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    TEDxPhiladelphia 2014: ‘A toast to those who jump’

    Published April 11, 2014 by

    Philadelphia Jazz Project's Nimrod Speakers and Bethlehem Roberson perform following Natalie Nixon's rousing talk on the future of work, which she posited "will look like jazz." Photo by Kevin Monko. Emaleigh Doley is co-producer of TEDxPhiladelphia 2014. Knight Foundation was the title sponsor of the conference. More than 1,100 thinkers, makers and doers took a break from the hustle and bustle of the city to explore Philadelphia’s urban reinvention at TEDxPhiladelphia recently, offering a wide range of perspectives designed to provoke, engage and excite  but, most important, spark new ideas, new conversations and new ways of changing our corner of the world. The sold-out crowd at the March 28 conference listened intently to 21 speakers at Temple Performing Arts Center during the day, everyone from funders and financiers to educators and organizers, guided by the theme “The New Workshop of the World.” The historic former Baptist temple has hosted some of the country’s most prominent intellectual and political figures, from civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Helen Keller.
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    Sending out an ‘SOS’ to the art world

    Published April 11, 2014 by

    Edwin Villasmil, "Libertad de Expresion," Ink on Paper. There is a strain in North American art practices to shy away from overtly political commentary – that, of course, is a sweeping statement, but European, African and Latin American artists seem to wade into that territory more...
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    Macon, Ga., celebrates success—and the future—the College Hill Way

    Published April 11, 2014 by

    Report to the community 2014, via YouTube How do you create a neighborhood renaissance? With determination, a great framework, committed investors—and most important—people who care about the place they call home and will put their own self-interests aside for the greater good. The people of College Hill—neighbors, Mercer University, the Community Foundation of Central Georgia, Historic Macon and Macon-Bibb County government—have worked together over the past five years to revitalize the 2-square-mile area between Mercer and historic downtown Macon. We recently marked our shared success with a party that featured music, fellowship and the unveiling of the new College Hill video. We celebrated the fact that the master framework guiding the renaissance is 95 percent complete (some would say 100 percent because the other 5 percent consists of infrastructure improvements to be completed by government). We also celebrated new friendships and partnerships, our diverse and affordable neighborhoods, and mostly, being a part of something truly remarkable: bringing the urban core of Macon back to life. When we envisioned the College Hill Corridor in 2007, the overarching goal was to attract talented young people to Macon and convince them to make their lives here. They are the future of our city. Little did we know that many of those talented people were right here but hidden in plain sight. The College Hill Corridor Commission and the Knight Neighborhood Challenge helped highlight these everyday leaders, and allowed them to create the future of this place. Now we have a model to share with others, exhibiting how people of good faith, with a solid plan and the desire to improve the community—without worrying about who gets the credit—can make lasting change happen.  
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    Tosca + electronica = pure magic

    Published April 11, 2014 by

    Between the “boom boom now” and the “boom boom pow” of the Ultra Music Festival, Puccini's ultra-tragic opera, Tosca, opened at the Arsht Center. Unlike the Florida Grand Opera's (FGO) awkward and overly-acted production of Nabucco last month, Tosca soared. It walked a well-choreographed and controlled line between too much...
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    Fellowship that places new college grads with startups expands to Miami

    Published April 11, 2014 by

    Venture for America Recruitment from Zoom Detroit Studios on Vimeo. Andrew Yang is CEO and founder of Venture for America, a fellowship program that helps recent college graduates become entrepreneurs. The effort is expanding to Miami with the support of Knight Foundation.  Ask a startup CEO what she needs most, and – after the knee-jerk reaction, “Money!” – she is likely to tell you that her biggest challenge is finding great talent. Next, ask a smart and enterprising young person what he wants most out of an entry-level job, and he will likely say he wants to gain skills, make career progress and do something meaningful – exactly the opportunities a startup can provide. Why can’t these two people meet one another? Because armies of suits show up on college campuses each year, and funnel our best and brightest off to financial services and consulting firms in a handful of cities. Startups in Miami have no coordinated way to access these channels, and young people have no systematized means for finding or vetting startup opportunities. That’s where Venture for America comes in: We level the playing field so that the startup CEO can find highly vetted talent that is eager to go to work for her and make an impact. Essentially, Venture for America is a two-year fellowship program that places recent college graduates with promising startup companies in U.S. cities with significant human capital needs. We currently operate in eight cities, and Miami is our next destination. We all know that entrepreneurship is the engine of job growth in America, and that many of our historically great cities are in serious need of job creation. What you may not know is that for every one person an innovation-oriented firm hires, five new jobs quickly follow in the wider community. Imagine if the same proportion of talent that currently flows to professional services went instead to startups and early-stage growth companies in Miami. How long would that take to meaningfully impact job growth and innovation?
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    “Bauhaus: Model and Myth”

    Published April 10, 2014 by

    Dessau, das Bauhausgebäude, 02/09/2009. The Bauhaus influence has reached almost all of us in our material worlds, whether it is the streamlined, functionality of a chair or the steel-frame construction of a building. The documentary Bauhaus: Model and Myth (103 minutes, German and English with English...
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    The Creative Interventions Tour: Lessons from Macon, Ga.

    Published April 10, 2014 by

    Hunter Franks, an artist and founder of the Neighborhood Postcard Project and League of Creative Interventionists, recently concluded a three-week residency in Macon, Ga., where he used creativity to build community with Knight Foundation support. Photo credit: Hunter Franks. The words bounced off the cold brick walls: We tryna make a difference Imma let that line hit you It’ll probably take a minute I’ll be right here when you get it. As the sun set, Sabir and Vinson Muhammad captivated a crowd with performances of tracks from their latest album. About 50 Maconites had gathered outside the vacant Historic Capricorn Recording Studio building for a Love Notes to Macon Community Potluck. The potluck was the finale of my three-week residency in Macon, Ga., where I used creative interventions in public space to ignite interactions between strangers and build community. Games, food, poetry and an interactive Neighborhood Postcard Project installation rounded out the potluck offerings. As people let down their guard and created connections with new friends, I reflected on what I learned from creating a sense of place in Macon in three weeks:      1. Find the active citizens Macon has a strong divide between socioeconomic levels, and it is extremely difficult to bring together the people on the opposite sides of that spectrum. The key is to find the active citizens — those people that work to make their city better. They are the ones that will embrace the idea of building connections between strangers and they are the ones that have the networks to make that happen. Each active citizen will tell a friend or contact. That network will slowly grow until it reaches those that were previously unreachable. This is the beginning in growing a network and a creative movement.     
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    Tech tools connect Miami-Dade students with mentors in entrepreneurship

    Published April 10, 2014 by

    Knight Foundation supports the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) to prepare students from low-income communities for today’s technology landscape. Below, Julia Weincouff, a VISTA AmeriCorps member serving as NFTE’s volunteer coordinator, gives a snapshot of how NFTE is integrating technology into its curriculum. Technology. Some of the most important conversations going on in boardrooms are about it. Many long-standing companies are crumbling because they can’t wrap their heads around it. New businesses that know how to effectively use it are emerging as leaders within every industry. And our students are growing up in a world that was never without it. So how do we use technology to prepare the next generation of entrepreneurs? How do we prepare young people in low-income neighborhoods who are disconnected from school for the 21st century workplace? Like most other educational institutions, we are leveraging technology to more effectively teach and engage our students because learning how to calculate return on investment is not everyone’s idea of a good time. We do know that our students love getting the chance to meet and learn from successful entrepreneurs and business leaders. We also know that these inspiring volunteers are busy people and Miami-Dade County is one of the most expansive counties in the country. This is where technology gets to shine its magnificent light – connecting students with volunteers virtually. It is instinctive. It is easy. And it’s pretty cool.
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    POV reimagines the documentary—again

    Published April 10, 2014 by

    POV has incubated dozens of documentary-based projects at its POV Hackathon lab series, including “Portraits of the Enemies.” Photo: Concept/photography/videography by Karim Ben Khelifa; coding/design by Jack Kalish and Maria Rabinovich. Adnaan Wasey is executive producer of POV Digital, the Webby Award-winning department that drives storytelling innovation for the PBS documentary series POV, which Knight supports.  What is POV? Yes, it’s television’s longest-running showcase of independent documentaries. And it may also be the place where, at some point over the last 27 years, you first saw films by Errol Morris or Michael Moore or Frederick Wiseman or Terry Zwigoff or Marshall Curry or Laura Poitras or...  I could go on, but POV has never been just a television program. More than that, since its earliest days it’s been an ongoing exercise in bridging independent voices and the public by offering new tools and technology for storytelling and engagement. By the mid-’90s, when media viewed the Web and interacting with the public as novelties, POV was broadcasting user-generated video on national television, spawning communities through message boards and on its own websites, exploring the aesthetics and business of digital filmmaking, and producing video and games inspired by its documentaries. Much of this work was unprecedented. As POV matured, it created public media’s first interactive storytelling series, the Webby Award-winning “Borders,” and it formalized and shared its pioneering strategies for national engagement campaigns. In a letter to POV’s online advisers in 1994—a letter because most of POV’s advisers were not online—POV founder Marc Weiss exclaimed his joy that with the Web, “Finally, the technology is available to start a real dialogue with TV.” Fast-forwarding 20 years, I feel the same excitement around a multitude of technologies. I see the proliferation of Web-capable personal electronics, of open-source software tools, and of large stores of public data as mechanisms for dialogue. And what’s coming is equally exciting:  immersive viewers, wearable computers, 3-D printers. As we learned in the early days of  the Web, these technologies aren’t novelties; they constitute the ways we will soon be making connections and having new kinds of conversations because of storytelling.
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    Cuban poetry at O, Miami: many voices, one history

    Published April 9, 2014 by

    By Fernando González, Miami-based arts & culture writer For the next few weeks, poetry is the language of Miami. But the monthlong O, Miami poetry festival, funded by Knight Foundation, is an ambitious proposition well beyond the literary. This year, the event includes a greater emphasis on Spanish language programming,...