• Article

    4 Nights with Betsy by Oscar Fuentes

    Published June 19, 2014 by

    I met Oscar Fuentes a little over 1o years ago in a creative writing class at Miami Dade College led by teacher and poet Michael Hettich. Hettich, who has had a major influence on Miami's literary scene, helped propel Fuentes into the author, filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist he is today....
  • Article

    Teach for America: Evaluating impact

    Published June 19, 2014 by

    Video by Teach for America Knight Foundation made a $6 million grant to Teach for America in 2009 to support their work in Miami-Dade Public Schools to help close the achievement gap in the county’s highest-need schools. The grant was also designed to answer a key question: Do students who are taught by Teach for America teachers demonstrate persistent academic growth and performance over time?   The grant supported an approach that concentrated the placement of Teach for America teachers in three side-by-side school feeder patterns, the school paths students follow as they move from one level to the next. This “clustering strategy” was designed to account for high moving rates in these high-poverty schools, where nearly 90 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and better address the question of student academic performance over time. The strategy also enabled “laddering” by which students would be more likely to experience multiple Teach for America instructors over time. Today, American Institutes for Research released its interim report highlighting preliminary findings from its evaluation of the Teach for America clustering strategy in Miami. The final report will more fully explore the program’s impact on long-term learning, but this early assessment provides interesting insights. Some of the key findings include:
  • Article

    New report details rise of contests in the social sector

    Published June 19, 2014 by

    “Why Contests Improve Philanthropy: Six Lessons on Designing Public Prizes for Impact”  from Knight Foundation was released in 2013 and complements a new report “The Craft of Incentive Design.”  At Knight Foundation we’ve leveraged grantmaking challenges since 2007 to supplement our traditional funding and generate impact in the fields of journalism, arts and community engagement. In May 2013, we highlighted what we’ve learned from more than a dozen open challenges with $112 million in grant commitments in a report, “Why Contests Improve Philanthropy: Six Lessons on Designing Prizes for Public Impact.” Not only did we use the review of our challenge grantmaking to refine our approach, we also saw it as a small step for an emerging field in need of greater assessment and shared learning. Related Press Clipping  "Innovation Contests With Cash Prizes Attract More 'Average Joes' " in The Wall Street Journal (paid membership required) That’s why we welcome the release of a new report today, “The Craft of Incentive Design,” which explores the rise of innovation challenges in the public sector over the last five years. Commissioned by several foundations including Knight, the report captures lessons from an increasingly crowded landscape of contests and challenges about how they can be best used to address issues in the social sector. Both “The Craft of Incentive Design” and our 2013 report show how grant prizes and challenges surface ideas, people and organizations that traditional ways of awarding grants often miss. The reports taken together provide a comprehensive guide for organizations that want to create a successful challenge.
  • Article

    The World Wide Web Consortium at 20: Moving the Web toward its ‘full potential’

    Published June 18, 2014 by

    Above: World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee welcomes a Knight grant establishing the World Wide Web Foundation in 2008 at The Newseum. Credit: Scott Henrichsen. In a mere 25 years, the Web has become critical infrastructure for enabling human expression. Indeed, a number of countries (including Costa Rica, France, Estonia and Finland) have taken the position that Internet access is a human right, and because for many the Web is the primary platform for using the Internet, the Web’s impact on our lives cannot be overstated. Twenty years ago, I launched the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to “lead the Web to its full potential.” The primary activity of the organization is to develop technology standards that enable software, devices and people to communicate. These standards —known by opaque acronyms such as URL, HTTP, HTML5, CSS, WCAG and so on — are the bedrock for many of the systems that we enjoy today, including search engines, social networks and online commerce. Like many standards, Web standards remain largely invisible until they break down and we feel the pain of interoperability failures.
  • Article

    Making ‘doable’ ideas work for cities

    Published June 18, 2014 by

    Mia Birk is president of Alta Planning + Design and a principal of Alta Bicycle Share is a keynote speaker at “8-80 Cities Forum: The Doable City.” The Knight Foundation-sponsored conference on fostering livable cities is happening through today in Chicago.  Above: Gil Penalosa speaking. Credit: Emily Munroe, 8-80 Cities. What is “Doable?” As 8-80s Cities founder Gil Penalosa explained it to me, doable ideas are achievable, attainable, feasible, practicable, realizable, viable, workable—ones that can be adapted or evolved to each community’s unique situation. What a great pretext, right up my alley! I’ve spent the last 25 years focusing on the practical details of making bicycling and walking are safe, normal, healthy and fun daily activities.
  • Article

    A Georgia perspective from ‘The Doable City’ forum

    Published June 18, 2014 by

    Today is the final session of the “The Doable City” forum in Chicago sponsored by Knight Foundation and organized by 8-80 Cities.  I’ve been here since Monday with 24 of my great friends from the Knight communities of Columbus, Macon and Milledgeville, Ga. It’s been a rewarding two days so far—full of learning and meeting new people and making stronger Georgia connections. We’re lucky with our group of Georgia cities; they are represented by a broad array of folks who care about the future of our communities, including the mayor of Columbus, the county manager of Macon-Bibb and the head of its transit authority, and the incoming chair of the Milledgeville-Baldwin County Chamber. The nonprofit sector is well represented by leadership from Uptown Columbus, Midtown Columbus, Macon’s College Hill Alliance, Newtown Macon, Historic Macon and the Urban Development Authority. The presidents of the community foundations serving our Georgia Knight communities are here too, along with some private developers. I’m lucky to be with all these smart and caring folks.
  • Article

    The night moves and strokes of Arturo Rodriguez

    Published June 18, 2014 by

    The School of Night: oil, crayon and charcoal on paper. Arturo Rodriguez has sometimes fallen under the radar here in Miami, although he has been exhibited worldwide for many decades. But maybe that’s not a surprise: Miami is a brash city that likes flashy statements, and...
  • Article

    Knight Arts Challenge winner launches Kickstarter for Miami Marine Stadium dance/film project

    Published June 18, 2014 by

    Hattie Mae Williams, a 2013 Knight Arts Challenge Miami winner, recently launched a Kickstarter campaign for her Miami Sites Project.  The first component, of the project, a site-specific dance and film at historic Miami Marine Stadium, is scheduled for July, she said. Williams hopes to raise $4,000 for to help match the Knight Arts Challenge grant and to pay for camera rental, lighting, wardrobe, dancers’ pay and post-production services, she said. The 50-year-old Miami Marine Stadium has been closed since being declared unsafe following Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Williams said the film, being developed by a team of Miami artists, “will capture the importance of the stadium, the history, the organic nature of the shifts that the graffiti population brings to the space and the constant inspiration the architecture holds.”
  • Article

    Giving Day Playbook offers crucial guidance for online fundraising campaigns

    Published June 18, 2014 by

    Photo: Panel Session at the Social Media 4 Nonprofits Conference on Silicon Valley Gives Day. Caitlin McShane from Opportunity Fund describes how they raised over $75,000. In August 2013, Knight Foundation published the Giving Day Playbook, a website and digital publication for community foundations and other organizations interested in hosting an online Giving Day. The easy-to-use guide was packed with best practices, examples and templates from Giving Day organizations across the country. Many organizations have found the resource valuable for planning, implementation and evaluation of their Giving Days. Here are some of their experiences:
  • Article

    OpenNews: Apply to become a 2015 Knight-Mozilla Fellow

    Published June 18, 2014 by

    Photo: Knight-Mozilla OpenNews director Dan Sinker visiting the MIT Media Lab with the 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellows. Photo credit: Knight-Mozilla Fellows. This item was originally posted on June 16, 2014 at dansinker.com. I’m excited to announce that starting today, applications to become a 2015 Knight-Mozilla Fellow are open. The Fellowships offer an opportunity for people that love to code to get paid to spend ten months building new things in collaboration with some of the best news organizations in the world. Fellows spend their time following their passions, working in the open, sharing ideas, traveling the world, and writing transformative code. 2015 marks our fourth year of the fellowship program, and we’re going strong with seven incredible news organizations: