The Miami-Dade Broadband Coalition officially opened its doors with a ribbon cutting ceremony on Aug. 11.

The launch was the result of more than three years of planning with stakeholders in education, healthcare, government, non-profits and the private sector. The task has been challenging but immensely rewarding.

Our goal is to increase the "technology quota" of our community, in order to attract new industries and provide economic and educational opportunities for Miami-Dade County residents.  By banding together, the coalition’s anchor members have already begun to increase the availability of  high-speed Internet access across our community while at the same time lowering its cost.

A portion of the realized savings will be reinvested in the community through the coalition’s sponsorship of training and Internet connectivity for our underserved neighborhoods.  The coalition is funded by a grant from Knight Foundation, as part of its efforts to ensure communities have access to information through universal broadband.

While our goal is ambitious, our success will provide a more resilient, diverse and self-sustaining local economy.  We invite you to watch our progress through our website, and hope that you will join us in “Connecting our community for a brighter future!!”

-  James E. Osteen, Jr.

Saint Paul Mayor Chris Coleman's  recent  news update  included two items that are both near and dear to Knight Foundation - and great news for the city.

First, Coleman announced a new  fund to help small businesses survive construction of the Central Corridor Light Rail Transit line, 11-miles of rail that will connect Minneapolis and St. Paul.  The  Central Corridor Funders Collaborative  was instrumental in supporting the planning for the project and then leveraged $1 million in public funds with a $500,000  grant . Knight was one of the lead foundations that helped launch this funders collaborative.  The line is scheduled to open for riders in 2014.

The second focused on the public launch of Knight's  library grant to support a  Mobile  Workplace . It will provide ten classes every week throughout the summer to teach residents the essential computer skills they need to compete in the 21st century.  By bringing these classes out into the community, we are able to reach residents who don’t have ready access to computers or the internet. Many of the people who attend these classes have never used a computer before, and digital literacy has become a prerequisite for the modern workplace.   One great part of this initiative is that we are able to offer classes to residents in English, Somali, Spanish, Hmong, Karen, Amharic, and Tigrinya.

The grant was part of Knight's Library Initiative, a 20-city effort to enhance digital access and training.

Siobahn Canty

Siobhan Canty joins Knight Foundation this week – bringing two decades of experience in community engagement and nonprofit development to the Strategic Initiatives program.

Canty most recently worked as a U.S. change leader for Ashoka, Innovators for the Public. She also founded a consulting practice for nonprofits and businesses, and was president and CEO of Greater DC Cares, the largest volunteer facilitator in the Washington, D.C., area.

Knight’s Strategic Initiatives Program supports innovative leaders and organizations working across disciplines to promote informed and engaged communities.

From today’s release: “Siobhan has the experience Knight needs to help identify and cultivate organizations that understand the life cycle and effective management of engaged community members,” said Paula Ellis, Knight Foundation’s vice president of strategic initiatives.  “Her range of experience – from local community organizer to national innovator in volunteering – allows her to see the issues of engagement from a unique and valuable perspective.”

Hundreds of volunteers from around the Detroit region participated in four KaBOOM! playground builds Saturday.  Two sites, Starlight Baptist and Jude Baptist, are faith-based organizations with strong community ties.  The Jude playground is connected to a community center that includes a daycare for residents on Detroit’s east side.

Focus Hope chose Paul Robeson Academy to partner with and the place was packed with children from the school doing their part in the build.  The school band entertained the volunteers and the cheer team motivated folks to proceed even with the threat of inclement weather. Congressman John Conyers told a story about knowing Paul Robeson, the actor and political activist for whom the school was named.  Other elected officials were in attendance including Wayne County Commissioner Keith Williams.  Commissioner Williams contributed the match funds to support the project build.

At ACCESS in Dearborn, the build had a hip hop flare.  The music kept the volunteers in an upbeat mode while their spirit for supporting their community was shared by all.  Mothers brought food and a local firefighter brought the fire trucks and entertained the small children.

Some of the people who volunteered got so excited they volunteered to do more for the organizations building the playgrounds.

Knight Foundation is funding volunteers to build 13 playgrounds in five cities this year in an effort to engage residents in strengthening their community.

Seeking Sustainability: A Nonprofit News Roundtable

Anyone curious about the future of journalism – and how news outlets can effectively inform people in the digital age, while surviving as a business – should check out a new Knight Foundation report, Seeking Sustainability: A Nonprofit News Roundtable.

The report (accompanied by videos) summarizes one of the first roundtable discussions of its kind with 12 groundbreaking nonprofit news organizations, including California Watch, a project of the Center for Investigating Reporting; The Huffington Post Investigative Fund; Chicago News Cooperative; Voice of San Diego and The Texas Tribune.

Knight Foundation sponsored the roundtable in April, which was co-hosted by The Texas Tribune, Voice of San Diego and the Knight Chair in Journalism at The University of Texas at Austin. In addition to the news groups detailing their experiences, several dozen funders, academics and researchers from around the country shared their perspectives.  They touched on the issues all online news startups are experimenting with: journalism and advertising models, ways to generate revenue, interacting with and building community and technology and innovation.

Lessons learned and questions explored:

• When getting an online news enterprise off the ground, participants agreed that “structure matters.” Nontraditional media groups need to be entrepreneurial, adaptive, collaborative and flexible. Diversity of revenue and approaches to creating journalistic and community value is key to sustainability.
• A group’s success at developing strong community and media partnerships seemed to be linked more to its leadership, business model and visibility than to its initial financial support.
• Most of the startups agreed on the importance of finding partners in traditional media that can publish their work and provide support (both organizational and financial). The Texas Tribune, for example, has partnered with NPR. Public media were viewed as the most natural collaborators because they share a nonprofit, community information mission.
• In terms of creating revenue streams, memberships were considered an effective way to raise money as well as to foster engagement. Incentives or benefits to membership need to be explored, such as those offered by symphonies and public media.
• News startups, which typically have very limited tech staffing and budget, seem to find most success using existing technology rather than developing their own tools. Voice of San Diego, for example, acquired an iPhone app for a small licensing fee.

While participants agreed that nonprofit news startups face serious challenges, including financial self-sufficiency, those at the roundtable have enjoyed significant success carrying out their missions. In this sphere of journalism, optimism is reigning.

Knight funded the Lex Mundi Foundation to create a web site that provides free legal support and resources to non-profit organizations.

Lex Mundi is dedicated to linking social entrepreneurs to pro bono legal services from law firms across the country and abroad.

If you are a social entrepreneur, or your organization is working on social innovation, we hope you take advantage of the Lex Mundi network and their new site.

Jose Zamora is a journalism program associate at Knight Foundation.

More than 200 participants are representing several dozen federal agencies and more than 20 corporations and organizations.  Knight is one of two foundations invited to the roundtable to give advice on how contests and open grant making are driving innovation.

The meeting is designed to encourage citizen involvement in matters that affect them. That goal merges with the Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive, which seeks to elicit ideas from top American thinkers and doers to address the nation’s problems.

Knight Foundation has committed millions of dollars to a range of contests it sponsors to encourage innovation in journalism, the arts and community information and engagement. There’s the Knight News Challenge, the Knight Arts Challenge and the Knight Community Information Challenge.

Watch the live stream, Tweet your questions to #opengov and see Jose’s presentation at Knightchallenge.net.

Beverly Blake, Knight’s Macon-based program director, was on the road when the news broke in Georgia. She’s attending the invitation-only FiberFête in Lafayette, La., learning about that community’s innovative fiber optic infrastructure and municipal broadband network, already in place. Before she left, she commented on the impact the mobile library will have when it takes to the road in 2011. “Digital access is essential to first-class citizenship in our society. Without digital, you lack full access to information; you are second class economically and even socially. While the mobile library will benefit families and individuals, the staff of CVL will also benefit as they learn more about the people they serve and how CVL can provide those customers access to computers, the Internet and materials that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to obtain.”

The grant to CVL is part of a $5.7 million Knight Foundation initiative benefiting library users in 20 communities across the United States. The effort reinforces the recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, a project of the Aspen Institute. In a report issued earlier this year, the Commission concluded that democracy in America is threatened by the lack of equal access to quality information. Funding public libraries as centers of digital and media training is one key to fill the gaps.

Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, recently explained that the newspaper is now as much a technology company as a journalism company.

This year’s South by South West Interactive (SxSWi) indicates he’s not the only one thinking that way. When the conference started 16 years ago, it was strictly tech, a convening of engineers, software developers and coders. But this year, everywhere you turned, it seemed, there was another journalist and or media organizations. And there were many panels about technology and the future of news.

It demonstrates how far media organizations have come in embracing technology and using it in “digitally native” ways to inform and engage their communities.

-- By Jose Zamora, Journalism Program Associate, Knight Foundation

FCC/Knight America's Digital Inclusion-Mignon Clyburn from The Newseum on Vimeo.