Knight News Challenge: Libraries offers applicants a chance to share in $2.5 million by focusing on the question “How might we leverage libraries as a platform to build more knowledgeable communities?” Below, Chris Jowaisas, senior program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, writes about libraries playing an active role in helping solve community challenges. Libraries can play a variety of roles in addressing the challenges that communities—and the individuals within them—face. They have the opportunity to move from being passive information providers to active assets for their communities – whether those communities are schools, universities or colleges, or the broader public community.  Some libraries have already begun this transformation. But many libraries are hesitant to embrace this role because it involves a great number of uncertainties. The role that libraries have played in many communities is one that seems more certain. But shifts in demographics, service expectations and attitudes towards the value of government are creating a situation in which this supposedly certain role is beginning to be questioned to a greater degree than ever before.