Knight Foundation

"Utilitarianism," from Jessica Hagy's brilliant site This Is Indexed. I'm a huge fan of Visual.ly, a blog that's devoted to infographics. We live in a world where our ability to make choices from everything about our health to who we'll vote for -- depends on our grasp of what I'll call The Big Numbers. Dense walls of text about your risk of developing heart disease or about health care costs often leave me more confused than when I started. Infographics are great because they can give you an understanding of a topic at a glance. There are many important social issues that can't be effectively communicated any other way -- the biggest stories of our times are, in fact, about Big Numbers: the economic crisis, global climate change, healthcare, the foreclosure crisis. So if infographics are so great, why do so few sites use them? Because generating them and designing them is hard. Current technology makes it easy to publish text to the web, just as I'm doing now. Most of us are carrying a combination still camera and video camera in our pocket, and depending on...

The River Partnership is an association of community foundations located in cities and towns along the Mississippi River. With a watershed of over a million square miles, the river is the kind of natural resource that risks being everyone's treasure and no one's concern. The River Partnership, a second round winner of the Knight Community Information Challenge, will launch six projects that will solve a central problem: residents can't act until they care, and they can't care until they know. Each project will make use of the web and social media to get people engaged with the river that flows through their back yard. Here are some thumbnails of a few of the projects that will be launched in the coming year: Community Foundation of the Great River Bend will launch "Quad Cities Wild Places," which is modeled after Chicago Wilderness, which helps people in the Chicagoland area get outside into Chicago's hidden wilderness areas. Quad Cities Wild Places will develop a website with maps, educational material, and even a childrens' "Wild Places Passport," to encourage families to get outside. The Community Foundation of Northwest Missisippi doesn't yet have a name for its project, but it does have big ambitions -- it calls the project "A Huffington Post for the Mississippi Delta. The surrounding region has no regional newspaper or television station, and the community foundation hopes to bring together research findings and the voices of residents. The IQ Magazine Community Foundation Consortium backs IQ Magazine, which turns each issue into a deep dive on serious issues facing the residents of Minnesota, including...

The California Endowment and the Knight Foundation are supporting a youth media initiative in California's Central Valley, and judging from the quality of the writing, the investment is paying off. Here's Jesus Vargas, a resident of Coachella, CA, writing about the Coachella Festival, a music festival which triples the population of this town, where 35% of the 18 and under residents live below the poverty level: "Most people who frequent Coachella Fest or stay at the nearby resorts in the west side of the valley, know nothing about the real Coachella. I live in the actual city of Coachella, less than a 10-minute drive southeast from Indio, a small 40,000 person town that is economically depressed, mostly rural and agricultural and predominantly Hispanic. Further east of the city are the unincorporated communities of Thermal, Mecca, and North Shore, which are home to the migrant workers who toil in the area’s agricultural fields. Many live in poverty. The environmental conditions – contaminated drinking water, toxic landfills, dilapidated mobile home parks – are terrible, and the landscape is desolate. Trash heaps and illegal dumps litter the area. A nearby soil recycling plant emits a stink that many residents say causes them extreme discomfort. The region sits in stark contrast to the glitz and glamour of the western Coachella Valley that’s only a few minutes up Interstate-10. When my friends and I tell our fellow concertgoers that we live literally five minutes away, they are incredulous. They seem to have had the impression that nobody under the age of 40 lives here. When I tell them I’m not from La Quinta, Indio, Palm Desert or Palm Springs, they ask, “What other cities are there here?” Many times, we just say we’re from somewhere else to avoid the inevitable bemused looks and questioning. Why should I kill their Coachella buzz with tales about Mecca and Thermal, and the poverty and pollution endemic to them?