In an article in the Miami Herald, Ilan Ziv, executive producer of the project, says:

The idea behind Havana-Miami is to use human experiences that are very similar to help connect audiences and overcome their political alienation ... The stories from Havana are very similar to the Miami stories: People trying to survive and dreaming about their future. When you explore the huge cultural and human connection that exists between Miami and Havana, the commonality of people's experiences outweighs their political differences.

The project is being produced by University of Miami School of Communication graduate students Mark Shumow and Mark Mocahbee, with the help of undergraduate students who are filming the Miami participants and a Cuban film making team in Havana. The project is funded by Arte, a French-German TV network, and in association with the Knight Center for International Media at the University of Miami.

This three-month web series is comprised of six short (2-minute long) video updates each week and will be completed in May. Viewers can watch the web series as it unfolds  at http://www.havana-miami.tv. A stand-alone documentary will be produced upon completion of the series.

Teach For America is the national corps of recent college graduates who commit to teaching at public schools for two years and become livelong leaders in education. Today, 7,300 corps members and 17,000 alumni are working for fundamental change to ensure educational excellence and equity.

Kimberly Williams, a Teach For America corps educator at Miami Central Senior High School, and her 11th grade student Kettysha Collydmore shared their stories Thursday night to an audience of Miami-Dade corps educators:

Dennis Scholl, Miami Program Director for Knight Foundation, believes that Teach for America is the right program to create systemic change in Miami's education system.

"The achievement gap in this community's schools is a massive gap. But the good news is it's fixable – and Teach for America knows how to do it," Scholl said Thursday night. "Today, [Teach For America educators] are changing the culture of our schools, classroom by classroom. Tomorrow, we expect [them] to stick around as alumni and be the educators and advocates Miami-Dade needs to continue to move this community forward."

A feeder pattern for teacher placement has been developed to help ensure students success is maintained over time. Teachers will move from elementary schools to middle schools and from middle schools to high schools so that students have the opportunity to be a part of Teach For America for more than one year.

Read the Miami Herald for a story and an editorial on Teach For America. To learn more and donate, visit http://teachforamerica.org/.

Phillies fans celebrate victory during a parade on Broad Street in downtown Philadelphia in November 2008. Creative Commons photo by Flickr member SnakeManRob.

Katherine Loflin, lead consultant for Knight Foundation's Soul of the Community, a three-year study with Gallup, presented an overview of the project and identified three community factors that emotionally attach residents to the Philadelphia area: (1)Openness and (2) social offerings, both of which need improvement to further encourage attachment to place, and (3) aesthetics, which is seen by residents of Philadelphia as a community strength.

These findings are not exclusive to Philadelphia. In the third year the study, these three factors are consistently emerging as being key to tying residents to place in all 26 communities that are a part of the study.

Communicating findings from Soul of the Community is crucial to helping local government and community leaders better understand why residents choose to make a particular place their home.

Gary Steuer, Chief Cultural Officer for the City of Philadelphia, writes in his blog:

"I think this research can serve as a persuasive new public policy tool in helping decision-makers understand the role that arts and culture play in a community ..."

Loflin adds: "It's always very rewarding to share this information with community leadership and residents because their enthusiasm and interest in the findings continue to show us that we are on to something important here."

For more on Soul of the Community, please visit soulofthecommunity.org.

Skyline of downtown Charlotte. Photo by John Ashley via Flickr.

While Charlotte was growing during the boom times of the last decade, poverty was less visible. Today, it's not only more visible, it's at the heart of two critical issues facing the city: educating our children and providing affordable housing for our residents. Like most of the country, Charlotte has seen unemployment rates rise over the past few years and more than 15.8% of Charlotte's nearly one million residents are currently living in poverty. In May 2009, a study found 2,989 homeless children enrolled in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system.

Susan Patterson, program director for Charlotte, says Knight has begun investing in projects to address these critical issues.

The Urban Ministry Center's Moore Place project will provide permanent supportive housing for chronically homeless men and women. It's one piece of a continuum of services needed to reduce the number of people in over-crowded shelters in the community.

Knight's investment in Citizen Schools is supporting public education by extending the learning day with citizen teachers. The middle school students learn new skills, and the volunteers learn more about the needs and desires of public school students.

Patterson is hopeful that momentum is growing to address these critical issues and credits the city's new mayor, Anthony Foxx, for making them part of his agenda.

When Neal came to the foundation, ''she not only brought a lifetime of insight and experience, but a love for Akron, her community,'' said Alberto Ibargüen, president and chief executive of the Knight Foundation. ''She has been a player in Knight's involvement in Team NEO, the University Park Alliance, the Austen BioInnovation Institute, education projects with Akron's school board and superintendent and countless other small and big projects around town. She understands Akron, she loves Akron, she wants Akron to succeed. And her work always showed it.''

You can read the entire story at Ohio.com

Included in this round of KCIC winners are a diverse range of projects - from raising public awareness on vital local issues to creating online community forums to stimulate dialogue among residents to conducting an online cultural treasure hunt. The list of winners also includes the Challenge's first collaboration among several local foundations seeking to make a regional impact. From the news release:

“Information is as important to a thriving democracy as clean air, jobs and schools. As leaders, local foundations are taking the initiative to meet those information needs,” said Trabian Shorters , Knight Foundation’s vice president for communities, who leads the Challenge. “These projects help ensure that everyone has the information necessary to make decisions about their governments and their lives.”

You can read details about all of the winning projects at InformationNeeds.org.

Speaking of InformationNeeds.org, the site has been redesigned in conjunction with today's announcement. There, you'll not only find more information about the Challenge, but also information on the upcoming Media Learning Seminar, as well as plenty of archived video resources from past seminars.

Since 1988, Knight has worked closely with community foundations in these cities, and believes they offer an important grassroots grasp of the issues that can help guide funding. From the release:

“Information is an essential community need and community foundations were established to meet core needs,” said Alberto Ibargüen, Knight Foundation’s president and CEO. “They also only exist and thrive because of community engagement and contributions. That makes them ideal partners to help us understand and advance local community engagement, focused on ensuring that these communities have the information they need to mange their affairs in our democracy.”

A new position will be created at Knight Foundation’s Miami headquarters to direct the initiative.

"Our goal is to better coordinate and focus our initiatives in the Knight communities and use our resources in the most effective way possible,” said Trabian Shorters, Knight Foundation’s vice president for communities. “The new director will work together with foundation staff and advisory committees in each Knight community to guide the local foundations on use of the funds.”

Read the full news release for more details on the initiative.

When we last wrote about Knight's Library Initiative, it was a $3.3 million effort to empower libraries in 12 communities to become true information centers for their communities, with expanded wifi access, mobile computing labs, job-hunting assistance, digital literacy training and more. Today, Knight's announcing an expansion of that effort - the Foundation will distribute $5.5 million to  20 communities around the country:

Strengthening residents’ ability to use the Internet to improve their lives, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will help libraries in 20 U.S. communities enhance digital access and training.

The effort is part of the foundation’s $5.5 million Library Initiative.  Launched in October, Knight is expanding it to eight additional communities, the foundation announced today.

In October, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy released its report, finding that libraries are critical to a community's information infrastructure. Today's grant announcement signals Knight's commitment to helping usher these institutions into the digital era.

The resulting report by Andre Oliver is a sobering picture of the challenges met in trying to transform the community. And the report itself is still making an impact. Most recently, a column in the Miami Herald this week about the continued setbacks in Overtown cited the report in its analysis:

In 2000, the Miami-based Knight Foundation made a major effort to transform Overtown with a $19 million commitment to 32 national and community organizations.

Two years ago, the foundation published an analysis of its effort, showing mixed results.

Among the main obstacles, according to the report: a lack of a common vision in the community and a void in community leadership and collaboration.

"The role of the city and the county in Overtown's development remains critical, but has been challenging,'' the report stated.

The Overtown report is part of a series of reporter's analyses funded by Knight. Each of them encapsulates valuable lessons about how our grants play out in the communities they affect. And they offer a candid picture of both our setbacks and our successes. If you want to get a sense of what Knight considers when making a grant, this might be a good place to start.

Cross-posted from the Soul of the Community blog.

Meredith Hector, Knight's program director in Bradenton, wrote an op-ed about the Soul of the Community study that was published in the Bradenton Herald this morning. Here's a taste:

Soul of the Community is a study of perceptions. Unlike the latest unemployment figures, we can change what people think and how they feel. That is why we can be experiencing one of the worst economic declines in recent memory, and still have a large percentage of residents who love where they live.

The economy is bad everywhere. Folks don’t appear to be blaming their financial troubles on where they live. Instead, there are other community features that drive people’s perception that the Bradenton area is a place they enjoy and recommend to others.

Luckily for us, these features also happen to be ones we can influence.

Two key features are perceived as community strengths in Bradenton: our social offerings (fun places to gather and meet people) and our aesthetics (the region’s physical beauty and green spaces).

But a third feature, openness — or how welcoming a place is perceived to be for different demographic groups — merits extra attention and work.

You can read the rest at Bradenton.com. Then come back and give us your thoughts.