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    Sidewalk Festival delighted Detroit’s artistic community for a third year

    Published August 7, 2015 by

    For anyone who holds a perception of Detroit as a city in decline, the scenes from last weekend would have been hard to reconcile. Stepping onto the main drag of Old Redford at the intersection of Grand River Avenue and Lahser Road, one was immediately suffused by the joyful spirit of the Sidewalk Festival of Performing Arts, which was awarded a $35,000 grant in the 2014 Detroit Knight Arts Challenge. To focus overmuch on any given one of the dozens of performers, artists and participants would miss the point of the festival, which has so much to do with the enthusiasm and openness of the attendees. There did not appear to be a single person in the approximately three-block radius of the festival who wasn’t having a great time.
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    A rewarding journalism innovation project on the eve of destruction

    Published August 6, 2015 by

    Our experimental project calling for faster innovation in journalism and journalism education, Searchlights and Sunglasses, is approaching its second birthday. So it’s just about time to destroy it.  I know. That sounds ridiculous. Something does well, so you blow it up. Welcome to change in the digital age. Out with comfort; in with strange. For the moment, our free digital teaching tool is safe on the Knight Foundation servers. Paige Levin, a University of Florida journalism student and recent Knight intern, just completed its latest update. She read it, fixed broken links, added some class exercises, and reported what she believes journalism students today should know. By all accounts, including hers, she learned from Searchlights. So the content still has educational value. That said, most of what we hoped to learn when we launched in 2013 we have learned. Can a loosely organized team remotely create a classroom tool that’s more nimble than a printed book? Yes. (Thanks, Reynolds Institute.) Will more people read a long-form work than the 5,000 or so who read my blog posts. Yes, many times over. Could an old newspaper editor let go of tradition and let a creative team inject surprise and humor—and even jokes about me? Yes, if we talked first. Would writing about slow change speed up change? No. Information by itself doesn’t change the world. People change it.
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    New Study Highlights Unequal Access to Local News and Information in New Jersey

    Published August 6, 2015 by

    Map image by Flickr user David. Newark sign by Joseph on Flickr. If you are a resident of Morristown, New Jersey you get 23 times more news coverage than the state’s largest city, Newark, NJ. Residents in Morristown have access to 2.5 times more coverage than New Brunswick. Authors Molly de Aguiar and Josh Stearns New research, from Rutgers University, being released today explores the health of the local news ecosystem in three diverse New Jersey cities. The study suggests that there is more work to do to ensure all residents of New Jersey have access to the information they need about their communities. “If journalism and access to information are pillars of self government then these findings suggest those tools of democracy are not being distributed evenly, and that should be cause for concern,” said Prof. Philip Napoli, the study’s lead author. The report was co-authored by Sarah Stonbely, Kathleen McCollough, and Bryce Renninger. According to the new study, for every 10,000 people in Newark, a city with a per capita income of $13,009, there are only about.55 sources of news. New Brunswick, with a per capita income of $16,395, fares better. There we see 2.18 news sources for every 10,000 New Brunswick residents. But in the most affluent New Jersey city in the study, Morristown (whose per capita income is $37,573) there are 6.11 news sources for every 10,000 people.
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    Library For All breaks down barriers to knowledge in developing world

    Published August 6, 2015 by

    Katherine Stephans is partnerships and communications manager for Library For All, a winner of the 2015 Knight News Challenge on Libraries. Two hundred fifty million children in developing countries are not learning to read and write, despite being enrolled in school. At Library For All, we envision a world where everyone has equal access to knowledge. There is a critical need for relevant, language-appropriate educational materials in developing countries, but the cost of building physical libraries is extraordinarily high. In March 2012, our co-founders Rebecca McDonald and Tanyella Evans built Library For All, a cloud-based, digital library platform as a solution to the knowledge gap. Our “library” is curated to offer quality ebooks in local languages for our program countries. The platform operates on devices that already exist in the developing world, such as low-cost mobile phones, tablets and computers. Recognizing that mobile phone networks are widespread but still growing, the platform is designed for low-bandwidth environments and can even be used offline. Today, we have readers in Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. We work with international and local publishers to build our country-specific libraries, and we liaise with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and governments to drive adoption in communities and schools. In these countries, local device manufacturers offer low-cost options for our readers to access our library platform. Though we do not provide devices to our program countries, we work with national telecommunications companies in each country to ensure that our users incur zero data charges while reading on our platform.
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    ‘Knight Cities’ podcast: The Underline, a good idea on the move in Miami

    Published August 5, 2015 by

    Miami is buzzing about new plans for a 10-mile forgotten stretch of public property beneath its elevated metro rail. Manhattan has its High Line, and Miami will soon have its Underline. Meg Daly is founder and president of Friends of The Underline. Here are five things you should know from my conversation with Meg: 1. Change your perspective, and you may see new opportunity. In Meg Daly’s case, an injury caused her to abandon her car for transit and walking, and it was only then that she realized the potential of the land beneath Miami’s Metrorail for what is now known as The Underline. 2. What do you do after you have a good idea? You just talk it up. And if 1 in 10 people think you have a good idea, you’re probably onto something. 3. If you want to get a big idea moving, find your partners, find your advocates, find your believers, and they will push you through the right doors. 4. The Underline used a University of Miami architecture studio class as a marketing opportunity to open up discussions. People came to see the student designs for The Underline, they commented on the designs, they had a voice, and they became owners of the project. When you later go back to ask them for money, it’s their idea. 5. Unlike the High Line, The Underline is attempting to capture some of the incremental new value it creates through tax increment financing from new development that abuts The Underline. That money will be used to maintain and program The Underline.
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    Tech.co competition showcases the growing array of South Florida startups

    Published August 5, 2015 by

    Tech.Co’s Startup of the Year Competition and Mixer, celebrated in Miami Beach Thursday, showcased an intriguing, wide-ranging mix of ideas and products. There were apps to connect users through sports (SportsBuddy); offering face-to-face video messaging (Tracks) and helping people donate to their favorite charity (Traca); sites connecting patients and dentists (123 Patient Portal) and to help physicians educate their patients about their health concerns (VideoMD). Listenup.to offered a Web service that turns written articles into audio. There were projects focusing on political and social principles, such as Apretaste.com, which aims to connect Cubans to the Internet; but also startups offering eminently practical business solutions, such as Liveanswer.com, an answering service software presented as “the Uber of call centers,” Metricsco, an analytics service, and uxgofer.com, a tool for user experience research. And not everything was software. Nawboi Technologies presented what they call “a revolutionary” camera mount. HFactor, offered a product that infuses hydrogen into water to increase hydration and recovery, while GenSmart exhibited a battery-like, small hybrid power system, on a drone.
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    Panel helps decode how to fund startups in South Florida

    Published August 5, 2015 by

    Call it a sign of the times for South Florida, but an event titled “How to Fund a Startup” had a full house of hackers, entrepreneurs and investors in Miami Beach, on a Wednesday evening. Organized by LatAm Tech Miami under the auspices of eMerge Americas, the gathering at the newly opened WeWork space featured a panel with John Milciunas, entrepreneur-in-residence at the San Francisco-based Accelerator Ventures; Nico Berardi, managing director of Accelerated Growth Partners; and Ed Boland, a principal at Scout Ventures. Derrick Ashong, a musician and CEO of amp.it, a social network and music site, moderated the discussion. LatAm Tech is an organization based in New York, San Francisco and now in Miami, whose goal is to connect the technological ecosystems in those cities and Latin America. The discussion included both big-picture themes and practical, specific issues. Knight Foundation has made more than 100 investments over the past three years to support the developing entrepreneurial ecosystem in South Florida.  “There is no institutional capital on the ground here,” offered Boland when discussing why Scout Venture opened offices in South Florida. “We saw that as a great opportunity not just to be here but to help build the ecosystem. … [and also] the opportunities in Latin America. There are tremendous growth opportunities, and the potential for technology to change Latin America … is astounding.”
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    Train ride fosters stronger connections to Akron, Ohio

    Published August 5, 2015 by

    All aboard! Knight Foundation recently hosted a discussion in Akron on the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad, a historic railway in Northern Ohio. The trip, which took place in the dining car, brought together about 35 interns, young professionals and community leaders. The invited guests were participants or presenters at the Akron Outside the Box program this summer. The goal was to figure out how to get interns and young professionals to fall in love with Akron. The conversation centered on sharing favorite places and exploring how we can motivate millennials to explore Akron, whether they are here for a summer internship, a semester of college or a new job. Akron Program Director Kyle Kutuchief facilitated the conversation and introduced us to Knight Foundation’s strategy focused on attracting and retaining talented people, expanding opportunity and promoting civic engagement in its communities. Members of the group shared how they want a unique experience when they arrive in a city, and it would be helpful to have a stronger online presence for things to do in Akron. A show of hands revealed most of the group relied on mobile apps or Google to discover things to do in a new place. They don’t want the typical chain restaurants but options that are iconic to the location. Additionally, guests shared their favorite ventures this summer with people mentioning activities in areas such as Highland Square, North Hill and downtown. There were only a handful of guests that had been on the train in Akron before and the majority were first-time riders. The experience not only exposed participants to the train itself, but also to the scenic Cuyahoga Valley National Park and Towpath Trail. Our hope is that people return to explore with family and friends. More importantly, we hope the event was another small step towards making the case for them to get involved in our community. Akron has many great things to do; we just need to figure out how to better tell our story to young people.
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    Miami dancer Niurca Márquez to fuse local history and flamenco in Knight-funded performance

    Published August 5, 2015 by

    The Pioneer Winter Collective won a 2014 South Florida Knight Arts Challenge grant with its proposal for a site-specific performance initiative called Grass Stains. The project aims to articulate an exchange between a work of art or performance, and the place in which that work of art is set. Taking performance out of theaters and into streets, parks and cultural sites throughout Miami-Dade County opens up the possibility of transforming the urban landscape into a stage. Dancer and choreographer Niurca Márquez, one of the Grass Stains artists, will use her funding to shape traditional elements of flamenco and embed them within the architecture of Miami. In this interview, Márquez documents her process and plans for developing her work-in-progress.  
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    HistoryMiami presents moving account of Pedro Pan exodus

    Published August 5, 2015 by

    Of the many traumatic stories that have surrounded the history of Cuban exile since 1959, none resonates as much as Operation Pedro Pan. That’s because it involved thousands of children sent from Cuba, unaccompanied, to the United States–many of them understanding they might never see their parents again. The more than 14,000 children put on planes by their families from 1960-1962 represents the biggest documented child refugee migration in the Western Hemisphere. At HistoryMiami, an incredibly moving and intimate exhibit about this exodus takes over the second floor of the museum's new space.
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    For-profit news: New Jersey foundation looks for ways to strengthen business models

    Published August 4, 2015 by

    This post is one in a series on what four community and place-based foundations are learning by funding media projects that help to meet their local information needs. All are funded through the Knight Community Information Challenge. Since commercial media, especially newspapers, continue to shrink their local, accountability journalism, it's reasonable to think that public and nonprofit media will be key players in producing more civically important journalism. But public media alone may not be able to save the day. In New Jersey, for instance, public radio and TV were eviscerated in 2011 and are still recovering. Most other public-media outlets in the U.S. find it difficult to grow news-coverage capacity since funding is, as always, a struggle. Nonprofit media? While a growing cadre of nonprofit news organizations have emerged in recent years, expecting them to significantly make up for the lost journalism is unrealistic. Molly de Aguiar, director for media at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, points out that other than NJTV/Public Media NJ Inc. and NJPR, the public media serving New Jersey, the state has only one significant nonprofit news organization, NJ Spotlight (which is funded by a group of foundations including Dodge and Knight). With a limited public-media footprint and without multiple nonprofits to support, Dodge is positioned to support the complete range of media players serving New Jersey: public media, nonprofit news AND for-profit news startups. "If you're a small place-based or community foundation, it may be that your only option is to support local journalism as a business,” de Aguiar says. Dodge is moving aggressively to shore up local news in New Jersey in part because it is one of four community and place-based foundations receiving Knight funding for local news and information projects. Of the four, Dodge stands out for its support of and grants to small for-profit news startups, in addition to public and nonprofit news entities, with the mission of helping the news startups grow enough so that communities in New Jersey receive more civically important news coverage.
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    22 projects win support from Knight Prototype Fund

    Published August 4, 2015 by

    Photo: Virtual-reality storytelling demo at University of Texas at Austin. Today we’re announcing the latest recipients of support from the Knight Prototype Fund. Twenty-two projects will join scores of others who have taken ideas from concept to demo since we launched the fund in June 2012.  Check out the full list below, which represents a range of ideas from government, the media, nonprofits, universities, libraries and more. The Prototype Fund serves as our primary tool for funding early-stage media and information projects. The model invites applicants to experiment, learn and iterate before moving on to the more costly stage of building out a project. In addition to receiving $35,000 in funding, Prototype Fund projects go through a six-month process that begins with a three-day course in human-centered design, facilitated by LUMA Institute. Building on that training to better develop their projects, the teams gather six months later for a demo day to share their discoveries and developments.  They join an expanding network of innovators seeking to provide better ways to inform and engage communities with the information that is essential to their lives. Some of the projects may eventually receive additional funding from Knight Foundation to help them scale. Every quarter we announce a new cohort and invite new applications. We’re looking for U.S.-based organizations with projects that explore media, journalism, civic experience, and data and information needs. To learn more and to apply, please visit prototypefund.org.
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    DANCECleveland opens its 60th season with performance by Parsons Dance

    Published August 3, 2015 by

    DANCECleveland celebrated the National Day of Dance and kicked off its 60th season on Saturday, July 25 by co-sponsoring a performance by Parsons Dance at Cain Park in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Before the renowned contemporary dance company took the stage, other events filled up the festive occasion. Local dancers were able to attend master classes with members of Parsons Dance (and David Parsons himself) earlier in the day. Later came hip-hop and ballroom dance demonstrations from area companies Show Peace Entertainment and La Danse Cleveland. Immediately before the appearance of the Parsons Dance company, locals who had rehearsed a bit of choreography via a video feed got to come onstage. Members of Parsons Dance joined in. So did dancers from The Seldoms company. The participation from The Seldoms was particularly interesting because the group spent the week of July 20-28 working on a new piece at The National Center for Choreography at The University of Akron, as part of the center's pilot cycle. The National Center for Choreography is a joint project from DANCECleveland and The University of Akron; Knight Foundation has pledged $5 million over five years toward the center. It was created to provide both space and technical support for choreographers to make new dance, and it is only the second institution of its kind in the country.
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    Detroit Sidewalk Festival puts a bright light on Brightmoor

    Published July 31, 2015 by

    Everyone is already buzzing with anticipation for the third annual Sidewalk Festival of Performing Arts, which takes place in Detroit’s vibrant Old Redford and Brightmoor neighborhoods. An area devastated by the mass exodus from the city, Brightmoor has quietly transformed itself into a utopia of urban gardens, public green spaces and a community bound and determined to do better for itself, in the absence of much help from outside. Taken in that context, the Sidewalk Festival, which was awarded a $35,000 grant in the 2014 Detroit Knight Arts Challenge, is a real triumph. It's also a whole lot of fun. “Sidewalk is unique among festivals in that no traditional stages are used,” said organizer Ryan Myers-Johnson, who noted that activities instead take place in “community gardens, alleys, courtyards, sidewalks and parking lots. [It’s] a true street festival in every sense of the word.”
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    Work by more than 80 artists on view at Philadelphia Photo Arts Center show

    Published July 31, 2015 by

    Representing more than 80 different artists working in photographic media, the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center provides a multitude of perspectives and methods in its sixth annual Contemporary Photography Competition & Exhibition. This juried show contains some heavily edited images, documentary photographs, architectural examinations, portraiture, street photography and just about any subject one can think of, in both desaturated palettes and bright, vivid colors. Understandably, this assortment provides more than enough fodder for discussion or merely observation, and there is no shortage of interesting imagery in which to become immersed.