• Article

    Artists become others at Napoleon

    Published December 18, 2014 by

    A beige canvas rectangle on the floor topped with a human-size, plush stick figure of the same color greeted visitors to the second floor hallway of 319 North 11th Street on First Friday. Seeing that the hallway of this multiform art destination is a severely underutilized space, the regulars stopped...
  • Article

    IgKnight Philadelphia connects and inspires grantees

    Published December 18, 2014 by

    2014 Philadelphia Knight Foundation grantee gathering at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Gregory Walker is managing and creative director of The Brothers Network, a 2012 Knight Arts Challenge winner. Last month Siobhan Reardon, president and director of the Free Library of Philadelphia, welcomed Knight grantees to her institution for IgKnight Philadelphia. The second annual gathering opened with one of the most compelling yet harrowing stories most of us had ever heard. The executive director of First Person Arts, Jamie Brunson, shared a personal story of loss, fear, shame, reconciliation and affirmation. At 10 in the morning, each of us sat erect in our seats, hanging on her every word. Words turned into sentences, sentences turned into stories, and stories turned into the human experience. Jamie’s first-person account of humility and humanity got our morning off to a great start and placed First Person Arts front and center. Jamie presented herself as a brilliant model for exactly what First Person Arts does so well as a Knight grantee. In the vein of storytelling that springs from the tradition of the newspapers operated by the Knight brothers, David Clayton of Ignite Philly introduced amazing IgKnight talks that spanned the history and culture of jazz, high-tech mapping and the importance of engaging broad and diverse communities at their doorsteps. These stories, carefully crafted and curated, kept the flames ignited by Jamie’s opening talk burning brightly.
  • Article

    A foundation eager to act learns to listen first

    Published December 17, 2014 by

    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.
  • Article

    Happy Craziest New Year

    Published December 17, 2014 by

    Production photo from Happy Craziest New Year. Courtesy of Dangerous Productions For the past three years, Dangerous Productions has produced a unique series of shows called Happy Minnesota. The project was created with a focus on fostering economic growth, play and community along St. Paul’s Central...
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    ‘Knight Cities’ podcast: Jason Roberts on building better blocks in our communities

    Published December 17, 2014 by

    Before planning fatigue sets in, why not just build a better block? That’s the approach of Jason Roberts who leads Team Better Block. Jason is a charismatic man who works with communities – first his own in Oak Cliff, Texas, and now with communities around the world – to turn vacant properties into lively, thriving blocks that showcase what’s possible in a neighborhood.  He usually has to break a few laws to do it, but the result is places people love and want to be. It’s an approach that employs acting your way to success versus planning your way to success.
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    LaunchCode in Miami: Solving the tech talent shortage

    Published December 17, 2014 by

    The LaunchCode Story from LaunchCode on Vimeo. Jim McKelvey is the co-founder of LaunchCode as well as several successful companies, including Square. Mariana Rego is LaunchCode’s Miami expansion coordinator. We are so thrilled to partner with Knight Foundation to bring LaunchCode to the South Florida community. LaunchCode began 15 months ago as a community-driven effort in St. Louis, a region that, like South Florida, has seen rapid growth in technology jobs, but has simultaneously struggled to generate enough talent to meet the needs of growing companies and to ensure diverse access to these new opportunities. LaunchCode is designed as a community-wide solution. On one side, we partner with businesses hungry for talent. On the other, we identify, mentor and match talented, driven candidates with paid apprenticeships. In our first year in St. Louis, we helped 125 people from all backgrounds and walks of life find their first job in technology, making over 70 different companies more productive in the process.
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    Blending of opera and cabaret gives pop soup of ‘Andy’ its flavor

    Published December 16, 2014 by

    Photo by Kate Raines. The work of Andy Warhol set the art world on its head, blurring the lines between high and low and the notions of what defined artistic and commercial work. It is only fitting then that “Andy: A Popera,” a show exploring Warhol’s life, work and legacy, started with pop-up performances of singing soup cans in a supermarket aisle, evolved into a cabaret show and is now becoming an adventurous, irreverent pop art-cabaret-opera mash-up scheduled to premiere in Philadelphia in September 2015. The piece is a collaboration between Opera Philadelphia and the experimental cabaret company the Bearded Ladies. The creative process and the intended result suggest a daring and ingenuity that truly celebrates the subject. Both organizations are previous Knight Arts Challenge winners, and “Andy: A Popera” is being developed with Knight Foundation support. Classical composer Dan Visconti, who recently completed a multi-year residency with opera companies, including Seattle Opera, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, New York City Opera, the Glimmerglass Festival and the Metropolitan Opera, recently joined the “Andy” creative team and is charged with creating the unprecedented musical hybrid.
  • Article

    New video series highlights best practices in local news

    Published December 16, 2014 by

    Lloyd Armbrust is CEO of OwnLocal, which he founded in 2010 to help local media companies improve their digital advertising revenue. Below he writes about “Broadsheet,” a video podcast series sponsored by OwnLocal. Knight Foundation has invested in OwnLocal through the Knight Enterprise Fund. “Broadsheet: The Business of News” launches this week as a video series to discuss the importance of local media and showcase the innovative ideas that newspaper publishers from across the country have developed. In my 15 years in the newspaper industry, I have seen two types of leaders. There are thought leaders whose job it is to think about the big picture of media (and what the future of the newspaper industry holds), and then there are local media execs who are in the weeds and run the day-to-day operations of producing a newspaper.