• Article

    Broadsides and craft brews at Miami Book Fair’s the Swamp

    Published October 31, 2014 by

    Lissette Mendez is director of programs for Miami Book Fair International, which Knight Foundation supports. Image: 'Somewhere.' For Sweat Broadside Project II, artists and writers collaborated on pairing original artwork with poems. The Swamp, a new event space at Miami Book Fair International sponsored by Knight Foundation, celebrates the writers, filmmakers, visual artists and musicians (and some who fall between those disciplines!) who are creating work and defining culture in the Sunshine State. Among those culture makers are the writers and visual artists who are part of Sweat Broadside Project II. Florida-based writers and artists came together to form Word and Image Lab (WAIL), a group that encourages community conversation and opportunities for collaboration among writing and the visual and performing arts. For Sweat Broadside Project II, artist/writer duos created the broadsides, which feature their collaborative pairings of original artworks and poems. The printing processes vary widely and include letterpress, lithography, etching, silkscreen, woodcut and archival ink-jet printing. 
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    “Connecting the World” at the Mint Museum

    Published October 30, 2014 by

    Alson Skinner Clark (American, 1876-1949). In the Lock, Miraflores, 1913, oil on canvas. Private Collection, Princeton, New Jersey. The Mint Museum reflects on the building of the Panama Canal, its global impact and remarkable history through art in this the centennial year of the canal’s opening...
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    Foundations take on projects to improve local news and information

    Published October 30, 2014 by

    Terry Mazany of the Chicago Community Trust and Neha Singh Gohil of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation take part in a design thinking session for their projects. Increasingly, community foundations are playing a role in meeting the information needs of their cities. Over the next year, KnightBlog will follow four of these projects funded by the Knight Community Information Challenge, and share their progress and insights. Community foundations aren't likely to save faltering local news institutions or bring failed media outlets back from the dead. But six years into the Knight Community Information Challenge, they now are playing a significant role in ensuring residents have the information and news they need to shape their cities. Knight launched the Community Information Challenge in 2008 as a way to encourage community and place-based foundations to get involved in stemming what was becoming a news-and-information crisis across the U.S.: the alarming decline in local journalism as a result of the news industry's rocky transition to the digital age and the loss of many working journalists in local media. Through 2013, the challenge backed more than 100 community-information projects, which were matched with funding from community foundations.
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    Lessons from Miami’s Underline: What makes an idea stick?

    Published October 30, 2014 by

    Meg Daly is an entrepreneur and founder of Friends of The Underline. Knight Foundation provided seed funding for the project to promote community engagement. Photos: Pedestrian path below Metrorail track by Michael Bolden. For years, people posted notes on doors, corkboards and car windshields with tape, thumbtacks and windshield wipers. Notes got wet, stolen and often never delivered.  Then, along came the Post-it note. We could post notes wherever we wanted, without the hassle of glue, tape or other things to make the note stick. And, the product took off, making billions for the company with the Post-it patent, 3M.  Sometimes great ideas like that, with the possibility for big change, are right in front of us, just waiting for someone to take them and run with it. Sometimes they are ideas just sitting in your back yard, with the possibility of changing an entire community.
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    Wynwood, Inkub8 & the Godoy-Pradera Projects

    Published October 30, 2014 by

    Once upon a time, in a decade not too long ago, Wynwood was a gritty working-class neighborhood that housed Miami's fashion district. It's where I would go once a month to buy spools of thread, invisible zippers, muslin and needles from Scott Notions to restock a small sewing factory that...
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    Becoming Juliet

    Published October 30, 2014 by

    By Emily Bromberg, MCB corps de ballet dancer One of Shakespeare’s most beloved characters, Juliet, is a young girl who believes in eternal love, so much so that she trades her life for it. She is a girl we all know well, but what does it mean to a ballet...
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    How storytelling heals and strengthens communities

    Published October 29, 2014 by

    Cross-posted with permission from Creative Exchange. The Secret Society of Twisted Storytellers. Photo by Marvin Shaouni. In April of 2014, Damian Woetzel and the Aspen Institute Arts Program convened a Strategy Group in Detroit. This convening brought together local and national experts: artists and leaders in...
  • Article

    How storytelling heals and strengthens communities

    Published October 29, 2014 by

    The Secret Society of Twisted Storytellers. Photo by Marvin Shaouni. Cross-posted with permission from Creative Exchange.  In April of 2014, Damian Woetzel and the Aspen Institute Arts Program convened a Strategy Group in Detroit. This convening brought together local and national experts: artists and leaders in arts, policy, community development and education. The group spent a thrilling morning at Spain Elementary School where Yo-Yo Ma, Damian Woetzel, Lil Buck, Aaron Dworkin and Cristina Pato conducted an ArtStrike with students and teachers followed by a roundtable discussion on the role of the arts in Detroit Public Schools. In the afternoon the group focused on creative placemaking and the ways in which art is contributing to Detroit’s future and how it can be further utilized to reimagine the city. There is so much important, groundbreaking work happening in Detroit right now that the Aspen Institute Arts Program felt it was important to share the story of this work more widely. Our hope is others may learn from and understand more deeply the challenges and opportunities facing Detroit and the unique way that Detroit views artists as a critical asset and building block for the future. This is the second of three pieces commissioned by the Aspen Institute Arts Program in partnership with Creative Exchange. (Read part one here and part two here.) Performer and writer Satori Shakoor knows that for some of her white friends, she is probably their only black friend in the city: the one African American who comes to their home, plays with their child, and altogether is a meaningful part of their life.
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    Macon, Ga., unites to tackle blight

    Published October 29, 2014 by

    Unblight conference in Macon, Ga. Photo by Molly McWilliams Wilkins.  With the revitalization of the College Hill Corridor, urban renewal in Macon is definitely on the upswing, but the community still struggles with a legacy of abandoned and rundown properties. Over the past three months, Macon-Bibb County government, The Telegraph and the Mercer University Center for Collaborative Journalism have convened business leaders, neighbors, nonprofits and development experts to discuss how to fight blight in the community. For decades the community has struggled with what to do with thousands of abandoned and rundown properties. On a recent Tuesday, dozens of people mingled over pizza, sodas and cookies to talk about moving Macon-Bibb forward. The forum was one of several follow-ups to Unblight, an “unconference” funded by Knight Foundation and hosted by the Center for Collaborative Journalism and the Sunlight Foundation in August. “We want to look to you for ideas,” Tim Regan-Porter, director of the Center for Collaborative Journalism told the crowd. “ Ultimately the answers have to come from the community.”
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    Knight network provides community, collaboration and support

    Published October 29, 2014 by

    Knight News Challenge: Summer attendees arriving at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Mo. Photo by Michael Bolden. Bianca St. Louis is the program coordinator for the nonprofit CODE 2040, a Knight News Challenge winner. This summer Knight Foundation chose CODE2040 as one of 19 winners in its Knight News Challenge on strengthening the Internet. One of the highlights of this experience has been an event dubbed KNC Summer, a chance to gather with other winners from the current and previous groups, in Kansas City, Mo. in late August. We shared our experiences and gained insights from experts in storytelling, branding, search engine optimization and other fields. It was a remarkable experience, but the effects have stayed with us as we continue our work.   So, what is CODE2040? We create pathways to educational, professional and entrepreneurial success in technology for underrepresented minorities, focusing on black and Latino people. Our nonprofit exists to make a direct impact on the achievement, skills and wealth gaps in the United States. The year 2040 is when the U.S. is predicted to be a majority-minority country. Our goal is to ensure that, by that year, black and Latino people are proportionally represented in the leading edge of America’s innovation economy as technologists, investors, thought leaders and entrepreneurs.
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    ‘Knight Cities’ podcast: Mary Kramer discusses the catalytic effect of The Detroit Homecoming

    Published October 29, 2014 by

    Imagine a homecoming that brought more than 100 of your city’s native luminaries back to town to see for themselves what life is like now. Then imagine you invited their investment in real estate, in businesses, in the people of your city. That’s what happened in Detroit when Mary Kramer of Crain’s Detroit Business organized a get-together of epic proportions, complete with a prospectus of investment opportunities.
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    The poet and the painter

    Published October 29, 2014 by

    "Tohu Bohu" oil painting by John Bailly. It took a long time for Miami to stand center stage, literally, as a culturally important city. So long identified as a vacuous vacation land filled with beach bunnies and cocaine cowboys, the city’s transformation into a much more...