Thanks to the News Challenge winner Lisa Williams of Placeblogger and the Berkman Blog Group for a great Boston meetup last night where we talked about the history of the News Challenge (the $5MM yearly contest to find innovative digital delivery ideas), the Garage site for working through ideas before applying, how mentoring in the Garage works, and brainstorming ideas for this year’s contest.

You’ll see Steve Garfield and Jason Pramas (Open Media Boston) in the group below as well as developers and thinkers from MIT, Harvard, and Somerville organizations.

Next Thursday, we’ll host meetups in Austin and we’ll also be at the Maker Faire during the weekend. After that, we’ll talk in San Francisco (Facebook invite). We hope to meet you then–

Remember that the News Challenge contest closes November 1st; you can apply here and work through your idea before applying here with a mentor who has won the contest in the past.

Editor’s note: Susan Patterson is the Knight Program Director for Charlotte, North Carolina. Below, she details Knight winners at the inaugural Charlotte Chamber Innovation Awards.

The Charlotte Chamber launched its first ever Innovation Awards Tuesday night, and Knight grantees were winners.

The McColl Center for Visual Arts received the Innovative New Product or Service Award for its Innovation Institute, which received a million-dollar grant from Knight in June. Executive Director Suzanne Fetscher was quick to thank Knight for its investment, and Institute alumni scattered around the Westin ballroom cheered.

With more than 400 folks in the room, the Institute is likely to have a waiting list for its next class where artists help business folks tap into their creative side for more effective leadership on the job and in the community.

Michael Marsicano, CEO of the Foundation for the Carolinas (also a Knight grantee and often a partner with Knight in major initiatives), was named Innovator of the Year.

As he said, in this business town, having non-profit winners was remarkable. He’s right.

Tuesday, Macon.com posted this story about future planning for Macon roads, mentioning Knight Program Director for Macon, Beverly Blake, and an e-mail she wrote to community leaders.

From the Macon.com article:

With funding from the Knight Foundation, a disinterested third party, Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture IMAGINE Lab (www.coa.gatech.edu/imagine) is being employed to look at the proposed project and present a 3-D rendering that should show the community what the project will actually look like. There are all sorts of rumors of the project’s height and width and how it will interact with the Ocmulgee River. In the letter informing community leaders about the Tech project, Beverly Blake, the Knight Foundation program director, said, “Will it (the I-16/I-75 interchange) provide an orderly set of feeder streets to bring more folks into downtown/intown Macon? Will the time for construction effectively choke off all life to downtown? Are the alternatives worse than the proposed plan?”

The computer generated visuals, she said, will let us “see just exactly what the proposed interchange will look like when completed from different perspectives…”

Blake’s original letter concluded:

They [Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture IMAGINE Lab] are pleased to provide us with a proposal for their work to bring to us the three dimensional view of the proposed interchange; they will need info from Bibb/Macon and also DOT. If the scope is within the financial parameters of the grantmaking of the Knight Fund for Macon at the Community Foundation of Central Georgia, we will ask the Board of CFCG to consider funding of this visual presentation.

I wish to be clear that Knight Foundation does not have a position on this plan-our only position is to support projects and ideas that move forward Macon as a vibrant, progressive community. Our goal is to assist in providing accurate information to our citizens and policy makers.

I welcome your comments and ideas. Kindly respond to all so that we can each be a part of this conversation.

Do you have comments or ideas? Please leave them in the comments below.

As we’ve previously blogged, one section of Knight’s annual progress report asks what you think about the Miami arts scene and the new Knight Arts Partnership, a $20 million matching challenge to fund individuals and organizations with ideas for the future of arts in Miami.

I asked Rick of the South Florida Daily Blog (SFDB), who summarizes area blogs, to help us identify art bloggers whose audiences might be interested and have ideas for arts in Miami.

Rick posted an entry on SFDB yesterday (thank you, Rick), asking his readers which art blogs they followed.

The readers suggested a few in the comments (TuMiami, ArtLurker, a new Miami Art Exchange url). We plan to follow up with these blogs, and we’ve noted Roger L’s comment that summer isn’t, perhaps, the liveliest season of the Miami art scene.

What you think about the Miami arts scene? Other Miami art blogs you follow?

Tell us in the comments below or on the annual report site.

Part of the annual progress report, Knight Foundation asks what you think about the Miami Knight Arts Partnership.

Bonnie Clearwater, executive director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, explains some of their recent work in this video:

“We’ve gone from about 100 arts groups to more than 1,200 in the past two decades,” said Lorenzo Lebrija, Knight’s Miami program director. “It shows a real growth and maturing of Miami’s creative community.”

What do you think about arts in Miami? What would you like to see funded in the Knight Arts Partnership?

Leave a comment below or on the progress report site.

Analyzing Knight Foundation’s efforts in the Mississippi Gulf Coast, reporter Dick Polman writes,

Today, nearly three years after the storm, and with expenditures thus far totaling roughly $10 million, Knight Foundation can rightly point to a string of achievements - most notably, its crucial role in bringing world-class planners and architects to the afflicted region, and prompting citizens to chart new communities in ways they had never before imagined. Yet at the same time, political, cultural and financial obstacles have impeded recovery on virtually all fronts. In the words of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who is praised for his recovery efforts even by political foes, “It’s all been way too slow to suit me.”

Here’s a recent comment on the article by James W. Cromwell:

…After reading your article I have a different perspective of some of your good intentions that your foundation had for the people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. But I think you have been hoodwinked by the business men of these communities into believing that your monies were being used to help the citizens when it was really being used to help big business…

Adele Lyons, Knight Program Director for Biloxi responded:

…A long-term recovery after a hurricane like Katrina takes many organizations working together. We have worked with several of the funders you noted including the Twenty-First Century Foundation, OxFam, Ford Foundation and Foundation for the Mid South. We work together as part of the Gulf Coast Funders for Equity. Several of us helped organize the Funders’ Forum for Sustainable Gulf Coast Transformation held in September 2007.

We wanted to know what happened after Katrina. In the first few days, Knight Foundation made emergency grants to the Salvation Army and the Red Cross totaling $1 million to help with the relief efforts. Relief was slow to reach the East Biloxi citizens. Additional emergency grants totaling $110,000 went to several small, local nonprofits. And, of course, many of our grantees continue to work in East Biloxi…

See the East Biloxi grantee list and both comments in their entirety here.

Find more of Knight’s “Stories of Transformation” here.

Editor’s note: Matt Bergheiser is Knight Program Director for Philadelphia. Below, he describes a new Knight investment in the future of the Ben Franklin Parkway.

In Philadelphia, Knight has made the case that compelling, dynamic public spaces can change the feel and perception of our entire city.

The Ben Franklin Parkway is such a place, and a recent Knight investment of $1.25 million has helped to put this wonderful, sweeping promenade on a path to being transformed into a signature cultural campus for the entire region.

Read a recent editorial for more details on this effort.

What would you like to see in the new Ben Franklin Parkway?

The ManaTEEN Club, an organization funded through the Knight community of Bradenton, recently completed a marine restoration dive in West Palm Beach with members of Knight Foundation staff.

Founded in 1994, the ManaTEEN group volunteers in southwest Florida, and more than 300 teens have given 16,576 hours of service. The club has 12,000 active members ranging in age from eight to twenty-one.

“It is currently the largest locally based youth community service organization in the nation giving back 1.7 million hours annually to our community,” according to Alysia Bower of ManaTEEN. “The dive in West Palm Beach focused on the purpose to empower teens as decision makers regarding the coastal environment and marine restoration.”

Here’s the video from the dive:

For more ManaTEENS, you can follow along on their blog.

Knight Foundation supports Miami’s Wolfsonian-Florida International University’s new poster exhibition “Thoughts on Democracy” through the Knight New Work Award. A video about the exhibit, which opened July 3rd, is below, followed by details on included artists and the inspiration for the exhibit.

“The Thoughts on Democracy exhibition is comprised of posters created by fifty-five leading contemporary artists and designers, invited by The Wolfsonian to create a new graphic design inspired by American illustrator Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” posters of 1943, which were recently gifted to the museum by Leonard A. Lauder.

Some of the participating artists involved in the project are Neville Brody, Seymour Chwast, Wim Crouwel, Elliott Earls, Richard Tuttle, Lawrence Weiner, Paula Scher, Francesco Vezzoli, Chip Kidd, and Italo Lupi, among others.

Rockwell’s images, reproduced by the U.S. Office of War Information for mass dissemination, communicated FDR’s vision of ‘a world founded upon four essential human freedoms’—Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. The exhibition will be on view and free to the public in the museum’s lobby.”

At the July 3rd exhibit opening, visitors were asked for their thoughts on democracy. You can watch their responses on the Thoughts on Democracy blog.

What are your thoughts on democracy and this exhibit?

Editor’s note: Matt Bergheiser is Knight Program Director for Philadelphia. He adds context below to a recent article on the new Job Opportunity Investment Network (JOIN).

Knight’s work in Philadelphia continues to focus on building connections to jobs and opportunities. One significant platform for change is the Job Opportunity Investment Network, a Knight-led funding collaborative which creates advancement opportunities for lower-skilled Philadelphians into career ladder jobs.

From the article:

“The idea is to create a fund that will invest in connecting lower-skilled workers to career ladder opportunities,” said Matt Bergheiser, Philadelphia program director of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which has formed a partnership with the state, the United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board to establish Job Opportunity Investment Network (JOIN).

The founding partners of JOIN have raised $1.6 million and have close to another $2 million in the pipeline from other entities that are in the process of submitting requests for funding to their board of directors, Bergheiser said. In addition, JOIN applied last month for $450,000 over three years from NFWS– the maximum grant support it can receive — which will have to be matched 25 cents on the dollar. With or without the grant support, JOIN will roll out, he said.

“I think it’s critical; our target audience is people marginally attached to the work force,” Bergheiser said. “A lot of times they are the very first to go in an economy like this.”

Look for more information in coming months about JOIN. What questions do you have about this new network?