• Article

    75 finalists in Knight Arts Challenge South Florida

    Published May 6, 2014 by

    Above: Poets from the Omari Hardwick Blueapple Poetry Networks, a program of the Jason Taylor Foundation. Photo credit: O, Miami/Gesi Schilling. I’m excited to share the list of 75 finalists in this year’s Knight Arts Challenge in South Florida. This year, we received more than 1,100 ideas from artists, thinkers and South Florida’s creative community. Each was thoughtfully considered by a panel of local readers and Knight Staff. The group below represents a mix of projects from individual artists, small collectives and nonprofit organizations. Undoubtedly, South Florida is a different place now than when we began the arts challenge seven years ago. Our city’s evolution reminds me of a passage by Joseph Roach, who in his book Cities of the Dead refers to “culture” as “a process of remembering and forgetting.” “To perform in this sense means to bring forth, to make manifest, and to transmit,” Roach explains. “To perform also means, though often more secretly, to reinvent.” Our community must perform together to honor our history and reinvent our future. And the arts will play an integral role.
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    760 Selby Avenue: Construction 60% complete

    Published May 6, 2014 by

    By Peter Leggett, Walker West Music Academy Walker West's new home at 760 Selby is 60% complete. Welsh Construction began the build-out of the Academy's new 5,938 square foot facility in March and Walker West's entire operation will be at the new site by June 2014. Check out the photo...
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    Andres Moréno, CEO of Open English, inaugurates Tech Cocktail Miami speaker series

    Published May 5, 2014 by

    OpenEnglish.com on Vimeo. Entrepreneurial stories often involve a good initial idea, long hours and a few rejections followed by several failures. But we all love good endings. So Thursday evening, about 95 aspiring entrepreneurs came to hear Andrés Moreno, 31, co-founder and CEO of Open English. The online English school started in 2006 in his apartment in Caracas, Venezuela, with a few students and a couple of partners. Since then, it has grown into a global company with more than 150,000 students, seven offices spread throughout the Americas and 2,000 employees — 150 of them working at its Coconut Grove office. In between, Moreno, who left college to pursue his business dreams, moved to Silicon Valley looking for investors, knocked on doors, slept on a friend’s couch and went broke a few times. Fast-forward to less than a decade later and Moreno, who moved to Miami in 2009, has since raised “probably more than $130 million.” Moreno’s talk was the first in the speaker series presented in Miami by Tech Cocktail, a national media and events organization focused on entrepreneurs, startups and technology. Knight Foundation invested $150,000 to bring Tech Cocktail to South Florida.
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    Reading Queer launches the RQ Writing Academy

    Published May 5, 2014 by

    My organization, Reading Queer (a Knight Arts grantee), launches the Reading Queer Writing Academy this weekend with "In Defense of Forgetting," a two-day, two-hour intensive workshop open to anyone inquisitive about creative writing. The workshop will incorporate color photography taken by participants who will then use those prints as a...
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    Getting people excited about Giving Days

    Published May 5, 2014 by

    Silicon Valley Gives via YouTube How do you get attention for a 24-hour online Giving Day campaign? Dozens of community foundations across the country are wrestling with that topic this week, as they  prepare to rally residents to give locally as part of May 6’s #GiveLocalAmerica campaign. Over the past year, Knight Foundation has helped 19 foundations organize Giving Days in their hometowns, offering tips through the Giving Day Playbook, a Peer Learning Network for exchanging ideas and by providing matching funds for their events.
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    Putting ideas into action to build better cities

    Published May 5, 2014 by

    " Photo credit: Flickr user Christopher Dandrow. What happens when, in a single day, you engage a stellar group of researchers and practitioners across the nation to answer one of the toughest questions facing cities? We found out recently when we staged three Civic Innovation in Action Learning Labs.   RELATED LINKS "Learning Lab gathers ideas on promoting community engagement" by Carol Coletta on KnightBlog "Learning Lab gathers ideas on making the most of talent in our cities" by Carol Coletta on KnightBlog "Boston adopts new tools to engage residents in civic life" by Nigel Jacob on KnightBlog.org "Scaling an Etsy Economy for a changing workforce" by Dana Mauriello "Harriet Tregoning, identifying ideas to expand opportunities in cities" by Carol Coletta on KnightBlog We asked our experts to address these questions:  How can the design and programming of places accelerate economic opportunity? What are the best policies, practices and projects to do this in a one- to three-year timeframe? What are the programs, platforms and policies needed to harness talent and expand opportunity in an economy with a workforce that is increasingly fluid and independent? How can robust acts of citizenship be made “general”? How can these acts become the default behavior, rather than the exception? Each lab, structured as a Web conference with Knight Foundation staff, featured experts presenting their best thinking in 15-minute segments and answering questions for another 15 minutes, producing a sort of “Cliffs Notes” on each topic. It was a tsunami of learning that we are summarizing and will make available online.  Throughout, we asked our experts what bet they would make to act on their knowledge. Their answers will inform the work we will do in a Civic Innovation in Action Studio, set for May 12-14 in Miami, where we’re convening more than 70 people from across the country to combine the research insights with their own experience and develop new ideas to respond to these thorny questions. We expect the studio to produce a set of experiments to test in Knight communities and beyond that we hope will then lead to prototypes and eventually to civic innovations, new ideas that improve the places where we live. The process has been enlightening and highlights one of the powerful tools we have at Knight Foundation in our pursuit of social change. We can ask the questions, tap into a network of experts and convene a diverse mix of people to consider the implications and propose next steps that we can share with city leaders, civic innovators and all of us invested in the success of cities.
  • Article

    eMerge Americas event highlights South Florida’s community of entrepreneurs

    Published May 4, 2014 by

          eMerge Americas: Join the Movement, via YouTube     Knight Foundation is hosting a booth at eMerge Americas Techweek from May 5-6 at the Miami Beach Convention Center. Join us for some Cuban coffee, meet Knight staff and learn more about some of the investments we've made in South Florida. You can also meet established South Florida business professionals for insights into the region's growing startup and entrepreneurial community. Here's the lineup of the people who will be hanging out at the Knight booth and the projects that will be featured. Be sure to check here for any schedule updates. We look forward to seeing you at eMerge.
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    Spanish-language workshop at the Queens Museum

    Published May 4, 2014 by

    By Maura Guyote, Creative Capital Foundation Guest leaders Gonzalo Casals and Chemi Rosado-Seijo (who is also a Creative Capital Awardee!) lead a session at the Queens Museum In February, the Queens Museum partnered with us to host a Spanish-language workshop underwritten by Tequila Herradura. The workshop...
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    The action at the ArtCenter’s Project space

    Published May 2, 2014 by

    Alba Triana curated "Concrete to Abstract." The art action in South Beach on Wednesday night moved to the second floor of the ArtCenter/South Florida’s project space at 924 Lincoln Road, one block west of its main space. It’s a building that has come into active use...
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    Deerhoof, AWKWAFINA and Celestial Shore rock the MOCAD

    Published May 2, 2014 by

    There is unquestionable hipster cache in early-stage fandom, scene-topping achieved through claims on a band before they were huge. While there may be some satisfaction to be had in the mode of early adopter, there is something amazing about seeing a band that has come into its own, and been...