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    Israeli startups to share expertise with South Florida through Idea Center at Miami Dade College

    Published August 26, 2015 by

    Oren Simanian, founder of StarTAU.  The Idea Center at Miami Dade College and Star TAU, Tel Aviv University’s entrepreneurship center, signed a knowledge-sharing agreement Friday, linking the vibrant entrepreneurial and high-tech communities in South Florida and Israel. “This collaboration is testament to the type of synergy we want to see in Miami—with one initiative, in this case Project Interchange, acting as a springboard for another,” said Knight Foundation Miami Program Director Matt Haggman. “By making more of these connections, we can create new opportunities and foster the type of knowledge sharing that is essential to building a strong innovation ecosystem in our city.” The agreement is the culmination of a process that started in March, when a 12-person delegation from Miami spent a week in Israel as part of Project Interchange, a nonprofit educational institute of the American Jewish Committee. The exchange was funded in part by Knight Foundation. Last Thursday, the worlds came together again for “Innovation Nation: Secrets From the Israeli Startup Scene,” a presentation by Oren Simanian, founder of StarTAU. His talk was followed by a panel comprised of Felecia Hatcher, founder of Code Fever; Jaret Davis, co-managing shareholder Greenberg Traurig; Ben Wirz, director of venture investments at Knight Foundation; and Leandro Finol, executive director of The Idea Center. Haggman moderated the panel. All participants visited Israel as part of the Miami delegation.
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    Alberto Ibargüen on disruption, innovation in media

    Published August 25, 2015 by

    Knight Foundation President Alberto Ibargüen recently joined an episode of “The Open Mind” to share his thoughts on disruption and innovation in the constantly shifting media landscape. “I think that this is an unbelievably exciting time for people in the business of providing reliable and consistently reliable news to a democracy,” he told host Alexander Heffner. Above, Ibargüen offers insights into the culture surrounding contemporary journalism, ideas on financial sustainability and recent chilling effects on freedom of expression.
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    Engagement is essential to big changes in urban transportation

    Published August 25, 2015 by

    Portland photo by Elizabeth Tilis. Shin-pei Tsay is director of research and development at TransitCenter. The following post is adapted from a blog post originally published on transitcenter.org. TransitCenter recently published the report “A People’s History of Recent Urban Transportation Innovation,” funded by Knight Foundation. Congress may be consumed with yet another extension for the federal transportation program but progress to make our cities’ streets more livable and user-friendly continues apace at the local level. In just the first several months of this year, we’ve heard about the race to build the first physically protected bike lanes in Pittsburgh and Denver, the reinvention of the bus network in Houston, and new public plazas in other communities such as San Jose, Calif.,  and Columbus, S.C. More and more communities across the country are finding ways of advancing a change agenda that bends the arc towards more urban space for people, rather than for private vehicles. Who are the people leading the charge in urban transportation? As our new report, “A People’s History of Recent Urban Transportation Innovation,” explains, the short answer is that it takes leaders from three different sectors of urban society to make change happen quickly.
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    Georgia nonprofit groups join forces to help filmmakers learn fundraising skills

    Published August 21, 2015 by

    Stephanie Fritz is director of programs for the Macon Arts Alliance.  “You deserve, as an artist, to make a good living, because you do great things for society and for your communities,” Joe Winter told a group of filmmakers in Macon, Ga. last month. Winter is the deputy director of C4 Atlanta, a nonprofit group that specializes in “the business of being creative” and helps Atlanta-based arts entrepreneurs build successful careers. He was in Macon leading a one-hour workshop hosted by Amplify, a professional development program for artists and creative entrepreneurs run by the Macon Arts Alliance.  
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    LOTS turns unused land into public space in Philadelphia

    Published August 21, 2015 by

    If you spend any time in Philadelphia on Frankford Avenue just north of Girard, you know how much this stretch of street has changed in recent years. Development seems to move faster than any one person can keep track of, with new condos, storefronts and bars spreading out from Frankford into Fishtown and beyond. What is visibly lacking, however, is a large amount of green. As a way to call attention to public outdoor space, a trio of artists, architects and designers known collectively as LOTS took an empty plot of land at Susquehanna Street and Frankford Avenue and created a pop-up garden. The project was part of LOTS' month-long participation in the Recycled Artist in Residency program, a finalist in the 2012 Knight Arts Challenge Philadelphia.
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    Evalu-cations: The indispensable alliance between evaluation and communications

    Published August 21, 2015 by

    Photo credit: Flickr user Richard Matthews. A hallmark of my time supporting research and evaluation at Knight Foundation has been a close working relationship with our communications team. This partnership has been a key ingredient for the development and dissemination of a series of successful reports Knight has published in recent years. So when I recently encountered a Communications Network blog post lamenting the challenged relationship between evaluation people and communications people, I felt compelled to speak out on behalf of the way our teams have partnered at Knight. If I had to pick a word that binds evaluation and communications together it would be “strategy.” All those fancy tools in the evaluator’s toolkit like the theory of change or logic model (which I’m often reluctant to use with program teams fearing they can do more to alienate than to assuage) are really just communications exercises for teasing out strategy. And both functions will attest that working with program teams early in the life cycle of a grant or an initiative to clarify the goals and tactics is a prerequisite for effective measurement and communications. No Knight project exemplifies the results of strong collaboration between evaluation and communications more than our Civic Tech report, “The Emergence of Civic Tech: Investments in a Growing Field.” While the research findings captured in the SlideShare were certainly compelling, I have no doubt that the interactive data visualization accompanying the report amplified interest and uptake tenfold; the report’s received 18,150 page views in the first three months of release. The combination of good research and good communications saw an increase in media coverage and discussions around civic tech, as well as a landmark trend in the use of #civictech on social media with 1,734 mentions in the three months following the report’s release. The bottom line? Collaboration between communications and evaluation can go beyond the pages of a report or website and spell impact for an entire field. Furthermore, our communications team was instrumental in building a mechanism into the report for readers to submit additional data to Knight; this both fueled engagement and yielded enough responses for us to release an updated version a few months later with all the crowdsourced data.
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    Knight Arts Challenge-winning theater piece blooms at Detroit community gardens

    Published August 20, 2015 by

    Nobody appreciates the blazing days of August like true Michiganders, who know that a long, cold winter is always just around the corner. And what better way to celebrate the rites of summer than with A Host of People. The theater group won $20,000 in the 2014 Knight Arts Challenge Detroit in support of their site-specific performance series, “The Harrowing,” which was developed and is being performed in community gardens across the city. Led by co-directors Sherrine Azab and Jake Hooker, the Host of People crew was at Shipherd Greens Community Garden in Detroit’s up-and-coming West Village neighborhood on Aug. 16. A packed “house” was on hand for the Sunday performance, which began with an audio tour that highlighted some of the sights, crops, contributing community members and features of the garden—including a mural by former Detroit Waldorf School eighth-grader Molly Schneider and a sculpture by Cass Corridor great Robert Sestok.
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    Macon Arts Alliance focuses on transforming the city’s ‘birthplace’

    Published August 20, 2015 by

    Take a moment to think about the run-down neighborhood or downtown block that you may have passed today on your commute to work or school. At one point in time, these areas were likely vibrant and occupied by families and businesses. There are many factors–among them, lack of funds and inadequate planning–that can cause once-bustling communities to decay into a series of dilapidated buildings and houses. Once this happens, it can, as they say, take a village to restore these areas to their former status. Creative placemaking often puts arts and culture at the center of efforts to rereinvigorate neighborhoods, towns and cities. In Macon, Ga., one such project is the Tattnall Square Center for the Arts, a historic church building that is now home to Mercer University’s theater department and also functions as a community rental facility. Another is Beall’s Hill, which was transformed into a growing, economically diverse neighborhood, in part through a partnership between Knight Foundation and Historic Macon Foundation. Both examples fall within the boundaries of the College Hill Corridor, which is a larger effort in neighborhood revitalization and creative placemaking that is also supported by Knight Foundation. The Macon Arts Alliance, a Knight Arts grantee, is now focused on overhauling the East Macon Historic District. Forty-six percent of properties in the neighborhood that's known as the “birthplace of Macon” are vacant and blighted. But the Macon Arts Alliance has a grand vision for the area: to turn it into Mill Hill, East Macon’s Art Village. To this end, the alliance is working with the county's Urban Development Authority on restoring local houses, as well as an old auditorium that is the proposed site of the Mill Hill Community Arts Center.
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    A community of news: ProPublica expands crowdsourcing, exchanging expertise with other newsrooms

    Published August 20, 2015 by

    Amanda Zamora is senior engagement editor at ProPublica, which Knight Foundation supports to advance excellence in journalism and to help news organizations inform people in communities of all sizes through experimentation, innovation and leadership. Above: Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber at work. Photo credit: Lars Klove for ProPublica.   Over the next year, with the support of Knight Foundation, we will be working to improve how we engage communities to help us create journalism that spurs change. From our inception, two things have distinguished our journalism: our focus on deep, investigative reporting and our use of data to explain how systems meant to serve the public can often fall short. We employ classic investigative reporting and big data techniques to both expose problems and illuminate potential remedies.  
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    In the age of the #selfie, will the viewer always be a part of the picture?

    Published August 19, 2015 by

    By Leah Brown, FATVillage Take a look around any art opening these days and you are sure to see this scene: the audience standing with their backs up against the work of art they are (supposedly) there to see, arms outstretched in front of perfected smiles, thumbs pressing the button on their phones’ cameras to capture their own image with the art as background to their personal narratives. This, it seems, is the new way of looking at art, necessitating the insertion of one’s self.  It is like the highest form of postmodernism in its attribution of authorship to the viewer, with each work being defined by the onlooker’s presence and symbiotically defining the onlooker in his/her own terms: I am cultured; I am edgy; I am having fun; this is _____(insert adjective) and so am I…
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    ‘Knight Cities’ podcast: Philly park with renewed sense of purpose packs in the crowds

    Published August 19, 2015 by

    Above: Spruce Street Harbor Park. Photo credit: Flickr user Kevin Jarrett. Every city has one. It’s the civic space that once held so much promise, but is now moribund, lacking people and energy. Until last summer, Philadelphia’s Spruce Street Harbor was one such place. That is, until David Fierabend and his colleagues at Groundswell Design transformed it with inexpensive, temporary design changes that have made it the place to go in the city.
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    Restoring the land through environmental art

    Published August 19, 2015 by

    Above: Native Pollinator Garden - Marguerita Hagan, B.H. Mills and Magie Mills. Photo credit: John Woodin.   Putting the words “art” and “environment” together may conjure images of flower photography, landscape paintings, or Audubon’s famous illustrations.  But in the Schuylkill Center’s environmental art program (the only such program in Philadelphia and the most ambitious at a nature center nationwide), we widen our lens to work with the most cutting-edge indoor and outdoor contemporary visual artists who are engaging with the complex environmental issues and ecological topics of our time. At the Schuylkill Center, managing our forests presents seemingly insurmountable obstacles: invasive species, deer that overgraze the forest, erosion from increasingly large storms and the myriad impacts of climate change.  But these challenges present an opportunity to develop creative approaches that produce novel outcomes.  LandLab, a new artist residency at the Schuylkill Center funded by Knight Foundation, represents a new frontier in environmental art and land stewardship, asking artists to explore creative ways to respond to these pressing problems, and involve people in the solutions.  
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    Venture for America doubles down on Miami

    Published August 19, 2015 by

    Amy Nelson is vice president of external relations at Venture for America, which Knight Foundation supports as part of its efforts to invest in Miami’s emerging innovators and entrepreneurs as a tool to build community, while fostering talent and expanding opportunity. Above: A 2015 Venture for America Training Camp at Brown University last month. Photo courtesy Venture for America.  A year ago, Venture for America launched our program in Miami by sending six recent college graduates to work at growth companies like Cirle, Zeel, Rokk3r Labs and Kairos. Our inaugural Miami cohort is thriving, and we’re thrilled that they’ll be joined this month by eight new VFA Fellows headed to the Magic City. We believe Miami is a great place to start a business – and that an influx of job-creating enterprises could change the city’s unemployment landscape. Our fellows are eager to learn from the experienced entrepreneurs who have set up shop in Miami, and when they’re ready to step out on their own, we support them with mentors, funding, talent and other resources to help their business take hold.
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    How do Americans use Twitter for news?

    Published August 19, 2015 by

    The following is cross-posted from the Pew Research Center. Photo credit: Flickr user Ken Lee. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults who use Twitter get news on the platform, according to a recent survey. But we wanted a finer-grained understanding of how they use Twitter for news – not only whether they tweet about news and follow news organizations, but also what news topics they tweet about, and how many news media accounts they follow. We approached these questions through some exploratory research, leveraging one of social media’s greatest advantages for researchers: its openness. In order to better understand how Americans are engaging with news on Twitter, we built a small but representative sample of 176 Twitter users from an earlier national survey of 3,212 Americans conducted by Pew Research Center in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. We then analyzed the Twitter activity of these users, with their explicit permission.