with the foundation’s help. For Palma, ideas for expanding to an information role on other issues came into sharper view, as he saw what is most critical to the various ethnic communities around Silicon Valley, including issues of immigrant integration into the valley culture, economic security and housing challenges.

This is where the community foundation’s approach to information and news gets refocused. As Palma explains, the fellows program allows the foundation to have deep conversations and create ongoing relationships with journalists outside of mainstream media. He and his team learned what these journalists have discovered to be the critical issues within the ethnic communities they cover. This is a departure from the foundation’s previous relationships with ethnic media, which more often involved ethnic-media outlets as grant recipients partnering with the foundation to cover a specific issue or topic that needed visibility.

One important lesson coming from Silicon Valley is that foundation information experiments don’t have to be big or take a long time. Palma offers as an example a recent video, produced in concert with the Multicultural Institute, about the needs and struggles of immigrant day laborers in the Bay Area. The resulting short video about Silicon Valley day laborers was done in a couple weeks. The community foundation provided the institute with tools and support to create the video, and Palma’s staff will spend another couple of days helping find additional distribution channels. The hope is that the video will expand awareness and understanding of the day-laborer community.

As the Silicon Valley Informed Community Initiative has evolved and come into better focus up to this point, Palma points to parallel (and intertwining) tracks:

• Taking the community foundation’s information work on Common Core and continuing to support it, but in the second year also targeting other critical community issues.
• Continuing to define and build out the foundation’s internal capacity: to support and/or produce community-information products (its Common Core Toolkit is an example), and to further develop listening relationships with community members and organizations so that critical issues and news/information needs are defined by the people of Silicon Valley, not foundation staff.
• Working more with Silicon Valley non-profit organizations on information projects, so that the foundation becomes a stronger platform for community news and information.

What’s driving Palma and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s information strategy is the broad understanding that there is a news and information gap affecting local communities. Learning how to impact that situation is a continuing process, which I’ll continue to write about in the months ahead, as Palma and his team bring it into sharper focus.

Steve Outing is a writer and digital media consultant.