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    Knight Cities podcast: Philly’s Fairmount Park Conservancy shows value of public-private partnerships

    Published April 8, 2015 by

    With city finances squeezed, the call for public-private partnerships is increasing. But even in the best of circumstances, they can be tricky to manage. Kathryn Ott Lovell is responsible for one of the nation’s largest non-commercial public-private partnerships. She is executive director of the Fairmount Park Conservancy, an independent nonprofit organization that champions Philadelphia’s vast park system, where she orchestrates the daily dance of balancing public and private concerns and responsibilities to produce quality parks for citizens. Kathryn is also responsible for managing the collaboration of five civic assets in Philadelphia...  
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    A pop-up stage becomes a platform for community connections in Charlotte, N.C.

    Published April 8, 2015 by

    Mobile Arts & Community Experience with creator CarlosAlexis Cruz and students from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture. A native of Puerto Rico, CarlosAlexis Cruz is an assistant professor of theater at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He and Associate Professor of Urban Design Jose Gamez developed the concept for the Mobile Arts & Community Experience – or MAX – as a multiuse mobile venue that will bring people together to invigorate the cultural landscape across the Charlotte region. MAX, funded by a three-year, $350,000 grant from Knight Foundation, debuts April 10-11. For me, the mobile arts experience is embedded in my own education. At the university in Puerto Rico, we had what is called the Teatro Rodante, a traveling stage. We mostly performed Golden Age Spanish theater, and we took it to places that had never been exposed to theater. We followed the premise that a university has two components: It educates both the university community and the community surrounding it; and it asks questions that matter both for the university community and the surrounding communities.
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    Ensuring the American dream by improving public higher education

    Published April 8, 2015 by

    The Goodyear Polymer Center on the University of Akron campus. Photo by Flickr user Torrie Fischer. Scott L. Scarborough, Ph.D., is president of The University of Akron. I believe the role of public higher education in ensuring the American dream is more crucial today than perhaps at any other time in our nation’s history. Study after study confirms that a college degree is vital for social mobility in the 21st century. This is particularly true among those seeking to rise from the lowest socioeconomic levels into the American middle class and beyond. Public universities also exert an economic multiplier effect upon their regional economies. They help attract, develop and retain an educated and talented population that forms the regional workforce and citizenry. They conduct applied research that directly benefits regional business and industry. As major employers, they generate substantial tax revenue for municipalities. And they stimulate business growth among those providing goods and services to the institutions, their students and guests.
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    Sustainable strategies: Lessons from a year at The Texas Tribune

    Published April 8, 2015 by

    Those of us who live in Texas inevitably –– and repeatedly –– encounter that persistent, eyeroll-inducing cliché: “Everything’s bigger” here in the Lone Star State. It was no different in the late summer of 2013, when I began my stint as a Knight Foundation-funded Texas Tribune Fellow. Working as an embedded researcher in Austin, I studied the early success of the Tribune’s business model, searching for best practices and survival strategies that other news nonprofits might follow. Throughout my fellowship year, the most frequent question I encountered was whether the Tribune’s swift financial growth since its 2009 launch was simply another bigger-in-Texas story.
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    Knight’s ‘Gaining Ground’ tracks progress of nonprofit news sites

    Published April 8, 2015 by

    Radical disruption in the news industry over the past decade has fueled a period of experimentation with new approaches and business models for supporting journalism.  Nonprofit news organizations, principally those focused on local, state and regional news, offer the promise of filling the void left by cutbacks by legacy media organizations to state and local reporting. But how sustainable are the business models emerging from nonprofit news organizations and will they represent a viable long-term component of a healthy local information ecosystem? A report released by Knight Foundation today, “Gaining Ground: How Nonprofit News Ventures Seek Sustainability,” addresses this question and spotlights promising practices among 20 nonprofit news organizations. The report is the third in a series of studies Knight has produced since 2011. Our studies have gathered comparative data across nonprofit news sites to benchmark their progress on key metrics related to business models and audience engagement. “Gaining Ground” follows up on the 2013 report “Finding a Foothold,” growing the cohort from 18 to 20 organizations and tracking trends over a three-year period (2011-2013).
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    Magnolia Soap Box Derby promises a day of springtime fun

    Published April 7, 2015 by

    It's been almost 80 years since Macon hosted its first soap box derby. These multipurpose races involve design, science and sportsmanship, and they've been held in the city on an on-again, off-again basis throughout the decades. In 2009, the Magnolia Soap Box Derby was started in conjunction with the College...
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    One story, two wheels: Bike theater will help revive ancient art form

    Published April 7, 2015 by

    The Knight Arts Challenge Detroit is accepting applications through April 13 for the best local ideas for the arts. Here, writer Mary Chapman catches up with 2014 winner Andy Krieger. With the nation in recession, and Detroit all but broke, out-of-work carpenter and visual artist Andy Krieger read a magazine piece about an arcane art form called kamishibai. Originating in Buddhist temples nearly 1,000 years ago, it was popularized in early 20th century Japan, when cash-strapped men earned money by traveling from village to village on bicycles equipped with a small stage, and telling stories. For Krieger, a light went off.
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    Exploring the arts, events and opportunities in San Jose

    Published April 7, 2015 by

    Photo of San Jose, Calif., by Flickr user Ben Loomis. Knight Foundation supports a variety of events as part of our ongoing efforts to spark new ideas for cities and support civic innovators working to advance talent, opportunity and engagement in San Jose, Calif. Here is the first installment of a new monthly series of local events and opportunities aimed at moving San Jose forward.   
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    STEAM Zone: An afternoon of robotics at Miami-Dade Libraries

    Published April 7, 2015 by

    Jessica Melgarejo Cespedes is the library services specialist in charge of systemwide programming in the Community Engagement and Programming department of the Miami-Dade Public Library System. The Miami‑Dade Public Library System offered a week of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) programs consisting of five interactive workshops designed to give children and teens the power to create, learn and share during spring break. One of these innovative programs, taking place in two libraries, was “Robotics with LEGO Mindstorms,” led by volunteer software engineers from Ultimate Software and sponsored by Knight Foundation.  What began as a successful series of 10 workshops for the library’s YOUmedia Miami program at the North Dade Regional Library has become an equally successful half-day workshop, creating more opportunities for teens to participate.     
  • Article

    Moving Poets 6/15: An Exploration of Humanity and Nature

    Published April 6, 2015 by

    By Sarah Emery, Moving Poets Charlotte Moving Poets, a cross-disciplinary, contemporary dance theater company based in Charlotte, N.C., and Berlin, revives its showcase of six 15-minute original works April 23-25, 2015, with the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.   With “be curious” as its guiding...
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    Elizabeth Doud creates community and social change through Climakaze

    Published April 6, 2015 by

    In collaboration with FUNDarte, a Knight Arts grantee, Elizabeth Doud brings Climakaze to Miami. Climakaze is a three-day, participation-driven series of dialogues, performances and gatherings to connect the community, create awareness and incite action around the issue of global climate change. Aimed at artists, scientists and change-makers concerned about climate-change,...
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    RightsCon Manila: Laying groundwork and building partnerships

    Published April 6, 2015 by

    For the second year in a row, the Ranking Digital Rights team joined hundreds of advocates, technologists, government officials, and company representatives at RightsCon, a key annual gathering focused on Internet and human rights organized by our good friends at Access. This year’s conference was held in Manila, where we were thrilled to meet activists, researchers, and company representatives from all over Asia. We shared our pilot study results and collected valuable feedback on how the project can help others who fight to defend digital rights. In a public session focused on setting clear standards for companies, panelists Donny BU of ICT Watch Indonesia, Nighat Dad of Pakistan’s Digital Rights Foundation, and Charles Mok, a Hong Kong legislator, joined Rebecca MacKinnon to discuss RDR’s goals and work.
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    More than the art eye can see

    Published April 3, 2015 by

    "Ascending #2" 2014, from Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A). You won’t forget the art of Jose Alvarez once you see it. To call his large-scale paintings colorful, or vibrating, would be a vast under-estimation. These whimsical, magical creations, in extraordinarily bright colorings, resemble tapestries, abstract but with imagery...