Spring 1999 Articles

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These articles have been reprinted from the fall 1998 Knight Foundation newsletter. If you would like a print version, e-mail us at publications@knightfdn.org

John Gardner: Work Together as Convenors

John Gardner, the respected proponent of civic responsibility, urged a gathering of community advisers and community foundation leaders from Knight foundation's locales to work together as convenors to strengthen "the web of community."

Gardner, founding chairman of Common Cause and a founder of Independent Sector, said communities are held together by shared values and mutual obligation. They are characterized by responsibility, caring and trust. He suggested that the devolution challenge posed by the federal government’s shift of responsibility to the local level provided the audience both common ground and opportunity.

"Most of our cities are conglomerations of disparate cultures out of touch with each other," he said. "They often have a hard time understanding each other. If those of us who have the opportunity don’t work hard to realize [devolution’s] goals, it’ll be another exhibit in the Museum of Missed Opportunities."

The dinner opened a two-day gathering mingling two groups vital to the way Knight Foundation operates in a majority of its 26 communities of interest. The community advisers are newspaper publishers for Knight Ridder who offer voluntary advice and perspective on their communities to the Miami-based Foundation.

Their feedback is a distinctive aspect of Knight's community initiatives program, which seeks to enhance the quality of life in cities and towns where the Knight brothers published newspapers. The program makes grants in seven areas of interest: local arts and culture, children/social welfare, citizenship, community development, local education, homelessness and literacy.

"It’s a great advantage to us as a community-oriented foundation to be guided by men and women who are intimately familiar with their cities and towns," said Hodding Carter III, Knight's president and CEO. "We treasure the association."

Foundation staffers are making fact-finding visits to the five Knight communities where Knight Ridder no longer has a presence to consider different advisory options. Knight Foundation continues to serve as a community funder in Boca Raton, Boulder, Gary, Long Beach and Milledgeville which were Knight Foundation communities when the Knight brothers completed the foundation's funding.

A majority of the publishers are also involved with the 17 Knight Foundation donor-advised funds established so far in a campaign to strengthen community foundations. Income from the funds allows each community foundation to make grants to a variety of projects that wouldn’t normally receive Knight'support.

"The Knight funds give the advisers, working with the community foundations, the discretion to make timely, smaller grants, often to new or emerging organizations," said Penelope McPhee, vice president and chief program officer. "It’s an excellent way to learn about the grassroots culture thriving in our communities."

Gardner is a consulting professor at Stanford University. A one-time Cabinet secretary, he has advised several U.S. presidents since beginning his public service career in 1942.

Storm Relief Grants Help Georges’ Victims

Organizations providing relief to the victims of Hurricane Georges in the Florida Keys, Mississippi’s Gulf Coast and the Caribbean will benefit immediately and in the future from $800,000 in grants and emergency aid approved by Knight foundation's Grants Review Committee.

The late September storm carved a path of destruction across the Caribbean basin before striking the Lower Keys and hitting the Gulf Coast near Biloxi.

The committee approved grants to the following U.S.-based organizations:

• The American Red Cross will receive a $200,000 grant. Red Cross chapters working in the Biloxi region and the Florida Keys will receive $50,000 each. The remaining $100,000 will go toward relief efforts in Puerto Rico.

• The Salvation Army will split $100,000 – $50,000 to the Keys and the other half to Mississippi chapters serving Biloxi, Gulfport and Pascagoula.

• The Miami chapters of World Relief and Catholic Charities will share $200,000 in their recovery efforts in the hard-hit nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

• The committee also established a pool of $300,000 to respond to requests over the next year from individual nonprofit organizations in the Keys and Biloxi dealing with the hurricane’s effects, with emphasis on organizations addressing human needs and infrastructure rebuilding.

"We hope these funds boost the organizations helping out in the Florida Keys, the Gulf Coast communities and Puerto Rico," said Hodding Carter III, Knight's president and CEO. "Miami’s deep connections through kinship and geography made the grants to the U.S. organizations working in the hardest-hit Caribbean nations all the more vital."

Trustee Alvah H. Chapman Jr. chairs the Grants Review Committee. Chapman led South Florida’s We Will Rebuild effort in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in August 1992.

Knight Journalism Grants Reach $100 Million Plateau

The Knight International Press Fellowship, a program that has sent nearly 100 U.S. news executives and journalists on international assignments in the past five years to help build a free press worldwide, will continue through 2000 with a $2.4 million grant approved in September by Knight foundation's trustees.

The grant to the International Center for Journalists was the largest of 12 journalism grants totaling $6,935,000 approved by Knight's trustees. Adding that total to past journalism grant making means that Knight Foundation has now given more than $100 million toward its historic goals of journalistic excellence and defense of a free press.

"The $100 million plateau is a challenge as well as a signal accomplishment," said Hodding Carter III, Knight's president and CEO. "The thoughtful direction and leadership throughout from the Knight brothers, from the visionary Lee Hills and from my predecessor, Creed Black, have carved a distinguished record over many years, not only in journalism grant making but in the foundation's other programs as well."

The International Press Fellowship program sends senior newsroom executives, business managers and veteran reporters to fragile democracies in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and Latin America.

September’s journalism grants supported a variety of Knight Foundation priorities including strengthened international programs, greater diversity in the field and enhanced educational opportunities for current and future journalists including the 1998 Knight Chair in Journalism at Columbia University. Other key journalism grant recipients:

• The Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, Oakland, Calif., will use $900,000 over three years for the management, editing and Total Community Coverage programs. The Maynard Institute will conduct programs for and provide services to media professionals, particularly people of color, which will create a larger pool of strong candidates prepared for advancement to news industry leadership positions.

• The American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., will use $360,000 over three years to support three U.S. journalists’ participation each year in the American Political Science Association Congressional Fellowship program. The fellows work for nine months on Capitol Hill.

Columbia Gets Latest Knight Chair in Journalism; Knight Professors Meet

When Knight foundation's trustees launched the Knight Chair in Journalism program eight years ago, they could hardly have imagined the scene in late September at a Texas barbecue joint in Austin. Crammed elbow-to-elbow around two noisy tables, a group of seasoned journalists-turned-educators sat with rolled-up sleeves, diving with equal gusto into piles of ribs and serious conversation about journalism and how to teach it.

This third annual gathering of the Knight chairholders – a cadre whose ranks grew by one in September with the award of the latest Knight Chair to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism – demonstrated the program’s power and potential. In three days of meetings hosted by the University of Texas School of Journalism, the professors reported on their own campus activities, discussed major trends in the field and agreed to collaborate on a yet-to-be-defined assessment of journalism’s current and future status.

Columbia’s Knight chairholder will focus on news coverage of business. The school will supplement the foundation's $1.5 million grant to endow the John S. and James L. Knight Chair in Business Journalism to be held by a distinguished business journalist.

Since the program began in 1990, Knight Foundation has endowed permanent teaching positions at 12 top U.S. colleges and universities to bolster journalism education.

"The Knight Chairs were created to provide a strong professional influence on good academic programs," said Del Brinkman, director of journalism programs. "We’ve seen how they’ve had a real impact individually on their campuses, and we know there’s a cachet attached to the Knight Chair positions. There is so much broad experience within this group, it’s exciting to think of the possibilities for sharing it with a bigger audience."

The new Knight professor at Columbia will teach in the journalism school, and will also work with the Graduate School of Business and the Knight-Bagehot Fellowships in Economics and Business Journalism. The Knight-Bagehot program enables experienced journalists to become adept at reporting on complex financial issues.

"This teaching position builds on the school’s strengths and dovetails nicely with our previous support for the Knight-Bagehot program," said Hodding Carter III, Knight's president and CEO.

Funding for the new chair is the second step in creating a Center for Economics and Business Journalism at the school, according to Columbia Dean Tom Goldstein.

Knight chairholders include some of the nation’s most respected working journalists, recent practitioners and journalism educators including Duke’s William Raspberry, Maryland’s Haynes Johnson and North Carolina’s Phil Meyer. Other schools with Knight professors include Kansas, Michigan State, Florida A&M, Texas, Arizona State and Washington & Lee. Columbia now joins recent recipients Missouri and Florida in conducting searches for Knight professors. Also invited to attend the Knight Chair gatherings are Stuart Loory, the Lee Hills Chair in Free Press Studies at Missouri; and Jack Balkin, the Knight Chair in Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School.

Five Communities Have Opportunity to Reinvent Libraries

In their golden days, local public libraries opened ornate doors and invited readers into a hushed, book-lined universe of information on every subject imaginable. A library card was a family’s passport to adventuresome reading, a student’s starting place for research, a neighborhood’s key to community.

In contrast, most of us now get our information, often in isolation, in hard-to-imagine ways: on the Web, in digitized print, over the airwaves.

Libraries for the Future, a New York-based resource center and technical assistance provider for library advocates, helps communities transform their free public libraries into modern centers for learning, community development and information.

Through a recent $98,700 Knight Foundation grant to Libraries for the Future, five Knight communities will be able to rethink and revitalize the role of their libraries.

"Our experience in other cities has shown that community libraries can become energetic places for interaction and information access," said Michael Holzman, program director for Libraries for the Future. "In geographically or culturally isolated neighborhoods, information access is generally scant. The community library should, and can be a place for residents of all ages to meet and exchange ideas not only in their own neighborhood, but in the global neighborhood as well."

Libraries in Detroit, Long Beach, Myrtle Beach, San Jose and St. Paul will work with the organization’s coordinators, public advocates, education officials and other community members. Together, they will customize their own programs using the organization’s ACCESS partnership model.

ACCESS programs have had measurable success in 15 other U.S. cities using all or some of the following components:

• Youth ACCESS, which promotes communication and leadership skills through an after-school library program.
• Community Development, which nourishes local civic and community participation through library resources, new communications technology and networked information.
• Family Place, which creates family and child development centers at neighborhood libraries.
• Educational Collaboratives, which tests innovative teaching approaches and promotes school/library collaboration.
  
  
  

Status Report: St. Paul Arts Organizations Play Key Role in Riverfront Redevelopment

St. Paul, like so many other cities, was born on the banks of a river. Not just any river, though. St. Paul straddles the mighty Mississippi at its northernmost navigable point, and from that vantage point Minnesota’s capital city became a hub of transportation, commerce and government.

But over time, the downtown grew up and away from the river. Riverbanks once teeming with life and commerce in the Industrial Age grew aged and dingy, scarred by pollution and decay. "Like a lot of cities, we turned our back to the river over the past 50 years," said Patrick Seeb, executive director of St. Paul Riverfront Corp.

Beginning in 1994, Mayor Norm Coleman and many others began talking about "reconnecting St. Paul to its soul, the Mississippi River." Five years later, that connection is carefully mapped out in a comprehensive development framework. A flurry of new construction and redevelopment involving some $1 billion in public/private financing speaks of progress. Tangible projects include the newly opened, pedestrian-friendly Wabasha Bridge; improvements to the RiverCentre convention complex; an adjoining, $130 million professional hockey arena; a new, under-construction Science Museum of Minnesota and a 70-acre regional park that will invite people once again to the river’s edge.

While the river’s renaissance has plugged significant citizen involvement into efforts from the business, civic, nonprofit, retail, entertainment and government sectors, Seeb credits a rarely appreciated source of leadership. "In many ways, the arts community led the way in how the city reawakened to its potential relationship to the river," he said.

"When St. Paul was struggling most in the early ’90s, it was the arts community that was still growing and thriving and investing in downtown," said Seeb. "It has been a source of energy from which we’ve been able to draw as we proceed."

The Twin Cities benefit from a strong philanthropic and corporate giving sector. Knight Foundation is but one of many funders contributing to a number of artistic, cultural and community development organizations involved in the riverfront rebirth. Six Knight grants in the past six months have gone to St. Paul-based arts organizations that have been key players at critical times in developing awareness, coalescing community involvement and spearheading the turnaround.

"The city of St. Paul is experiencing a remarkable makeover, and the key to its success is the riverfront," said Rick Sadowski, Knight foundation's local adviser and publisher of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, which also has taken a lead role in explaining the promise and importance of the riverfront plan. "The river is the glue that holds together the key components of the plan: retail, jobs, housing, arts and entertainment."

"It’s not news that arts organizations have been players in urban revitalization projects in cities throughout the country," said Gary Burger, director of Knight's arts and culture programs. "What is particularly intriguing about St. Paul – and of particular appeal to the Knight Foundation – is that cultural organizations have been so thoroughly involved in inspiring a common vision and reclaiming the riverfront. Their success in St. Paul should offer inspiration to arts organizations in all of our communities by again proving that culture does have a place at the community-planning table.

"That’s not to say that St. Paul is alone," Burger added. "In Detroit, the symphony is in the midst of a major capital project that will help turn the Woodward Avenue corridor around. The Columbus Challenge, as part of a long-term redevelopment project in Columbus, Ga., has raised more than $90 million to build, renovate or endow major cultural facilities. In Philadelphia, the Avenue of the Arts and Independence Mall are key parts of Mayor Ed Rendell’s lofty vision for the city’s future. In other cities such as San Jose, arts organizations have participated in the development of long-range cultural plans, while in Charlotte and Long Beach they have joined forces to create cooperative marketing ventures."

According to Seeb and others, St. Paul’s arts community was a constant participant as the ideas for a new riverfront began to take shape.

When planners sought community involvement in developing a design for the new Wabasha Bridge, arts and culture representatives were involved under the leadership of Public Art St. Paul, a nonprofit organization advocating for public art. The new bridge, which carries traffic from downtown to the West Side, features wide pedestrian walkways, scenic vistas of the river and skyline, bike paths and stairways to the riverfront below. The St. Paul-based American Composers Forum, a September grantee for its Continental Harmony project, commissioned a piece, St. Paul Crossing, to commemorate the bridge’s grand opening Sept. 12.

In 1994, just as the St. Paul Riverfront Corp. began pursuing its mission of getting people interested in the river again, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra stepped to the podium. SPCO performed a riverfront concert on a barge, a performance that invited people right to the river’s edge and got them talking of possibilities. The SPCO is one of 10 U.S. orchestras involved in Knight's national symphony music initiative. The Ordway Theater, home of the SPCO, has also been a central player in the discussion of St. Paul’s long-range plans.

That same year, a key piece fell in place when the Science Museum of Minnesota committed to building its new 300,000-square-foot facility at the Upper Landing, an 18-acre riverfront stretch of unused, polluted land. The $100 million museum is scheduled for completion in December 1999. A 1995 Knight grant went to the building campaign, and a September grant of $100,000 will help the museum carry out an educational collaboration with the Minnesota Orchestra.

"Figuratively, the river was an opportunity waiting to happen," said Kathleen Wilson, vice president for external relations with the Science Museum. "We turned our eyes in the direction of the waterfront and wound up designing a riverfront site for our new facility."

Directly across the street is the newly improved RiverCentre Convention complex. The city’s old Civic Center is being demolished; rising in its place is a new $130 million home of the Minnesota Wild, a 1999 expansion team that will bring professional hockey back to the Twin Cities.

Finally, St. Paul leaders broke ground Sept. 22 on a $13.5 million restoration of the 70-acre Harriet Island Regional Park, a long-neglected stretch of greenery on the river’s opposite bank. Plans call for a great lawn, a promenade at the water’s edge, grand staircases, public art and performance spaces for arts groups. The University of Minnesota’s paddlewheeled Centennial Showboat, now being restored, will be docked at the park.

The Harriet Island park fronts the ethnically diverse, redeveloping West Side neighborhood, which offers promising sites for residential and commercial redevelopment. The park is set to reopen May 2000, on the 100^th anniversary of its donation to the city.

Other pieces are joining the arts and culture contributions to complete the St. Paul redevelopment puzzle. The plan encourages new industry to locate on the river in human-scale buildings. In the future, new neighborhoods are planned whose residents will use the parks and public spaces.

"The Mississippi is an international icon," said Wilson of the Science Museum. "The fact that it’s running through our backyard is pretty exciting."

North Dakota Full-Service School Program Expands to Four More Schools

An idea first tested in South Carolina – that teachers could concentrate on teaching if schools also offered a range of social services to meet students’ overall needs – has reached full fruition in the plains of North Dakota.

The University of North Dakota’s College of Education will use a $549,000 September grant along with Grand Forks Schools to expand a pilot School as the Center of the Community Project (SCCP) at Lake Agassiz Elementary to four other schools.

The latest in a series of large-scale education reform grants to Knight communities, the Grand Forks project shows how one community can learn from and replicate another’s program.

In 1992, Columbia College in South Carolina received its first Excellence in Education grant from Knight to collaborate with local public schools in launching the first school as a center of the community. Under the leadership of Dr. James Solomon Jr., the project centralized educational, social, health and community services under one roof. It blossomed at Alcorn

Middle School in Columbia,'s .C., and the collaborators received transitional funding in 1996 to continue the program and evaluate its progress.

Meanwhile, UND’s Excellence in Education project had concentrated on interdisciplinary curriculum and professional development. Knight's Director of Education Programs

A. Richardson Love Jr. introduced UND Dean Mary Harris and Lake Agassiz Principal Sharon Gates to the SCCP idea. In collaboration, they put a pilot program into place. It worked especially well as the community coped with the aftermath of the Red River floods of 1997. Given the benefit of locating the services and educators in close proximity, it seemed an opportune time to expand the program.

"We think this provides a way to think together about how to help families in the Grand Forks community," Harris told the Grand Forks Herald.

"Mary Harris, Sharon Gates and their many colleagues have worked hard and with great success to get this ambitious collaborative off the ground," said Love. "We are delighted to help them build on such a promising start."

A team from Grand Forks traveled south to Columbia in March to learn more about the program. The visit was reciprocated in May when Columbia’s SCCP team got the lay of the land in Grand Forks. "This visit helped the Grand Forks group move beyond the ‘what if’ discussions to the ‘how to’ discussions," wrote Barb Jacobsen, a project coordinator.

Long Beach Organizations Continue Seamless System of Education

Long Beach has grabbed national attention for its collaborative efforts to provide a seamless system of education for its students and for its special focus on the important middle school years in education reform.

Key members of Knight foundation's staff learned a great deal about those goals during a fact-finding visit to Long Beach in July. In recognition of the community’s collaborative efforts, the Foundation has approved three grants to organizations focusing on children, youth and education in Long Beach.

"Everyone we met in Long Beach talked of the importance of youth and seamless education," said Hodding Carter III, Knight foundation's president and CEO, who headed the visit. "These grants provide an opportunity for us. They are meant to increase the impact of a variety of projects, all shaped in a community that understands the importance of collaboration. They are also fortuitous in that they allow Knight Foundation to look at the community and its priorities in a systemic way."

A $450,000 grant to California State University Long Beach is addressing the state’s notable shortage of classroom-ready teachers. The Long Beach Standards-Based Teacher Preparation Project is a collaboration among the university, the Long Beach Unified School District and Long Beach City College. The project broadens the definition of teacher education by involving college and university faculty from all disciplines – not just the school of education – in the preparation of future teachers. The project includes a redesign of the Liberal Studies curriculum, and ties better teaching and improved content instruction for teachers to national, state and local standards for what students should know and be able to do.

"The partner institutions have committed to an unprecedented level of cooperation to assure that local college graduates meet the highest standards for employment as teachers," said A. Richardson Love Jr., Knight's director of education programs.

The Los Angeles Educational Partnership will receive $150,000 over two years to complete the installation of a client tracking system and the FASTNet information network, which allow schools to better provide social service referrals for students and families and track them over time.

Finally, the Boys and Girls Club of Long Beach will use $105,000 for a club at Washington Middle School, the second school-based club site. A pilot program funded in 1992 by Knight Foundation established a well-attended Boys and Girls Club at Franklin Middle School in collaboration with the school district to provide services for youngsters ages 7-18. An early evaluation shows that kids who participate are more motivated in school, finish more of their assignments and improve their reading levels.

 

Fort Wayne Addresses its Youth Violence Dilemma with an Alternative Program for Middle-School Students

Though they are moving ahead at varying speeds, community-driven organizations in 19 Knight Foundation locales are incubators for big-picture ideas and solutions to the nation’s troubling outbreak of youth violence.

Biloxi’s planners gleaned local views on the subject by distributing snazzy yellow fliers in the Sunday Sun Herald, complemented by an editorial urging readers to find the questionnaire and complete it. In Myrtle Beach, a countywide coalition of social service agencies, businesses and local leaders will meet to coordinate a comprehensive plan of attack. In Charlotte, the Teen Health Connection is taking the lead in developing a similar strategic plan for the whole community.

And in Fort Wayne, Knight foundation's Initiative to Prevent Youth Violence and Promote Youth Development has taken its largest stride yet toward action. A $300,000, three-year implementation grant approved in September is helping Fort Wayne Community Schools expand a successful alternative program for middle-school students who have a history of discipline problems, poor attendance and low grades.

Knight Foundation began the initiative in 1996 to help Knight communities craft strategic, local responses to the daunting youth violence epidemic and to prevent it with realistic approaches.

The Fort Wayne project started its long journey toward a solution in a critically important place: local middle schools, with their vulnerable population of preteen and teen-age students. The project recognizes that academic failure can be part of a downward spiral which may include dropping out of school and youth crime and violence. The community’s discussions about providing alternatives for students in trouble ultimately led Fort Wayne Community Schools to start its FOCUS Program last year. Middle-school students attend a two-period program instead of their elective classes and get tutoring, homework assistance and social skills training. They are evaluated at the end of each grading period. Initial results were encouraging: absenteeism by FOCUS students decreased by 52 percent, and 64 percent improved their grades.

Knight's grant will help expand the FOCUS Program to all middle schools in the Fort Wayne school district by testing a new model. At five sites supported by Knight Foundation, a teaching assistant and computer-assisted instruction will augment the specially trained teacher already at each site. Fort Wayne Community Schools plans to serve more students while maintaining the same quality programming.

"This is a tremendous boost to our efforts to help kids be successful," Superintendent Thomas Fowler-Finn told the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel.

So far, Knight has invited proposals from organizations in 19 communities in the invitation-only undertaking. For most communities, an initial grant provides support for a comprehensive strategic planning process. Two such planning grants were approved at the September board meeting for Charlotte ($72,620) and Myrtle Beach ($49,198).

 

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These articles have been reprinted from the summer 1998 Knight Foundation newsletter. If you would like a print version, e-mail us at publications@knightfdn.org

 

North Dakota Visit Gives Trustees a Feel for ‘Community’

Drenched by flood and singed by flame 16 months ago, residents of the Red River Valley of the North are tapping ample reservoirs of community spirit as they rebuild and reinvent their cities.

Knight foundation's trustees and senior staff traveled to Grand Forks, N.D., in mid-June to witness the region’s progress as it emerges from the calamitous blizzards, epic floods and fires that gutted 11 downtown buildings in the spring of 1997. Floodwaters inundated much of the community and caused the biggest civilian evacuation of a U.S. community since the Civil War.

On tours around town, in meetings with community leaders and at social gatherings, the message was clear: Grand Forks and East Grand Forks are working together for a better future. They have been aided in part by the foundation's commitment of $1 million for disaster relief and recovery.

"Communities find their resiliency through great disasters and they discover hidden talents and resources they didn’t know they had," said Laurel Reuter, founder and director of the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks. "The flood brought folks together who had never spoken with each other and forced them to appreciate each other. This has given us an opportunity to work together in a way that few communities will ever experience."

During the flood, the museum opened its doors to the community, providing refuge to displaced nonprofit organizations, potluck community suppers and a temporary home for the Bible Baptist Church. In the final distribution from the $1 million Knight contribution, the museum received $122,000 to collect and archive material, commission works of art and mount a two-part exhibition on the flood and its impact.

"Grand Forks proved to all of us from Knight that the civic enterprise is an abiding reality in the Red River Valley," said Hodding Carter III, the foundation's president and CEO, one of about 20 Knight visitors. "We came away more convinced than ever that community involvement is the heart and soul of our democracy."

Michael Maidenberg, president and publisher of the Grand Forks Herald and a member of the foundation's Community Initiatives Advisory Committee, served as host and led the community tours. The flood-related fire destroyed three Herald buildings, but the newspaper continued to publish and won'the 1997 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service this April.

Rising 97 feet above the street, a clock tower gracing the Herald’s new home symbolizes Grand Forks’ commitment to its historic downtown. The height is a reminder of the year of the flood; the rotunda dome beneath it rises to 54.11 feet – the level of the Red’s flood crest. The foundation's tour included the new Herald and the Museum of Art. Two other projects receiving post-flood Knight funding were also involved: the multipurpose Empire Arts Center, a refurbished theater serving as home to a variety of arts organizations; and Cafe Kosmos, a new teen center and restaurant. A bird’s-eye rendering in the Empire’s lobby offered a vision of a new city center, complete with commercial, arts and professional districts and a massive flood wall coursing through downtown and its surrounding neighborhoods.

The visit included a sampling of flood-related photography, art and drama at the Empire and the Muse-um of Art; a funders’ session with grant-seekers; and a community dinner at the 6,000-acre Scott Farm in Gilby, an appropriate demonstration of agriculture’s leading role in the valley’s economy.

Grand Forks is one of the 26 U.S. cities and towns where the Foundation concentrates its local grant making in the community initiatives program. The June board meeting is an annual opportunity for the board and staff to get acquainted with a Knight community.

"There’s no better way for this foundation's trustees and staff to learn about the impact of our grants than these in-depth visits," said Linda Raybin, director of community initiatives programs.

 

National Projects Give Millennium an Artistic Flair

Two of the nation’s most significant cultural efforts marking the new millennium – one a White House-led campaign to preserve the Star-Spangled Banner, the other a photographic and written survey to interpret American culture – are moving toward 2001 with Knight Foundation support.

The three-story-high flag that flew over Fort McHenry during the War of 1812 and inspired Francis Scott Key to compose the words of the National Anthem will undergo three years of conservation treatment beginning in October. Knight's $250,000 grant to the Smithsonian Institution, where the flag has been on exhibit since 1907, is part of a national, $18-million undertaking – one of the largest textile preservation projects in America.

The campaign was launched at the Smithsonian July 13 as the lead project in the White House Millennium Council’s Tour to Save America’s Treasures. The multicultural preservation effort is chaired by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The flag, which has been hanging since 1964 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, has undergone two previous conservation efforts.

The 30- by 34-foot flag will be laid out in a special conservation lab at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The lab has been designed so that the public will be able to view the work as it progresses. A variety of educational and outreach programs are planned for the duration of the project. When treatment is completed in 2002, the flag will be placed in a three-story, climate-controlled protective enclosure in a renovated Flag Hall.

"Our goal here is to stabilize this flag, not to make it look new," said Suzanne Thomassen-Krauss, the museum’s senior conservator.

"This project, in addition to ensuring the long life of one of America’s great cultural icons, spotlights the importance of preserving the millions of other documents, artworks and artifacts – in public and private collections – which together define our national identity," said Gary Burger, Knight's director of arts and culture programs.

A $100,000 Knight grant goes to the College of Santa Fe for the National Millennium Survey. The project grows out of the rich American'tradition of image-based surveys such as the Civil War photos of Matthew Brady and the Farm Security Administration project to document rural America during the Depression. The survey is the lead project for the National Endowment of the Arts in the White House Millennium Program.

The survey is a creation of James Enyeart, director of the Anne and John Marion Center for Photographic Arts at the College of Santa Fe. The project will hire 40 established and emerging photographers and 25 writers to produce work over the next two years commenting on such aspects of American life as family, diversity, forces of tradition and ritual, consumerism and search for community.

The survey will culminate in 2001 with a touring exhibition, a digital archive and a series of books by leading publishers. The Knight grant supports the $700,000 project and matches a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which has recognized this as its flagship millennium project.

Said Burger: "This survey is a model for engaging artists to document American life at this unprecedented moment."

 

A Science Journalism Veteran Hands Over the Keys at MIT

July looms large in Victor McElheny’s career.

As a Boston Globe science writer in July 1969, he watched Apollo 11 lift off from Florida for mankind’s first walk on the moon. In July 1977 as a technology reporter for The New York Times, he explained to readers how a lightning-triggered power failure blacked out the Big Apple. And on July 1 this year, he made way for successor Boyce Rensberger after serving since 1982 as founding director of what is now the Knight'science Journalism Fellowships at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

McElheny has served the longest stint among those who head the eight midcareer journalism programs receiving major funding from Knight Foundation. Through 15 years at MIT and in the company of some 154 Knight Fellows, he shaped a respected program by staying true to the field of science journalism.

"The ultimate goal here has been to contribute to a better understanding of science and technology," said McElheny. "It’s kind of hard to measure the success of that. What we can measure is the number of folks who stay in the field. We’ve kept in pretty close touch, and just a handful of the fellows who have been through here have dropped out of science journalism and education. It’s a sign we’re doing something right."

"It’s hard to separate Victor from the program," says 1989-90 Knight Fellow David Baron, a science and environment reporter for National Public Radio. "When I began my year as a fellow, I was working all by myself in a little newsroom with WBUR in Boston. I didn’t think of myself as a part of a community of science journalists. The program at MIT helped me develop a sense of identity as a science journalist because I was with people who recognized its importance and who also saw it as a noble profession. Victor had a big part to play in that."

McElheny came to the job with the right resume: Seasoned science journalist for newspapers and magazines; director of the Banbury Center of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; Nieman Fellow at Harvard; a year with Polaroid Corp.

He welcomed the first group of fellows to Cambridge in the ’83-84 school year and helped secure funding and endowment for the program, including $8 million from Knight Foundation since 1987.

"These programs are a very special kind of activity at a university; they’re kind of strange," McElheny says. "They’re for highly active, questioning midcareer people. They’re not just nice young students; they’re demanding. We encourage a lot of individual exploring on campus beyond the courses."

That, he adds, is by necessity. McElheny notes a shift in landscape for science writers and other specialized journalists.

"We’re going to have to be talking about our subjects in an increasingly grown-up way because society is growing up," says McElheny. "Consumers, citizens, employees and investors need much more sophisticated information than 10 or 15 years ago. The subject matter gets more complicated; translating it easily into journalism gets more difficult."

Rensberger, formerly a science writer and science editor at The Washington Post, says he agrees. "Science writing is the toughest beat at a newspaper because science moves forward, and the subject matter gets harder and harder to understand," he says. "The program Victor created has become essential to helping journalism keep up."

McElheny awaits the fall publication of Insisting on the Impossible, his biography of Polaroid’s Edwin Land.

"The Knight Fellowship program at MIT has developed into a top-notch experience for science journalists under Vic’s leadership," said Del Brinkman, the foundation's director of journalism programs. "Vic’s talents, combined with his excellent administrative skills, have created a program which should continue to grow in stature and results under the promising stewardship of Boyce Rensberger."

 

Status Report: New Online Survey Helps CIS Keep Students in School

This is the 10^th in a series of in-depth articles on Knight Foundation programs and initiatives.

On a parched June afternoon, Susan McCallion watches a cheerful file of 8- and 9-year-old boys bop past her into a computer classroom at the NFL/Youth Education Town Center in Miami’s Liberty City. They are among 350 kids attending a summer education/recreation program; most live nearby in a sprawling public housing tract.

McCallion remembers spending two months getting one of these youngsters to open up enough to reveal that his mother was an alcoholic. Had she known that earlier, said McCallion, executive director of Miami’s Communities In Schools, she would be better equipped to help keep him in school and out of trouble.

For now, he’s there, he’s happy and out of harm’s way. As he moves into the middle- and high-school years, that will be far less certain.

What if that shy child and millions of others like him could provide in-depth information about themselves and how they relate to friends, family, school and neighborhood in a low-impact way? Wouldn’t that help shape the kinds of services and incentives needed over the span of students’ studies to keep them thriving in school, all the way to graduation and beyond?

That’s the notion behind the School Success Profile (SSP), an innovative assessment tool that gleans the inside stuff from at-risk students and leads to better ways of meeting their needs.

Three grants totaling just over $950,000 approved in June by Knight foundation's trustees link the university researchers who created the SSP with students and schools in South Florida and Wichita. The grants support the development, testing and increased use of the survey so that middle- and high-school students have better odds of succeeding.

In the "glass-is-half-empty" world of dropouts, gangs, teen pregnancy, poverty, broken families and low self-esteem, Communities In Schools (CIS) has grown into the nation’s largest stay-in-school network, incorporating half-full optimism as it works with 300,000 children in 28 states. CIS believes that each child deserves four basics: a one-on-one relationship with a caring adult; a safe place to learn and grow; a marketable skill to use upon graduation and a chance to give back to peers and community.

Since 1990, Knight Foundation has provided nearly $3.5 million in 17 different grants to the national CIS organization in Alexandria, Va., its local affiliates and partners.

The CIS challenge is significant. McCallion works in Miami-Dade County, where 8.4 percent of the significant Hispanic student population left school in 1996-97. And even though the rate for blacks and whites is lower (7.5 percent and 5.5 percent, respectively), McCallion looks at her charges in Liberty City and says, "They’re all at risk."

The CIS mission of helping kids help themselves emerged from a life lesson by founder Bill Milliken. "Removed" from high school as a dead-end student, Milliken and a friend hung out in a Pittsburgh pool hall until a youth program worker showed enough faith in them to set them on the right course. Milliken and friend later vowed to use the power of such positive relationships to get kids off the streets, eventually starting storefront schools in Brooklyn in 1966 to provide dropouts a place to finish their education and get marketable skills.

The approach caught the attention of funders and President Jimmy Carter; by 1977, the whole student concept was known as Cities In Schools. Now Communities In Schools, the network relies on trained local staff, volunteers, board members and local private and corporate funders to use and coordinate existing community services – social workers, tutors, counselors, health providers, employers – for young people at risk of dropping out.

Knight foundation's relationship as a funding partner with CIS has evolved, with support going to CIS affiliates in our communities to help with start-up costs, develop school-to-work mentoring programs and create alternative schools. As the national network expanded, Knight provided funding and challenge grants to help institute national standards at the local level and provide training and technical assistance. Now, through the advancement of the SSP questionnaire, the network has available a concrete and sophisticated linkage of academic theory and grass-roots application.

"Among the many national organizations we support, none is more effective in working at the local level than Communities In Schools," said A. Richardson Love Jr., Knight foundation's director of education programs. "They are skillful and sensitive in helping communities organize and use their resources well to reach students and families most in need."

In paper form, the SSP survey is a self-guided, easy-to-follow set of 112 questions such as "Do you have a dependable way to get to school?" and "How often are you afraid that someone will hurt or bother you at school?"

Professors Gary Bowen and Jack Richman developed the survey at the Jordan Institute for Families at the School of Social Work, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It has been field-tested in Charlotte and Philadelphia schools.

Bowen said the pilot test results show that about one in five students is afraid at school and in the neighborhood. "We can’t expect students to perform at school when they face situations of fear and danger," he said. "We have to go beyond the school to also consider students in the context of neighborhood, family and peer group. The role of neighborhood influences has been virtually ignored in past studies of school performance."

A $581,000 grant over three years will help the Jordan Institute develop and test an online SSP. The institute will also develop Spanish language, audio and elementary-school versions.

A regional collaboration involving Communities In Schools organizations in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties – serving three of the nation’s largest urban school districts – will use a $222,500 grant to offer the survey to 600 students in each county. It’s the largest and most diverse use of the survey yet. The project, linking nine schools and the NFL/YET Center where McCallion’s summer program was getting under way in late June, will provide a variety of results for evaluation.

CIS of Wichita will use $150,000 to incorporate the survey in its development of a comprehensive evaluation plan. All three grants enable CIS to develop customized approaches for each child known as individualized intervention plans.

"We believe the School Success Profile can help local Communities In Schools organizations become even more successful by better matching programs to individual needs and stretching limited resources to reach more students," said Love."

It’s an ambitious program for a network intending to reach at least one million kids by 2000.

"I’m excited that I’ve lived long enough to see it get this far," Milliken said in an interview. "I have more hope now than at any time since I started almost 30 years ago."

 

Grants Create a Career Path in Arts for African-Americans

Two very different arts organizations with the same goal – providing more jobs and career opportunities for African-Americans in the arts – will use Knight funding from the arts and culture program to help diversify their fields.

A $100,000 grant to the trustees of Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., will help in the development, assembly and mounting of the exhibition, "To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities," its national tour and related educational programs.

The multifaceted educational and artistic project has been developed by a consortium of 10 institutions to select, conserve, document and display up to 200 important artworks in the collections of six historically black universities: Clark Atlanta, Fisk, Hampton, Howard, North Carolina Central and Tuskegee.

A key part of the project focuses on a conservation and collection-care training program for minority students. The summer art conservation training program at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center for selected students from each of the participating schools will be complemented by month-long collection-care summer workshops at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy and the Studio Museum in Harlem. The Addison Gallery and Studio Museum are also serving as co-organizers of the touring exhibit.

In Philadelphia, a $50,000 grant will help the New Freedom Theatre continue an internship program offering advanced training and career experience to young people interested in theater. The theater – an educational, drama and community center for African-American youth – will use the internship program to give local high school and college students the full spectrum of professional theater opportunities, including production and presentation of plays and musicals, background in development and fund raising, administration and theater management.

"These exemplary projects highlight the great potential of creative, hands-on training to increase diversity in the cultural workplace," said Gary Burger, Knight foundation's director of arts and culture programs.

 

Teaching Corps to Develop Classroom Savvy

Teach For America, an organization addressing the shortage of teachers in the nation’s urban and rural public schools in the past decade, will use a Knight Foundation grant to bolster the professional development of its teaching corps.

Since 1989, Teach For America has recruited, trained and placed in 500 U.S. schools some 4,000 outstanding graduates of the nation’s leading colleges and universities who had not been prepared formally to teach. In the process of reaching more than 600,000 of the nation’s most underserved school children, TFA has also succeeded in recruiting minority and bilingual teachers, male elementary teachers and math and science teachers. Surveys have given TFA teachers high ratings.

Not without its critics – among them established teacher educators who object to placing inexperienced recruits in challenging classrooms – TFA has grown, carried by the persistence of its founder, Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp. Knight funding – four grants dating to 1991 – has helped the organization move toward efficiency and stability.

Since experiencing financial uncertainty at mid-decade, TFA has gone through three consecutive years of reorganization.

A $300,000 Knight grant will help TFA develop the capacity of its 13 regional offices over three years to help build relationships with local educational resources, organize support networks of TFA alumni and corps members and encourage its teachers to take more personal responsibility for their own professional development.

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These articles have been reprinted from the spring 1998 Knight Foundation newsletter.

Status Report: An Interview with President and CEO Hodding Carter

Editor’s note: Hodding Carter III became president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation on Feb. 2, 1998. A few months into the job, he answered these questions from Director of Communications Larry Meyer.

Q: Your biography describes Hodding Carter III as "an award-winning journalist and commentator with a career-long minor in public affairs." What aspects of those previous job descriptions best prepared you for this new career in philanthropy?

A: Thanks to the workings of pure serendipity, virtually everything I’ve done up to now seems to have been a form of preparation for Knight Foundation. My earlier life as a working newspaperman, my latter-day incarnation as a Knight Chair professor of journalism and those in-between years of intense interest in the problems and products of American education at all levels are obvious examples. Less obvious, perhaps, are the lessons learned from participating in a host of community-based enterprises from Head Start to symphony orchestras. Knight's direct areas of concern happen to coincide with many of my own.

As for that "minor in public affairs," it drove home one lasting lesson: In this vast federal republic of ours, if you can’t make solutions work at the local level, they aren’t solutions. What philanthropy can and should offer is the seed money or support for local innovation, hoping it can have broader application across the nation.

Q: You come from a distinguished newspaper family and have worked in nearly all aspects of the media. You’ve been heard to say that journalism is under assault. What do you mean by that, and how does it relate to Knight foundation's funding in journalism education and free press?

A: The assault takes many forms and comes from many directions. For instance, there is a certain confusion these days about the root function of journalism. Is it a business whose product happens to be the news, but could as easily be rivets, or is it a calling to serve the public interest, given special place and responsibility by the First Amendment, that depends on profits to survive, prosper and expand? Listen to some of the debate about journalism’s recent leap into collective irresponsibility and it’s hard to escape the impression that hard-won standards are the permanent casualties of the new multimedia competition.

There are equally dangerous threats facing the press -- the media -- from without. There is a corrosive public cynicism about our protestations and practices, only a portion of it deserved. There is the continued effort by government, and indeed by all forms of concentrated power, to wall off their work from public scrutiny, which basically means from press scrutiny. And while unabashed public challenges to freedom of the press are the exception in this country, side-door efforts to hamper or restrict it are commonplace.

Finally, in much of the rest of the world the assault is unambiguous and, too often, uninhibited. Journalists are killed, "disappeared," tortured and economically intimidated in too many countries. Press freedom is a fragile bud in the post-thaw lands of eastern and central Europe, not to mention in Africa and much of Asia.

In the face of these poisonous realities, Knight foundation's sustained support for journalism education, midcareer training and press freedom advocacy offers a partial antidote. There is no one answer to the current problems facing journalism, but there is no answer at all without well-trained reporters, committed editors and an abiding respect throughout the news business for the rights and responsibilities that go with First Amendment freedoms. Encouraging all three has been the cornerstone of the foundation's work.

Q: You have many associations with education, among them longtime trustee at Princeton and the Knight Chair at Maryland’s College of Journalism. Share your basic views on education, please.

A: Public education that delivers is the bedrock of democracy and of a just society. It is also the common meeting ground, or should be, for the disparate folk who make up our land. If America is to make good on its fundamental promises, the public school system must work for the benefit of all students and higher education must offer quality and accessibility to students of all ages and income groups.

Q: Knight Foundation has shown itself to be a willing participant in collaborative funding, notably in our arts and culture programs. With a new arts funder’s fresh eyes, tell us what you see in the future for the arts in America.

A: We live and share in the world’s most democratic culture. How that translates in terms of quality as well as quantity in the arts is an eternally open question, the source of creative tension as well as angst. Knight Foundation has been, as you noted, a frequent collaborator with others who believe that the arts in all their manifestations are too important to be ghettoized on the one hand or adulterated into pap on the other. But taking the long view that you suggest, I think that the coming decade or two offers as much potential for the arts as any other time in American history.

Q: Grant making in 26 U.S. communities is a key aspect of what we do. How do you plan to get acquainted with those communities, their leaders and their needs and opportunities?

A: The first necessity is simply to catch up on what we have previously supported in our communities. That is a sizable task in itself, given the breadth and depth of Knight's previous efforts. But beyond reading about those many programs, I intend to visit each community and see firsthand the programs and peoples with which we have formed partnerships. That done, I’ll have a better idea not only of where we are but of where we might consider going.

Q: U.S. foundations run the gamut of enormous to small, quiet to highly proactive. Where do you see Knight Foundation fitting in that universe and doing its best work?

A: We believe in the partnership approach and have responded to numerous external initiatives. However, we have also not hesitated to take the lead when we saw an opportunity or need. Knight has always walked and talked softly, but has also carried a major programmatic stick when that seemed appropriate. That mixed approach will continue.

Q: Now that you’re on the funder side of the funder and applicant equation, what can you say about foundation behaviors? Do you plan to change any here at Knight Foundation?

A: As a longtime petitioner for foundation largesse, I encountered a fair share of foundation executives who seemed to believe that because someone had put them on third base, they had hit a triple. That is not my impression of Knight foundation's past attitude and I trust it won’t characterize our future behavior.

Q: What are your immediate goals for Knight Foundation?

A: To insure that it doesn’t suffer from a new president’s insistence on reinventing the wheel on the one hand and rushing off in new directions without adequate exploration on the other. The needs that confront any foundation are immense. The trick is to be selective, responsive and innovative simultaneously.

Q: Finally, are you having fun yet?

A: Anyone who can’t have fun working with and for a foundation as well-grounded and focused as Knight is a person who can’t have fun, period. I can and am.

Trustees Recommit to Local Grant Making in 26 Communities

Knight foundation's board of trustees has affirmed its commitment to community initiative grant making in 26 American cities.

As it has evolved since its founding in 1950, Knight Foundation makes national grants in three programs: journalism, education and arts and culture. Its fourth program, community initiatives, is concentrated in communities where the Knight brothers published newspapers.

Those 26 communities, which were receiving local grants at the time of founder James L. Knight's death in 1991, are: Aberdeen,'s .D.; Akron, Ohio; Biloxi, Miss.; Boca Raton, Fla.; Boulder, Colo.; Bradenton, Fla.; Charlotte, N.C.; Columbia,'s .C.; Columbus, Ga.; Detroit, Mich.; Duluth, Minn.; Fort Wayne, Ind.; Gary, Ind.; Grand Forks, N.D.; Lexington, Ky.; Long Beach, Calif.; Macon, Ga.; Miami, Fla.; Milledgeville, Ga.; Myrtle Beach,'s .C.; Philadelphia, Pa.; St. Paul, Minn.; San Jose, Calif.; State College, Pa.; Tallahassee, Fla.; and Wichita, Kan.

"These metropolitan centers, midsized cities and small rural communities are a representative cross section of the American landscape, and they have served us well as a laboratory for innovation and entrepreneurial grant making," Hodding Carter III, president and CEO of Knight Foundation, said in March. "We look forward to deepening our relationship with these Knight Foundation communities."

The foundation's trustees began a review of their community grant making following a series of newspaper acquisitions, sales and trades in 1997 by Knight Ridder, the national communications company.

The Foundation is wholly separate from and independent of Knight Ridder’s newspapers. The trustees’ conclusion means the foundation's choice of cities where it will make community initiatives grants is not tied to Knight Ridder ownership decisions.

"The trustees studied a number of scenarios, and at the end of the day the one that made the most sense was to settle on the 26 cities and towns where we were operating when Jim Knight died," said Carter.

In establishing a fixed group of 26 communities, the trustees agreed to continue making grants in the Contra Costa region of California through the end of 2000. Contra Costa became a Knight Foundation community in 1995, four years after Jim Knight's death.

Transition Funding Helps Excellence in Education ProjectsEvolve

Seven colleges and universities across the country now engaged in collaborative education reform efforts with local public schools will share $835,000 in transition grants to stretch their innovative boundaries as part of Knight foundation's Excellence in Education Initiative.

One of Knight foundation's most sustained efforts, the initiative encourages stronger relationships between colleges and schools that share the goal of improving education from kindergarten through college. The Excellence program has previously awarded nearly $8 million to 26 school/college partnerships around the nation since it began in December 1992. Many of the projects have served as test sites for some of the nation’s most innovative approaches to better teaching and learning.

The seven recipients are part of a third wave of partnerships that received initial funding three years ago. They will use this second, transitional grant for up to three more years to continue their projects to a point of demonstrating the impact on student achievement and share the results of their work.

The institutions receiving the latest round of transition grants are:

• Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md., $250,000, to adapt and pilot test the Roots and Wings reform design – a success at the elementary school level – in two middle schools in Miami-Dade County, Fla. Roots and Wings is a comprehensive program for restructuring schools to assure that all students achieve world-class standards (see box). The initial grant, which introduced Roots and Wings to three elementary schools in low-income neighborhoods as part of a national field test, encouraged the spread of the reform model has spread to 48 Miami-Dade elementary schools.
• Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, Fla., $200,000, to evaluate the Accelerated Schools reform model and test the Read, Write and Type instructional software as a means for improving reading achievement.
• Northern State University, Aberdeen,'s .D., $120,000, to enhance the impact of the Writing to Learn project by evaluating its effect on student learning and by embedding and sharing successful approaches for improving writing instruction.
• University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Miss., $100,000, to strengthen, embed and share the most successful portions of a comprehensive reform of the Biloxi School District’s K-12 mathematics curriculum.
• Indiana University Northwest, Gary, Ind., $100,000, to collaborate with the Gary Community Schools, the Gary ACCORD and other organizations to improve student achievement and career opportunities.
• Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C., $50,000, to develop distance learning and school-based applied research components for Project Achieve, an outreach effort intended to increase the number of teachers certified to teach deaf and hard-of-hearing students, and to develop a joint applied research program with partner schools.
• Haverford College, Haverford, Pa., $15,000, to distribute a workbook developed by the Inquiry in Science and Math project and to provide incentives for college faculty to continue work with local school teachers.

"Schools and colleges have a great deal to learn from each other," said A. Richardson Love Jr., the foundation's director of education programs. "Our transition grants offer existing projects an opportunity to share what they have learned, deepen the impact of their collaborative efforts and grow into lasting relationships."

The transition grants are an outgrowth of an evaluation of the Excellence program, which found that while the initial three-year grants got the ambitious projects going, they didn’t provide enough time to demonstrate and document real impact on student learning.

Roots and Wings Model Takes Root in Middle Schools

Can Roots and Wings, a success with elementary students, succeed in middle school?

The answer may be emerging at Henry Filer Middle School in Hialeah, Fla., home to 1,600 exuberant sixth- through eighth-graders. Drawing from Miami-Dade County’s blue-collar cities and neighborhoods, Filer has a student body that is 91 percent Hispanic, including a fair number of recent arrivals from Latin America. More than 89 percent are eligible for free or reduced school lunches.

Since 1994, Miami-Dade Public Schools has collaborated with Johns Hopkins University in testing and using Roots and Wings as one of 26 Knight Foundation Excellence in Education projects. From a start as a pilot test in three elementaries, Roots and Wings has spread to 48 schools in the nation’s fourth-largest school district.

Now, thanks to a $250,000 Excellence transition grant to Johns Hopkins, Filer and Shenandoah Middle Schools are the test sites for making the move into the middle school environs.

"Statistically, kids drop in reading scores when they hit the sixth grade, and we’re really working hard to keep that from happening," said Filer Assistant Principal Leonor Andreu.

While all of this provides an appropriate backdrop for a pilot test of a cooperative teaching and learning method, it’s of little concern to the preteens in LaVerne Mason’s second-period language arts class. Clad in Filer’s colors of green, black and white, the 34 advanced sixth-graders are more interested in a good book. They sit in clusters of five, busily discussing the first two chapters of Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, a story of an adventurous 13-year-old.

"We read two chapters, and then we write about the book, and then we share our writing with each other and talk about it," says an 11-year-old girl, describing the cooperative emphasis.

Mason, a 24-year classroom veteran – all at Filer Middle – began learning about and using the curriculum and teaching principles of Roots and Wings last year. She’s one of a team of sixth-grade teachers to have received extensive training last summer in the Roots and Wings approach. The team has been working together during the 1997-98 school year, teaching reading and writing, math, science, social studies and art to a group of nearly 300 Filer sixth-graders.

"I noticed last year that some of the reluctant learners were saved by the end of the semester by using this cooperative approach," said Mason.

While it’s too early to tell if test results will support the anecdotal positives at Filer, Andreu is cautiously optimistic. "It’s a wonderful approach, but you have to make sure that there’s buy-in from the teachers. All the training in the world won’t work if the teachers don’t follow through."

Musician-Led Orchestras in Initiative Continue Innovative Programs

Two orchestras, distinctive in that they are led and managed by their musicians, have received the latest grants in Knight foundation's national symphony initiative.

The seven-year-old Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra will go forward with two innovative programs developed to enhance the connections among musicians and their audiences, the orchestra family and the New Orleans community with the help of a $400,000, three-year implementation grant.

The Colorado Symphony Association of Denver received a second $50,000 planning grant to help it continue testing the musician-driven Explore the Music! Project, primarily for audience research. The new planning grant will also help the Colorado ensemble focus on how to incorporate the project’s innovations under new administrative leadership.

Louisiana and Colorado are among 10 orchestras nationwide involved in the initiative, testing promising ideas for creating a greater sense of excitement in the concert-going experience and a more vital relationship between artists and audiences. The grants, approved at the March meeting of Knight foundation's board of trustees, were reviewed and recommended by a seven-member "Magic of Music" symphony advisory committee.

The first of Louisiana’s programs is the classical but casual Beethoven & Blue Jeans series in which musicians are seated on risers wearing color-coded polo shirts according to section. The series also uses pre-concert block parties, in-concert video and post-concert informational gatherings called Soundings with Music Director Klauspeter Seibel. In early April, Seibel conducted a program featuring works by Beethoven, Bartok and Berlioz. And the symphony’s American Crossings series offers multidisciplinary programming to explore New Orleans’ rich cultural heritage using classical, nonclassical and contemporary works presented with stage settings, dramatic lighting, readings and video. Both programs involve planning retreats with community leaders, marketing campaigns and efforts to attract first-time attendees.

"These two grants exemplify both the process and the purpose of the foundation's symphony initiative," said Gary Burger, Knight's director of arts and culture programs. "Colorado is analyzing its audience and pilot testing ideas, while Louisiana is applying lessons learned. Both are taking creative and well-considered risks in finding new ways to engage their audiences and their communities."

"The Louisiana Philharmonic, reflecting a great pride in New Orleans’ musical heritage, is privileged to be recognized nationally not only for its musician ‘cooperative’ management structure but also for extending a sense of connection into the concert hall," said Louisiana Executive Director Robert J. Stiles. "Knight Foundation has offered to be a catalyst in challenging orchestras and their audiences to reinvigorate the live concert experience. The relationship with our community is certainly poised to move forward not only with fiscal integrity and discipline, but also with the sheer joy of sharing our music."

Eight other symphonies nationwide are participating in planning or implementing programs in the initiative: The Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, New World Symphony, Kansas City Symphony, Oregon Symphony, The Philadelphia Orchestra, the San Antonio Symphony, the Saint Louis Symphony and The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.

Each of the initiative’s projects must engage the entire orchestra family, include a specific planning process and create, in effect, a workable laboratory in which to explore innovation.

CD-ROM Preserves Memories of Charlotte’s Black Neighborhoods

There was a time when the neighborhood of Brooklyn was considered the hub of commerce, education, religious and social life for Charlotte’s African-American community. It was North Carolina’s version of Harlem in its heyday.

But much of what thrived in Brooklyn has disappeared due to urban renewal, demographic upheaval, decay and redevelopment. Except for the memories of the folks who lived there, little remains of the old Brooklyn save for a couple office buildings.

Those memories of Brooklyn and other parts of the African-American community in Charlotte have been kept alive and preserved through the efforts of the Public Library of Charlotte-Mecklenburg. The effort holds promise for any community with a past worth preserving.

A 1991 Knight Foundation grant of $50,000 assisted in the publication of The African-American Album, a collection of materials chronicling black history in Charlotte. A second grant, this one in 1994, helped the library pursue and complete one of its latest projects – an interactive CD-ROM version titled African-American Album, Vol. 2 – The Black Experience in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.

The project combines images, sound and video highlighting the past 50 years of African-American history in Charlotte and the small neighborhoods within. Both projects combined the efforts of Charlotte natives, library staffers and volunteers. Materials came from newspaper archives, personal scrapbooks and dozens of other sources.

"I applaud the library for both projects," said Vermelle Ely, a long-time educator and black community leader who chaired the project. "I hope we can continue to work to preserve the community’s history and use the many materials given to us by community members for this project in the future."

With a computer and the CD-ROM, users can'take a virtual walk along an old Brooklyn parade route, hear the church voices, enter small shops and visit once-forgotten streets in Charlotte’s black neighborhoods.

"It is an educational tool," said Dick Pahle, the library’s director of development. "But it is much more – a dramatic presentation, a self-paced storyteller, a historical record that is enlightening, entertaining, moving."

For more information about the project, including how to acquire the CD-ROM, write: African American Album CD-ROM, Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, 310 North Tryon St., Charlotte, NC 28202.

Retention is the Key to Penn State Journalism Diversity Grant

This spring’s roster of graduates from the College of Communications at Penn State will include Heather Collins, who has 18 brothers and sisters, and Pernita Raghaven, who has made the dean’s list every semester. Another distinction: They will be the first graduates from State College to complete four years of study as Knight'scholars.

Collins and Raghaven are among the participants in Penn State’s diversity scholars program, which has been highly successful in recruiting and retaining minority students preparing for careers in journalism. A $120,000 Knight Foundation grant in March will help the program continue its work for the next three years.

A $100,000 grant in 1994 helped the College of Communications create the program. So far, each Knight'scholar recruited for and supported by the program has completed or continues to pursue journalism studies in a school with 2,400 students, including minority enrollment of 11 percent. The college’s minority student retention rate of 90.6 percent is the highest at Penn State and well above U.S. averages.

"Recruiting, retaining and graduating student journalists who can join U.S. newsrooms to help news coverage reflect the diversity of America is a priority for Knight foundation's journalism grant making," said Del Brinkman, director of journalism programs. "Penn State appears to have created a model diversity program with an especially high retention rate. We hope this new funding will give the school time to make the program self-sustaining."

Joseph Selden, director of the college’s office of multicultural affairs, says the program combines regular mentoring, financial assistance and professional opportunity for the Knight'scholars. The students work on the school newspaper and interact regularly with the staff of the Centre Daily Times in State College. The college has established an internship program with The Philadelphia Inquirer for Knight'scholars interested in print journalism.

"It’s really fortunate that we have the Centre Daily Times in our neighborhood and that we can'take advantage of our partnership," said Selden. "It facilitates a better understanding of journalism in the real world for our students."

Performing Arts Centers Benefit from Knight Grants

A funding drive for Greater Miami’s new performing arts complex -- a ballet/opera house and a symphony/concert hall built around an elliptical courtyard sliced by Biscayne Boulevard -- has moved much closer to its goal with the help of a $2.5 million Knight Foundation grant.

The Performing Arts Center of Greater Miami, designed by renowned architect Cesar Pelli, will be home to five major local performing arts organizations. When completed in 2002, the two signature buildings are expected to be centerpieces of downtown revitalization and redevelopment. The complex is just north of the new downtown arena under construction on Biscayne Bay.

"This is a great development for a project that Knight Foundation has been interested in for some time," said Hodding Carter III, president and CEO. "We hope this will further strengthen the community’s support for a top-flight cultural project that has the potential to change the way we think about Miami and its downtown."

With a $244 million construction budget and a groundbreaking scheduled sometime in 2000, the performing arts complex is being funded through a broad combination of public and private dollars.

Knight foundation's grant of $2.5 million to the South Florida Performing Arts Foundation boosts the private funding drive past the halfway mark in an effort to raise $48.2 million to build and endow the complex. Miami-Dade County commissioners approved $54 million in additional hotel taxes in November 1997 to enhance the public contribution.

The primary organizations to use the performing arts center will be the Concert Association of Florida, Florida Philharmonic Orchestra, Florida Grand Opera, Miami City Ballet and The New World Symphony. The complex will also be available at not-for-profit rates for use by the community’s smaller performing arts organizations and at commercial rates for other entities wishing to rent the facility.

      

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These articles have been reprinted from the winter 1998 Knight Foundation newsletter.

Arts, Education Groups Take Lead in Revitalization

Three forward-looking projects, two in Detroit and one in Columbus, Ga. -- are demonstrating that the arts and education can work together as driving forces of community development and revitalization.

In Detroit, a pair of leading cultural institutions -- the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village -- are spearheading significant public/private partnerships, each with $1 million Knight Foundation grants. And in Georgia, the Columbus Challenge is gaining a national reputation for its coordinated approach to arts funding leading to the creation of a multipurpose venue for culture and education. Interdisciplinary funding from Knight's arts and culture, education and community initiatives programs will increase the grants’ impact.

The DSO, renowned as one of the premier symphonies in the United States, will use its grant over two years to further advance its Orchestra Place Project, a collaborative venture to revitalize Orchestra Hall and Detroit’s Woodward Avenue Corridor. The $80 million project teams the orchestra with the Detroit Medical Center, the public schools and private financiers in the creation of a new home for the Detroit High School for the Fine and Performing Arts, an office and retail complex housing the medical center and the symphony offices, a parking structure and an expansion of Orchestra Hall.

The other Detroit grant supports the new Henry Ford Academy of Manufacturing Arts & Sciences and related renovations to the museum and Greenfield Village. The innovative public high school, which will enroll 400 students, is a collaboration among the Ford Motor Company, Michigan State University, the University of Michigan-Dearborn and local school districts.

"What makes the Henry Ford Academy project so compelling is that through the collaboration, the museum becomes the classroom, and its extraordinary collections become irreplaceable textbooks," said Gary Burger, director of arts and culture programs.

A $500,000 grant -- Knight's largest in Columbus -- moves the Columbus Challenge arts capital campaign a step closer to meeting its unprecedented $83 million goal. The campaign, which got major boosts through $35 million in grants from the Bradley-Turner Foundation, is directing construction of the RiverCenter for the Performing Arts -- the future home of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra and the Schwob Department of Music at Columbus State University -- in the city’s Uptown district. The campaign also provides funding for construction of the Woodruff Museum of Civil War Naval History and renovation of the Springer Opera House and Liberty Theatre.

In addition, the Columbus Challenge will create endowments for the Columbus Museum, the Coca-Cola Space Science Center, the orchestra and the opera house, and will provide revolving seed funds for historic preservation.

"These are major undertakings that cut across several key areas of Knight Foundation interest -- the arts, neighborhood revitalization and education," said Creed C. Black, president and CEO. "They are serving as catalysts for future development and developing future leaders. What they have in common are innovation and vision."

Five Liberal Arts Colleges Receive Presidential Leadership Grants

Five strong liberal arts colleges and their presidents received unexpected news Dec. 11 when they got $150,000 discretionary grants in the latest round of the Presidential Leadership program.

Schools accepting the ‘97 grants are: Berea College, Berea, Ky.; Carleton College, Northfield, Minn.; Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, Calif.; Colby College, Waterville, Maine; and Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio.

The unsolicited grants acknowledge the distinctive role of private liberal arts colleges and give the presidents the opportunity to exercise creative leadership aimed at strengthening their institutions for the future.

Claremont McKenna President Jack Stark responded immediately with thanks and a pledge. "The grant comes at a very opportune time," he wrote. "I shall use the funds as ‘start up money’ for a new research/teaching institute … concerned with work, family and children."

"We look for strong colleges with strong leaders," said A. Richardson Love Jr., director of education programs. "These grants are not just about past accomplishment but about future opportunity."

Knight's education advisory committee, a distinguished panel of five educators including four former college and university presidents, assisted in making the selections. The program, reinitiated in 1996, awards up to five grants of $150,000 annually to schools selected from among more than 150 private institutions designated as "Baccalaureate (Liberal Arts) College I" in the Carnegie foundation's Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.

While the grant intentionally goes to the school, use of the funds is left to the discretion of the college president with the expectation that it will be used to benefit the institution long term.

There is no application process; Knight Foundation initiates all grants in the program without direct communication with the schools.

Presidential Leadership grants in 1996 went to Centre College, Danville, Ky.; Denison University, Granville, Ohio; Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Fla.; Smith College, Northampton, Mass.; and Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa.

Here’s what Knight foundation's education advisory committee said about the schools and their presidents:

• Berea College has enjoyed throughout its distinguished history an unusual clarity of purpose and mission of service. That includes offering preferential admission to low-income students from southern Appalachia and a compulsory labor program that allows many of them to defray all education expenses. In recent years, under the effective leadership of President Larry D. Shinn, Berea has renewed its mission despite mounting forces of change and gained new momentum through a clearer articulation of its purpose and a more defined system for planning and strategic decision making.
• Carleton College, under the exceptionally well-rounded and strong leadership of President Stephen R. Lewis, has been notably successful in maintaining high academic standards, increasing its financial support and benefiting from renewed and growing alumni enthusiasm and involvement.
• Claremont McKenna College has made steady, impressive gains in every dimension of institutional quality during the nearly three decades of President Jack L. Stark’s distinguished leadership to emerge as one of the nation’s strongest colleges. Both Claremont McKenna and its president have also contributed significantly to maintaining the strong and enviable collaborative relationship among the Claremont Colleges, which offers mutual benefit while protecting institutional integrity and distinctiveness.
• Colby College is addressing the special opportunity and obligation to educate its students about the personal and social responsibilities distinctive to small residential colleges. Under the courageous leadership of President William R. Cotter, Colby tackled a difficult re-examination of its student residential life, planned and implemented a new residential system that emphasizes civic responsibility, enhanced its academic profile and substantially increased its alumni support.
• Oberlin College holds the distinction of being the first coeducational institution in the nation. In addition to its strong undergraduate liberal arts tradition, its conservatory of music has earned international acclaim. Inspired and guided by the skilled leadership of President Nancy Schrom Dye, Oberlin recently developed a new strategic framework for planning and decision making which incorporates both broad participation and decisive action for the future.

Akron Project Helps Attract Nation’s First Town Meeting on Race

Dr. Fannie L. Brown is executive director of the Coming Together Project, a community citizenship initiative that evolved from the Akron Beacon Journal’s award-winning 1993 series on racial relations. A two-year Knight Foundation grant of $105,000 in 1996 provided operating support for the project’s outreach activities. In the aftermath of President Clinton’s visit to Akron Dec. 3 to host the nation’s inaugural Town Meeting on Race Relations, Dr. Brown wrote this piece for Knight Foundation.

Have you heard that saying about success, about how it’s made up of three parts preparation, one part inspiration and one part pure luck? That’s how we’re feeling these days in Akron.

We got started on the Coming Together Project to bring people together to talk. We’ve tried to create an atmosphere to talk about racial harmony, about getting along, and hope people won’t be afraid to share their feelings. We hope to be a model for other cities.

It was exciting enough when President Clinton formed the national race relations commission in June, headed by historian John Hope Franklin. Folks here made sure the White House knew what was going on in Akron with the Coming Together Project, and we were pleased when U.S. Rep. Tom Sawyer got involved in September.

The Coming Together staff was ecstatic when representatives from President Clinton’s Initiative on Race Relations informed us in early November that information on the project would be posted, along with 13 other promising practices across the nation dedicated to improving racial harmony, on the White House’s One America web site (http://www.whitehouse.gov/initiatives/OneAmerica).

Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic arranged a press conference to unveil the national web site at City Hall on Nov. 6. Judith Winston, executive director of the initiative on race relations, entertained questions by phone. John Higgins, a Beacon Journal reporter, asked if Akron was being considered as a possible site for the first town meeting. Winston indicated Akron was "in the running." Six days later, I received the official call informing me Akron had been selected for the first town meeting due in part to the Coming Together Project.

I cannot express how overjoyed I was after receiving that call. After mentally processing the news, my excitement and energy were quickly diverted to making the necessary plans to host the president of the United States. What a humbling opportunity!

When Dec. 3 came, we were ready. The town meeting was at the E.J. Thomas Performing Arts Hall, and we had coverage from CNN,

C-SPAN and other national media. President Clinton was skilled in his efforts to extract pertinent comments from the 67 panelists selected from the Akron community. Major issues directly associated with race relations surfaced. We discussed issues such as racial disparity in our justice system in addition to the lack of educational and economic opportunities for minorities.

Most Akronites had only positive comments about the issues discussed during the meeting. The entire community was energized because of this historic event.

President Clinton’s visit to Akron has given new energy to the Coming Together Project. We’ve been privileged to accept the services of scores of volunteers; we’ve welcomed many additional organizations as members; and embraced an ever-increasing number of individuals, organizations, foundations and agencies offering financial support. We have launched a $1.6 million campaign to create an endowment to make the project self-sustaining. It has been an enormously exciting time.

However, I would be remiss if I did not mention the timely generosity of Knight Foundation for supporting the project financially during its embryonic stage.

Future plans for the project include affording people of all races, cultures, backgrounds and lifestyles additional opportunities to understand each other, by accepting and celebrating their differences while embracing their similarities.

New Initiative Seeks Answers to Violence

Representatives of the first four community projects to be funded in Knight foundation's Initiative to Promote Youth Development and Prevent Youth Violence gathered in Washington, D.C., in early December to share facts, fellowship and hope for the future.

The Foundation began the initiative last year seeking workable approaches in Knight communities to the daunting national epidemic. With the addition of three new planning grants approved by Knight's trustees in December, the Foundation has funded seven organizations so far to craft their own community-based solutions to fostering youth development and putting a halt to youth violence. The foundation's trustees expect to consider proposals from other Knight communities at their quarterly meetings this year.

The Washington conference drew participants from four organizations in the midst of planning their communities’ strategies. They are: Partners for Youth Foundation, Lexington, Ky.; the Initiative for Violence-Free Families and Communities in Ramsey County, St. Paul, Minn.; University of Southern Mississippi, Biloxi, Miss.; and the Greater Grand Forks Youth Committee, Grand Forks, N.D.

The participants gave background reports on their plans and discussed common challenges. Nancy Guerra of the University of Illinois at Chicago, the initiative’s technical assistance consultant, gave the participants tips on strategic planning and ideas for what works in putting together their collaborations.

"Being the first project funded, we sort of started out blind," said Lexington Partners for Youth Director Hasan Davis. "This gathering validated some of the things we’d been doing from the beginning as we heard from the other projects."

"There is no pre-existing blueprint for success in addressing youth violence," said Linda L. Raybin, director of community initiatives programs. "This makes it imperative for communities seeking solutions to this vexing problem to share and learn from each other. This meeting proved to be a dynamic learning experience for the Knight projects."

The planning grants approved in December went to Lexington/ Richland Alcohol and Drug Abuse Council of Columbia, S.C., $38,000 over two years, for Safe Futures, a comprehensive planning strategy for four Midlands counties in South Carolina; Oconee Prevention Resource Council, Milledgeville, Ga., $37,900 over two years for a plan covering Baldwin County; and University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colo., for the Boulder County Health Communities Initiative's youth violence prevention plan.

Status Report

This is the latest in a series of reports on Knight Foundation grants at work.

Going to Scale in Education Reform

For anyone involved in education reform, the question is classic and compelling: How do you take significant but small innovations in teaching and learning -- those proven effective in the classrooms of U.S. schools -- and make them available to more teachers and students?

In the field, it’s called "going to scale." In practice, it has proven difficult to move good ideas from little successes to broader application without commitment, resources -- and a certain amount of risk.

Since 1993, the foundation's education program has made substantial grants in Knight communities to a range of organizations with the capacity to move from small successes to widespread use. In the most comprehensive expression yet of their interests in expanding and deepening the impact of school reform, Knight foundation's trustees approved $2,182,167 in grants at the December board meeting for three diverse and creative approaches.

They are the latest grants in a growing education program initiative totaling nearly $10 million in the past five years to encourage broadly collaborative, large-scale efforts. The initiative includes $1 million grants matching Annenberg Challenges in Philadelphia, Detroit and South Florida; similar-scale reform efforts in greater Akron and the Silicon Valley; a national pilot for teacher education and professional development in Charlotte; and a cluster of grants in Long Beach aimed at improving teaching and learning in the middle schools. Most ambitious of all is an attempt, through four grants since 1993 totaling nearly $2 million, to help the Galef-Kentucky Collaborative for Teaching and Learning take the Different Ways of Knowing instructional and professional development model statewide in districts across Kentucky.

The range of approaches acknowledges several key variables about education reform. First, much of the terrain is uncharted. There’s no single best answer or approach to improving teaching and student performance. And experience shows that the quality of education will depend on what a community itself can muster.

"Education reform often stalls because best practices don’t move effectively from individual classrooms and schools throughout a district and beyond," said A. Richardson Love Jr., Knight's director of education programs. "At this stage of reform, Knight Foundation is investing substantial resources where a venturesome community has developed a vision for education and is marshaling resources to accomplish it. In these grants we are identifying and encouraging a variety of organizations, ideas, mechanisms and strategies that can help communities bring better education to larger numbers of schools and students."

The December 1997 grants offer a glimpse of some of the latest developments in the field:

A $1 million grant will help the ambitious South Florida Annenberg Challenge tackle its goal of substantial student improvement in the public schools of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.

In 1993, philanthropist Walter H. Annenberg announced a $500 million gift to support the most promising efforts to reform U.S. public schools through innovative school/community partnerships, primarily in large urban school systems. In 1996, the Annenberg Foundation awarded a $33.4 million challenge grant to the South Florida Annenberg Challenge to be matched by private funds and public dollars in equal amounts for a total of $100 million. A tricounty board involving corporate, community, foundation and education leaders governs the local Annenberg Challenge organization. Similar boards serving each county are in the process of making smaller, start-up grants to schools and their corporate partners to foster creative new programs that stimulate student achievement. Knight Foundation has made grants previously to help match Annenberg Challenges in Detroit and Philadelphia.

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has made great strides in an emerging effort to define what accomplished teachers should know and be able to do. A grant of $750,000 in 1993 to The National Board helped launch the foundation's large scale efforts. The 1997 grant of $909,000 will help in the development of the Charlotte Collaborative, a community-based pilot using the organization’s rigorous national standards as the basis for the professional development and education of teachers throughout the country.

Teachers voluntarily complete the National Board’s battery of exercises and essays to demonstrate their high level of classroom competence based on rigorous standards. Many earn National Board Certification in the process.

The National Board’s partners in the pilot are the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Johnson C. Smith University. Over the next three years, Knight's grant will help the collaborators encourage and support qualified teachers to pursue National Board Certification, use board-certified teachers strategically to help train others and increase their ranks, boost the understanding and acceptance of those national standards beyond Charlotte and create a model for other communities interested in following suit.

"Knight foundation's generous show of support for education in our state will help us attract and keep good teachers in the classroom," said North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt, a national leader in the certification movement.

In 1994, the Los Angeles-based Galef Institute formed the Kentucky Collaborative for Teaching and Learning at the invitation of the state to help Kentucky teachers achieve success in their reform efforts. Since then, in partnership with 24 other education and community organizations, the collaborative has expanded Galef’s innovative Different Ways of Knowing (DWoK) instructional model to elementary schools around the state. The Galef method provides a curriculum structure and professional development for elementary teachers. Previous Knight grants have helped leverage state funds to accelerate the growth of DWoK into more districts (from 25 to 115) and schools (from 25 to 324), reaching 90,000 elementary students.

While field studies and evaluation reports speak to the success of DWoK in elementary schools, they confirm the growing evidence that America’s middle schools may be the weakest link in our education system. Knight foundation's latest grants will help Kentucky develop more focused, confident strategies for middle school improvement. A grant to the Galef Institute of $190,000 will help the organization plan to take the DWoK elementary classroom strategies to the middle school level. The research and planning will bring new strategic allies on board, including the University of Kentucky Colleges of Education and Fine Arts. With a companion grant of $83,167, UK’s newly organized Institute on Education

Reform will look at the ground-breaking work of the Kentucky Education Reform Act at the elementary and high school levels and begin searching for meaningful middle school reform.

"The work of the Galef Institute and the Kentucky Collaborative for Teaching and Learning stands as one of the best examples in the nation of how to take good practice in school reform to scale," said Love.

Knight Foundation has also supported New American Schools of Arlington, Va., a national organization which has gained experience in nurturing and demonstrating the effectiveness of a range of break-the-mold school reform designs. By maintaining an emphasis on helping districts make wiser use of existing resources, the organization is trying to prove that good schools can be the norm, not the exception.

To provide cohesiveness to this large-scale initiative, Knight Foundation has asked Policy Studies Associates, Inc., a Washington-based research and evaluation firm, to monitor the evaluation efforts already under way and help them identify possible improvements.

"All of these are pioneering efforts to improve education -- not just for some, but for all students," said Love. "Ultimately, their success and ours will be demonstrated through improved student achievement."

Charlotte Teacher Was One of the First to Attain National Board Certificate

As the 1994-95 school year got under way, Connie Bernash joined 200 other teachers from Charlotte-Mecklenberg County Schools to hear about a "very rigorous" journey that only seven would complete by the school year’s end. Her goal: earning certification as a "middle childhood generalist" from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

Bernash, now a fifth-grade teacher at McKee Road Elementary in Charlotte, was a volunteer field test candidate in a Knight-funded program -- the precursor of the National Board’s Charlotte Collaborative -- designed to establish standards for what accomplished teachers should know and be able to do in the classroom. The year-long process wasn’t easy.

"There was a degree of risk for all of us," she said. "But this was a grassroots reform movement being led by teachers themselves."

To acquire certification, Bernash had to assemble a portfolio of essays describing her teaching philosophy and technique, along with her commitment to students, parents and community -- all backed by confirming letters of support.

She was the subject of a video that included an uninterrupted, 20-minute live shot of her teaching skills. Finally, she and others were tested on 11 national standards over two grueling days in a sitting board exam.

"It was really hard watching myself teaching on video," she said. "It is truly a growing experience because you’re forced to look at yourself from the outside."

Bernash, a 15-year classroom veteran, received her certification in August 1996. The benefits extend well beyond a 12 percent bonus she’ll receive each year. "It has opened a multitude of opportunities. I’ve been asked to work on a state level in curriculum writing, and I’m mentoring three teachers this year going for their certification.

"All the opportunities, the awards that have come as a result of this, pale in comparison to the fact that I’m excited about teaching. I’ve known good teachers in every school I’ve worked in. What I hope with all my heart is that this project will give them the opportunity to get their certification, and that it gives them the same validity that I was given. I believe we can change the whole system in U.S. education, but it’s gonna come one teacher at a time."

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These articles have been reprinted from the Fall 1997 Knight Foundation newsletter.

If you would like a print version, e-mail us at publications@knightfdn.org

Board Elects Hodding Carter to Succeed Creed Black as Foundation President

Hodding Carter III, an award-winning journalist, media critic and educator, will succeed Creed Black on Feb. 1, 1998, as president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Carter, holder of the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of Maryland, was elected Sept. 16 by the foundation's trustees to succeed Black, concluding a national search. Early in that interview process, Carter said at his first meeting with the foundation's staff, "I thought that I was being introduced to a dream. I’m surprised and pleased to find that it came true."

Feb. 1 falls a decade to the day since Black, a former newspaper editor and publisher, took the helm of what has become one of the 25 largest private foundations in the United States. In the transition, he’ll stay on for six months as a consultant and will continue as a Foundation trustee.

"Creed told our board two years ago that he would like to retire around the end of 1997," Chairman W. Gerald Austen said. "He has given Knight Foundation strong and visionary leadership during a decade of extraordinary growth and transformation. It’s doubly gratifying that we have found in Hodding Carter a distinguished successor who not only is eminently qualified but who already has a relationship with the Foundation."

A nationally syndicated columnist, Carter left the family-owned Delta Democrat Times in Greenville, Miss., in 1977 to serve as assistant secretary of state and department spokesman in President Carter’s administration, most notably during the Iran hostage crisis. He has been a chief correspondent for the PBS documentary series Frontline and has won four Emmy Awards for his public affairs television documentaries. He has been the Knight professor at Maryland since 1995, focusing on public affairs reporting.

Carter, who will also be a member of Knight foundation's board of trustees, began his career as a reporter with the Democrat Times in 1959, rising to editor and associate publisher. He served as a Washington-based opinion columnist for The Wall Street Journal for 10 years and has been a frequent contributor to numerous newspapers and magazines.

He is president of MainStreet, a TV production company specializing in documentaries and public affairs television. A 1957 graduate of Princeton, he serves on the university’s board of trustees. He chairs the advisory board of The Pew Center for Civic Journalism and serves on the board of directors for the Center for Foreign Journalists. He is the author of The Reagan Years and The South Strikes Back.

During Black’s tenure, the foundation's assets have increased from $435 million to $1.2 billion, its annual grant payments from $15.5 million to $42 million, and its staff from five to 30 persons. Two new national programs in education and the arts were added to the existing programs in community grants and journalism, and the Foundation placed increased emphasis on developing its own initiatives instead of simply responding to requests.

In that same period, Knight Foundation also became a founding partner of the National Community Development Initiative, a consortium of foundations, private financial institutions and the Department of Housing and Urban Development which has become the largest collaborative effort in the history of American philanthropy. The Foundation also created a blue-ribbon commission which spent six years helping lead a campaign to reform intercollegiate athletics

Journalism Chair at Florida Focuses on New Technology

When the University of Florida first offered journalism courses in 1918, few could have imagined today’s web sites, laptops, digital photography and high density television. Those new technologies and the impact they will have on democracy will provide a wide field of study and teaching for the school’s new Knight Chair in Journalism professor.

Long a leader in the teaching of new media, Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications was awarded the latest Knight Chair by the foundation's board of trustees in September. The university will use its $1.5 million endowment grant to create a new faculty position for an experienced practitioner who understands the media’s role in society and the use of communications technologies in fulfilling that role.

Since 1990, the Foundation has endowed permanent Knight Chair positions at 11 top colleges and universities in the United States to strengthen journalism education by bolstering core curricular values and encouraging innovation. Knight chairholders include some of the nation’s most respected working journalists, recent practitioners and journalism educators. (Knight foundation's incoming President and CEO Hodding Carter III currently holds the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of Maryland focusing on public affairs reporting.)

"Florida’s program has developed a reputation for leading the pack in the study of new technology," said Del Brinkman, the foundation's director of journalism programs. "This is the right school this year for the Knight Chair, and the emphasis is right for our times."

The state of Florida’s Trust Fund for Major Gifts program will provide an additional $1.2 million as an 80 percent match for the foundation's endowment grant. The Knight position will have tenure and a base salary from the university equal to that of a full professor.

The Knight Chair at the University of Florida will build upon several strengths of the college, including an organizational structure and physical facility which would enable the Knight professor to work across communications disciplinary lines and take advantage of a broad range of electronic technologies for teaching and research.

"We are honored and delighted to be included in the constellation of programs which have received Knight Chairs," said Terry Hynes, Florida’s dean. "The focus of this chair goes to the heart of journalism’s purpose in a democratic society, namely, assuring that people have the information they need to govern themselves regardless of how that information is disseminated."

Grant Aids Detroit’s Schools of the 21st Century

A half-dozen Knight Foundation communities, each with a different approach to large-scale education reform, are adding to a body of knowledge that could well guide the educators and enhance the students of the next century.

The latest is Detroit, where a $1 million, four-year Knight grant will help the community pursue the ambitious goals of reforming its local public schools, raising levels of academic performance and promoting healthy growth and development for all students.

The recipient is Schools of the 21st Century Corp., the private, nonprofit organization established a year ago to manage Detroit’s response to philanthropist Walter Annenberg’s challenge to the nation to improve American public schools. Intending to support promising efforts at local school reform, The Annenberg Foundation has committed $500 million to major U.S. urban centers. Typically, the Annenberg challenge grants require a 2:1 match, half of which must come from new, private funding and the other half in public dollars.

Detroit’s reform effort is the result of a concerted community planning effort involving key public education stakeholders. An array of national and local funders have made large contributions toward the $60 million Detroit campaign.

“This grant further strengthens our partnership effort to forge a new vision in the Detroit public school system that gets our children better educated and able to compete globally,” said Dr. Teressa Staten, executive director of Schools of the 21st Century.

The Schools of the 21st Century Initiative maps out a 5- to 10-year reform plan to improve the quality of public school education by better coordinating new and existing resources and programs to promote high levels of learning and meet a range of students’ health and developmental needs. From a district of 180,000 students in 263 schools, the initiative is targeting 40 to 45 Leadership Schools where the reform effort’s resources will be concentrated.

“Schools of the 21st Century represents the new and growing optimism about Detroit’s future,” said A. Richardson Love Jr., Knight's director of education programs. “Knight Foundation is delighted to join in the community’s efforts to assure that all of its children can reach their fullest potential.”

Knight foundation's Education Program has been encouraging such broadly collaborative efforts to expand and deepen the impact of school reform for the past three years. The Foundation provided a similar grant in 1995 to Greater Philadelphia First for Children Achieving, the city’s standards-based response to The Annenberg challenge. Other grants in this initiative have been awarded to the Galef Institute for implementation of its Different Ways of Knowing reform model in Kentucky; the Summit Education Partnership for countywide education reform in the Akron area; Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network for Challenge 2000, a regional initiative involving local corporations in the improvement of schools; and a number of smaller grants to organizations working in Long Beach on education reform targeted to middle-school students. Ideally, promising approaches and successful programs developed in the initiative eventually would be shared broadly to reach more students.

Trustees Begin Long-Term Study of Community Grant Making

Knight foundation's board of trustees has begun a study of its community grant-making policy as a result of recent acquisitions, trades and intended sales of newspapers by Knight-Ridder Inc. (KRI). Those moves affect 11 cities, including five where the Foundation has a history of grant making. The foundation's study will focus on the selection of cities where it will concentrate its Community Initiatives program. Several options are under discussion, and decisions will be made in due time, said Trustee Jill Ker Conway, chair of the board’s Planning and Program Committee. “Our goal is to establish a long-term policy which will be beneficial to Knight Foundation and its mission in the light of current and possible future changed circumstances,” she said.

Meanwhile, until the board has adopted a long-range policy, the Foundation will:

• Honor all existing commitments in current Foundation communities which have lost or may lose their KRI affiliation. They are Boca Raton, Fla.; Boulder, Colo.; Gary, Ind.; Long Beach, Calif.; and Milledgeville, Ga.

• Continue making grants in those communities.

• Accept no community initiatives proposals from cities where KRI has added newspapers. Those communities are Belleville, Ill.; Fort Worth, Texas; Kansas City, Mo.; Monterey, Calif.; San Luis Obispo, Calif.; and Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

Immunization Transition Leaders Meet in St. Paul

St. Paul, Minn., served as the autumnal setting for Knight foundation's “community of learners” — the directors of projects in the transition stage of the foundation's Immunization Initiative. Though it included a smaller group than previous initiative gatherings, the September meeting was a big opportunity to continue the work of ensuring a healthy start for Knight communities’ youngest residents. The initiative, which began in 1994 with $1.7 million in grants to nonprofits' in 26 Knight communities, has provided several past opportunities for participants to meet together, get technical assistance and share the latest tips and techniques to help more children receive needed immunizations. Six projects in the original initiative — designed to promote public awareness and provide information to parents about the importance of immunization for infants and toddlers — have received additional funding to build on or maximize their experiences in the 1994 – 96 initiative. Representatives of five of those projects were hosted by Children’s Health Care of St. Paul in the two-day session built largely on project evaluation. The immunization transition projects continue in Aberdeen,'s .D.; Boulder, Colo.; Grand Forks, N.D.; Long Beach, Calif.; St. Paul; and Tallahassee, Fla. The participants presented project updates; went on site visits; heard experts from the National Immunization Program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Minnesota Department of Health and Children’s Health Care; and reviewed evaluation materials from the full 26-city project with Patricia Kelly, Knight's evaluation consultant. “We saw a lot. I think we learned a lot, from each other, from the speakers and from the tours,” said Patsy Stinchfield of Children’s Health Care. “I find it very unusual for a foundation to be so involved with grantees and so committed to following through, evaluating work and sharing lessons.” “It was an invigorating two days,” said Linda L. Raybin, Knight's director of Community Initiatives programs. “It was exciting to see that although the grantees had become experts in diverse areas, they recognized the challenge of assessing local strategies to ensure that immunization remains a high-profile issue.” A tour of Children’s Hospital took the group to the newborn nursery, where they stood at the viewing window and saw a child minutes after birth. “No words were needed,” said Raybin. “This beautiful baby was a reminder to all of us why we are involved in this work.”

ExhibitsUSA Makes Quality Art Accessible to All

Carey Pickard, director of the Tubman African-American Museum in Macon, Ga., knows the dilemma well. Museums and galleries in small or midsized cities often exhaust their resources — their undersized staff, their time and their budgets — mounting significant, worthy exhibits for their underserved audiences.

One solution for Pickard and other directors has been to turn to ExhibitsUSA, which has developed low-cost, museum-quality exhibits and educational materials since 1988 that travel to those museums and galleries across the United States. A 1993 Knight Foundation grant to the Mid-America Arts Alliance helped bring its ExhibitsUSA traveling shows to some 274,000 museum visitors in Macon and 12 other Knight communities.

Now, a $250,000 grant over three years approved by Knight's trustees in September will help develop up to 15 more moveable feasts for the eyes. The grant also provides fee subsidies for the exhibitors.

This fall, the Tubman presented “Betye Saar: Personal Icons,” which was developed by ExhibitsUSA. The showcase of the black Californian’s work has also visited State College, Pa., and the Charlotte, N.C., area.

“We don’t have a curator, so we rely heavily on outside exhibitions. That, in effect, is what ExhibitsUSA did for us,” said Pickard. “They shipped us a show in custom-built cases that came ready to be hung, not only with labels prepared but also with really good education materials.”

“We have supported ExhibitsUSA precisely because it makes high quality exhibitions available to museums such as the Tubman — museums with the mission and creativity to present a varied program of changing exhibitions, but without the very substantial resources required to create such exhibitions in-house,” said Gary Burger, Knight's director of arts and culture programs.

Through the program, residents of Knight communities have seen exhibits ranging from Hmong artistry to Mexican popular art to Native American realism. Not to mention Saar’s icons.

“Our director of education went to an art supply store,” Pickard said. “She gathered materials — sequins, feathers, construction paper and the like. We got visitors to make their own icons, cutting out cardboard disks and decorating them. We put them all together as part of the show. It really made the exhibit come alive. Now they understand better what she’s trying to do.”

Funds Continue Maryland's Specialized Journalism Program

In the past decade, the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland has established a strong reputation for its seminars that help journalists cover complex subjects more effectively. With a model unique to the field, the Knight Center has awarded 1,050 fellowships to journalists who have spent up to two weeks on campus studying topics ranging from global finance to biotechnology.

Based on that 10-year track record, the Knight Center has received a three-year grant of $1,323,986 for continued support from Knight Foundation.

"There’s an acute need in journalism to report more credibly on increasingly specialized subjects, and the Knight Center helps meet that need," said Del Brinkman, Knight's director of journalism programs.

Over the next three years, the Knight Center will award 300 or more fellowships for 15 to 18 seminars. The renewed funding will also establish a new program in medical fellowships for journalists who cover medical science and health care. All costs of the seminars, including room and board, are covered by the Knight Center.

"Journalists from every state have been here to deepen their knowledge of fields they are covering," said Reese Cleghorn, Maryland’s dean of journalism. "They take these familiarities back to their newsrooms and become the yeast for more sophisticated coverage there."

The Maryland grant was one of nine totaling $3,982,861 made to organizations supporting journalism education and worldwide press freedom by the foundation's trustees at their September meeting.

The board also approved a $503,875 grant over three years to continue and expand the Inter American Press Association’s Unpunished Crimes Against Journalists project. The IAPA campaign has forced the Western Hemisphere’s leaders to acknowledge the unpunished murders of nearly 200 Latin American journalists in the past decade. Earlier Knight Foundation funding of $484,000 enabled IAPA to investigate over two years the unsolved deaths of journalists in Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico. In the next three years, IAPA will continue its investigations in those three countries and extend the project to investigate the murders of journalists wherever they might occur in the hemisphere.

Other journalism grants include:

• A $200,000 challenge grant over two years to the International Press Institute of Allentown, Pa., for the international journalism magazine, IPI Report.
• A $175,000 grant to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to continue support of the Copy Editing Fellows Program for one more year.
• A $150,000 grant to the Independent Journalism Foundation of New York, N.Y., for support of four training centers in Central Europe.
• A $60,000 grant to Investigative Reporters and Editors of New York, N.Y., for a minority training program.
• A $60,000 grant to the American Society of Newspaper Editors Foundation of Reston, Va., to enhance its diversity initiatives.
• A $10,000 grant to the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation of Greencastle, Ind., for a media ethics education program.

Status Report

This is the latest in a series of reports on Knight Foundation grants at work.

Building Bridges: Two Views on Teaching and Practicing Journalism

Does a long-time journalist still bleed ink if academia beckons? Can a classroom veteran still make deadline in the Newsroom of the Nineties? Knight foundation's Journalism Program has developed a variety of approaches to shrinking the gap between journalism’s teachers and practitioners. At left, the reflections of a new Knight Chair in Journalism. At right, the views of a college teacher who spent her summer vacation in the newsroom.

The Journalist Takes Over in the Classroom

(Editor’s note: Stephen K. Doig, who just began his second academic year as the Knight Chair in Journalism at Arizona State University, reflects in the following piece on his transition from daily journalism to the academy. This previously appeared in ASU’s Journalist.)

Shortly after the end of my first year as a professor here at the Cronkite School, I attended the annual convention of IRE, the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization. There, I ran into dozens of long-time friends and acquaintances from newspapers around the country, including The Miami Herald, where I had spent most of my 22-year career in daily journalism.

"So, do you miss the excitement of being in the newsroom?" almost every one of them would ask, in one way or another. No, I told each one — I honestly had been far too busy this past year to miss that adrenaline rush of breaking news and big stories. I came here to be a teacher, to pass on to the next generation of journalists my enthusiasm for this profession, as well as the kinds of skills I think are needed to help the news media survive and prosper in the 21st century. But in fact, now that I’ve finally had a little time to reflect, I realize I have learned so much this year that I probably should have paid tuition myself. Let me share with you some of the things I learned:

I learned that being a teacher, at least a good one, is much more work than I had imagined. Much of the year, I was barely 24 hours ahead of my students, as I madly graded their work from the previous class and tried to create meaningful lessons for the next one. I regularly spent more time each week doing my new job than I typically had spent in my old one. I remember wondering when I was told I’d be in the classroom eight hours each week what I’d do to fill the rest of the week. Now I wonder, where is the rest of the week?

I learned that being an expert in something may be necessary to being a good professor, but it’s by no means sufficient. Effective teaching, I discovered, requires skills every bit as demanding as those of journalism. (My wife, herself a teacher, had told me that often enough, but I didn’t understand until I had to do it myself.) Happily, my students reacted well to my sometimes fumbling efforts in the classroom. Even so, I’m eagerly learning more about such instructional innovations as cooperative learning and interactive online lessons.

I learned that most of today’s college students aren’t the unmotivated slackers I’d feared I’d see snoring away in the back rows of my classes, nor are they willing to learn by rote, simply swallowing what’s told them without challenge. Class discussions on ethics, diversity, civic journalism, invasion of privacy and other such topics would be as interesting and heated as any I’ve had in a newsroom.

I learned that putting a grade on a student’s work is the most difficult part of being a professor. It’s particularly tough in Basic Newswriting where some students show a real flair for writing a news story and some, no matter how hard they work through the semester, never do. Teaching writing in a classroom is frustrating for me because I learned it myself in the newsroom by having a better writer or a tough editor coach me one-on-one. With 20 students needing that kind of coaching, the best I can do is fill their papers with comments and corrections.

I learned that students generally delight in their professor’s attention and interest. Much of the fun of this job is the walk-in visits I get from students who want to talk about how they’re doing in my course, or about some project they’re working on in another course, or about what it’s like to be a journalist, or whatever. I learned that even with the demands of being a good teacher, I can still have plenty of opportunity to work with practicing journalists.

For instance, in April I conducted the two-day Computer-Assisted Reporting Seminar attended by two dozen reporters from papers around the Southwest. And frequently throughout the year, I was able to use my computer skills to help various newspapers and television stations solve reporting problems.

Thanks to the Internet and the wonderful computing facilities here at ASU, collaborating on cross-country data-crunching projects is as easy and fast as doing it in person. I learned that there was still plenty for me to do in the summer, even though I was not teaching.

For instance, I worked with an Internet-savvy graduate student on a major overhaul of the Cronkite School’s online web site. I redesigned (yet again!) the way I’ll teach Basic Newswriting and Precision Journalism, the two courses I taught last year. I developed a syllabus and materials for a third course, Introduction to Media Statistics, which I’ll teach this year while Professor George Watson is on sabbatical. I even rewrote the journalism merit badge for the Boy Scouts of America; it’s payback for what I learned long ago becoming an Eagle Scout. And I’m chipping away at a couple of research projects I hope to complete before long.

A year ago, with only some cautious misgivings, I decided to leave the newsroom and enter the classroom because I thought it would be a fun and exciting and intellectually stimulating way to cap my very satisfying career. I figured that college would be a great place to learn — even for a professor.

Thanks to my students and my Cronkite colleagues, I learned I was right.

The Professor Gets a Newsroom Refresher Course

(Editor’s note: Laura Kelly, a journalism teacher at Florida International University who participated in this summer’s ASNE Institute for Journalism Excellence program, wrote this for Knight Foundation.)

It was a Wednesday afternoon in late June. About a dozen editors, reporters and photographers circled the conference table in the managing editor’s office at the Press-Telegram in Long Beach, Calif. Reporter Susan Pack had completed her four-part series about unwanted pets and a meeting had been called to select the art to complete the project, scheduled to run in a week.

Photos of animals in local shelters fanned across the tabletop. Dogs and cats peering from cages with doleful eyes. Shelter workers in smocks managing the glut of animals. And the more controversial shot scheduled to announce and anchor the front-page series: An unwanted dog in a hospital room with an IV in its front leg, receiving a lethal dose of drugs.

The ensuing discussion sounded as if it were an adroitly scripted college textbook case study about media ethics. The editors and photographers of the medium-sized daily volleyed the pros and cons of running the photograph. Executive Editor Jim Crutchfield moderated the discussion, paraphrasing the voiced ethical concerns. Comments were weighed, considered, thoughtful. Some deemed the image too graphic and assuredly offensive to readers. Others argued that the photo needed to be the centerpiece because it so startlingly conveyed the essence of the story.

I stood on the perimeter of the group, invigorated and observant. Unconsciously, I reached for my notebook. As the decibels rose and the discussion continued for more than an hour, I felt myself lapse into what I call the Patty Duke Syndrome, bifurcating into my two selves as I had almost daily during my six-week stint at the Press-Telegram. As one of the assistant city editors, I joined the discussion and offered my reasoning for running the powerful photo. As a journalism professor from the other side of the country, I jotted notes, knowing I had a ringside seat to yet another scenario I could incorporate into my university classroom. I fantasized about the possibilities: I would simulate the meeting as an exercise to prompt small-group discussions about ethics in my Principles of Journalism class, fold the scene into a lecture in my Print News Reporting class and update my arsenal of general-purpose war stories. In my head I rewrote the syllabi for all my fall journalism courses. Again.

I was in the meeting that June afternoon and in the newsroom of the Press-Telegram this summer as one of 23 fellows chosen to participate in the Institute for Journalism Excellence. Sponsored by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) and funded by Knight Foundation, the aim of the three-year-old institute is fundamentally to accomplish a feat of engineering. By putting journalism profs into the newsroom, the program hopes to build bridges between those who teach journalism and those who are journalists.

The 23 of us were a disparate lot with at least two things in common: We taught journalism on the college level and we wanted to make journalism. We came from colleges and universities across the country — the University of Missouri, College of Charleston, the University of New Hampshire, University of West Florida. And we were assigned to newspapers just as geographically dispersed — The Daily News of Anchorage, The Sacramento Bee, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass. We worked as copy editors, special projects team members, reporters, photographers, online editors.

I’m a faculty member at Florida International University in Miami, though I consider myself an erstwhile academic. What I am is a reporter with a roll book. I’ve written for the Tampa Times and Gainesville Sun, segued into magazine journalism, radio journalism, and now teaching journalism. FIU’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication is a professionally oriented J-school (and on the endangered species list in journalism education). Most of my colleagues began their careers in the field, in the newsroom, in the studio. When I pore over my student evaluations, I’m struck by how many of them comment about my newsroom experiences, about how my continued work as a journalist adds a pivotal and instructive dimension to my teaching. "More stories about the real world!! Tell us what it is like out there!" one student scrawled in all caps.

I remember my abject disappointment in college in the late ’70s when my feature writing professor filled the chalkboard with diagrams of story structures and then announced that this was all theory, as he’d never actually written a feature story. He’d never worked at a newspaper, never chewed his fingernails to quell the anxiety of a fire-breathing deadline, never cracked a tight-lipped source, never seen his byline. His lectures lost their authenticity after his confession, and I began skipping class more frequently to spend time at the campus newspaper. As a fledgling journalist I didn’t want theory. I sought a mentor, a coach, a model.

I believe journalism is a craft with an artful toolbox of skills best transmitted by the apprentice-master method. The strongest journalism schools provide those outlets for students, and the most powerful teachers are those who can provide the double whammy: They have experience as journalists, and they have skills as teachers. I tell my students I stumbled into teaching because I love journalism, and I wanted to talk about that love with others. I tell them I stay because teaching is the most gratifying work I have ever undertaken. It was Virginia Woolf who said, "Teaching without zest is a crime." I concur. My participation in the ASNE institute was a sort of zest stop; I was refueled by working once again in "the business" and will take my ideas, my anecdotes and stories into the classroom to feed the heads of the young people who sit before me, the journalists of tomorrow.

A mentor, a coach, a model — this is what I believe makes me an effective journalism teacher. At the Press-Telegram I wrote a half-dozen news stories, a think piece and a concert review. I worked as the assistant city editor (or is it air traffic controller?), participated in daily budget meetings, went out on assignments with photographers and reporters and coached a half-dozen college interns. I drank bad coffee, ate dinner from vending machines, worked beneath the glow of fluorescent lights and put in 13-hour days. It was exhilarating. My summer fellowship afforded me the opportunity to revisit the craft that I chose all those years ago, to update my firsthand knowledge of the industry, and to fall in love again with journalism. And ain’t love grand?

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Five Campuses Welcome Print Veterans

The first Monday of October began a different kind of week for Tom Siegfried, who ordinarily heads a staff of writers and editors producing Discoveries, the Monday science section of The Dallas Morning News.

That day Siegfried was a journalist-in-residence at Texas A&M University, the vanguard of a quartet of Morning News staffers headed to College Station to teach, mingle with and learn from students at A&M’s Journalism Program.

The Morning News/A&M partnership is one of five forged between newspapers and schools in the Newspapers-in-Residence Program, a venture crafted by the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communications and funded by Knight Foundation.

"It’s very interesting to hear the thoughts the students have about possible futures in journalism," said Siegfried during the jam-packed week of lectures, classes and one-on-one meetings with students.

"I think most of them are wise enough to keep their options open about possible journalistic paths, and are aware of new journalistic technologies."

"I really believe this kind of thing is badly needed at campuses like ours," said Charles Self, director of A&M’s Journalism Program. "We’re not in a major urban area, and it isn’t as easy for us as it is for other schools to bring the best talents in the field to work with our students and faculty."

This fall 20 journalists will visit five campuses. Other newspapers and journalism schools involved as partners are: the Louisville Courier-Journal and the University of Nebraska, the Dayton Daily News and Kent State University, the San Jose Mercury News and the University of Kansas, and the Nashville Tennessean and Syracuse University.

"The program will allow participating schools to integrate the experience and perspectives of senior editors and reporters into program curricula and activities," said Robert Ruggles, ASJMC president.

Copies of the handbook can be obtained by writing the Foundation or via e-mail at publications@knightfdn.org.

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These articles have been reprinted from the Summer 1997 Knight Foundation newsletter.

If you would like a print version, e-mail us at publications@knightfdn.org

Is Family Literacy the Answer to Welfare Reform?

In states, counties and cities across the nation, policymakers are struggling with the complex answer to a deceptively simple question: What’s the key to welfare reform?

Part of the answer may lie in the proven approach the National Center for Family Literacy has developed in combining early childhood education, adult literacy and parenting training in an all-out assault on intergenerational illiteracy. It’s a formula originally developed in Kentucky by Sharon Darling, NCFL’s charismatic president, and tested in a rapidly expanding host of sites including Knight-funded projects in Akron, Fort Wayne and Wichita.

Through many such programs, those hard-earned literacy talents, which include real-world workplace skills, have helped families move from poverty toward self-sufficiency. Now, with a $2.25 million Knight grant for its comprehensive Family Independence Initiative, the national center is putting its literacy development methods front and center in the search for the best approach to moving welfare recipients into the workplace.

The initiative will help NCFL develop, test and evaluate pilot program sites to create a model that will take families from welfare to work. The initiative will eventually cover 15 to 20 sites across the nation — several in Knight communities — to incorporate current knowledge and tailor the programs to meet the requirements of The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. With federal block grants going directly to state and local organizations and deadlines fast approaching for getting former welfare recipients into jobs, there’s a critical need for programs that succeed.

"Family literacy brings both practical strategy and an important set of humane values to the urgent efforts to move welfare-to-work from policy to practice," said A. Richardson Love Jr., Knight's director of education programs. "The program is effective, the organization strong and the leadership inspired."

"Through this grant we want to alert the folks working on welfare reform that NCFL deserves a seat at the table," said Creed C. Black, Knight Foundation president and CEO.

In less than a decade, the number of family literacy programs has increased from a handful in two states to some 2,500 programs involving every state in the union. Each year, 60,000 families enroll in family literacy programs that provide education and services for parents and their preschool-age children.

According to federal estimates monitored by NCFL, undereducation costs $220 billion annually in lost productivity, crime, employee errors, accidents and extra training programs. The national center has long-term evidence that family literacy moves families to self-sufficiency while at the same time strengthening the family. NCFL studies show that 73 percent of parents who enter family literacy programs not only complete the program year, but enroll in another educational or training program or get a job. Better yet, their children show an 80 percent increase in school readiness.

"We are honored that the Foundation has made this substantial gift to help us continue our goal to take family literacy to center stage in the welfare reform arena," said Darling. "It is a great vote of confidence in family literacy."

Knight foundation's experience with Darling and the national center began in 1993 with a $697,250 grant to establish family literacy programs in two KF communities. Through a request-for-proposal process, those programs were launched in Akron and Fort Wayne. In 1995 and 1996, Wichita Public Schools received two grants totaling $114,513 for a community-based family literacy program.

Three years of experience with the family literacy model in Akron and Fort Wayne have convinced local program directors of the national center’s capacity to move parents into the work force.

"There’s a real sense of urgency," said Judith Stabelli, executive director of the Three Rivers Literacy Alliance in Fort Wayne. "A high percentage of our families are on welfare, and they know that their welfare will end. They do need to prepare for work. We realized from the beginning that we were simply going to have to address that. So the parents at each of our sites did some volunteer work that would introduce them to the world of work, such as answering phones and learning how to be receptionists."

There are other benefits to family literacy, including increasing self-esteem and PACT time – Parent and Child Together – intended to strengthen the family. A group of 14 mothers and their children in Twinsburg, just north of Akron, bonded so well after experiencing the exhilaration of personal and family growth that they dubbed themselves the Zoo Crew.

"They were the most dynamic group of all," said Pat Galloway, program coordinator of the Akron Knight Family Education Program. "When we outgrew our space in a community center, we heard about the possibility of moving to an abandoned school. We asked the school board if we could use a room in the school if we redid it. The mothers wrote to paint companies and hardware stores and got the supplies donated. They scraped and painted and polished and moved into the room. They were very proud of it."

Two from the Twinsburg group improved their reading and writing skills enough to continue their studies at the University of Akron. One of those mothers is now employed by the Akron program as a tutor and mentor, and other parents are working and off welfare.

Ohio’s approach to welfare reform asks former public assistance recipients to demonstrate involvement in a Work Experience Program, which requires 20 hours a week of education or job training and an additional 8 to 10 hours of work. Summit County has certified Akron’s Knight program as such a site.

"It’s a wonderful advantage for the parents because they get their day care, their job training or education and meet their work requirement all in the same place," says Dr. Mary Ellen Atwood, Akron’s project director.

Fort Wayne’s Stabelli credits Sharon Darling with creating a program based on solid research that recognizes that families have a multitude of needs that must be addressed as they move toward self-sufficiency.

"I’m really grateful that she not only has put this concept of family literacy together, but she has enabled others of us in the field to take advantage of it," said Stabelli. "Seeing the bond between parents and children, seeing the strength of that bond grow, and seeing the delight the parents have in seeing their achievements is really rewarding. That’s what keeps them involved and moving forward."

Atwood says family literacy is the answer to welfare reform because it gives parents the tools to be responsible for themselves.

"The welfare reform clock is ticking," she said. "Parents no longer have a choice. They can’t raise their children in a multigenerational, welfare-dependent situation. In a way, they’re going to be able to give their children a wonderful gift. They won’t grow up with the expectation that they’re going to be on welfare the rest of their lives."

You can contact the National Center for Family Literacy at (502) 584-1133.

San Jose Provides High-Tech Setting For Board Visit

A California blend of new technology and old-fashioned hospitality greeted Knight foundation's board of trustees and professional staff as they traveled to San Jose for June’s board meeting and left $2.4 million behind in funding for eight community organizations.

The visit to the Silicon Valley and California’s third-largest city — hosted by Trustee Jay Harris, president and publisher of the San Jose Mercury News — afforded the trustees a chance to see the impact of their grant making up close.

In downtown San Jose, that impact is easily visible: Sharing a plaza with the board meeting’s host hotel is the San Jose Museum of Art, the recipient of past grants and a new $1 million challenge grant. Directly across the street rises the steel-girded dome of the Tech Museum of Innovation, now under construction and the recipient of another $1 million grant in 1986 — the foundation's first in San Jose.

The museums are among nearly 160 local organizations benefiting since then from more than $15.5 million in grants in San Jose. By including the John S. Knight Fellowship Program at nearby Stanford University and other regional grant recipients, the Foundation has made more than $25 million in grants in the past 25 years.

While the foundation's program staff participated in a "Meet Knight Foundation" seminar with community organizations, Harris led a group of trustees and staff on site visits of the two museums and a new youth center run by the Mexican-American Community Service Association.

The trustees met regional leaders at a reception and dinner June 16 at the Museum of Art. Dr. W. Gerald Austen, chairman of the board, presented the $1 million challenge grant to Museum Director Josi Callan to help build a $10 million endowment.

Other major grants went to the Center for Employment Training, which received $800,000 in grants and low-interest loans to develop a new site for its nationally renowned vocational training programs, a restaurant and parking lot; and San Jose State University, which will use a $350,000 grant to continue the Champions program to enable a core group of faculty to use new technologies in their teaching. Five other organizations received grants ranging from $125,000 to $20,000.

Grand Forks Publisher: ‘The River Is Rising’

Michael Maidenberg, president and publisher of the Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald and a member of the foundation's Community Initiatives Advisory Committee, was invited to deliver this address to the graduating class at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism on May 20, 1997.

Water washes away all that is nonessential.

Flames burn away all that is superficial.

What remains is a core which, if strong and true, stand as a rock despite flood and fire.

Here in New York this spring evening, you may think of these images only as metaphors. Don’t be lulled. You should be prepared to experience them. They can hap-pen to you. They happened to me.

It is 1 a.m. Saturday, April 19. I am in the newsroom of the Grand Forks Herald. The presses are rolling. The river is rising.

We are printing a gripping edition that tells the story of how the city of Grand Forks lost its battle with the Red River. The massive effort to stave off the flood, the backbreaking days of volunteer sandbagging, the final frantic hours of hastily erected dikes, failed as one neighborhood after another fell to the invading river.

The headline reads: Broken Dikes, Shattered Hopes.

It is the last newspaper that will be printed in our pressroom.

A reporter rushes into the newsroom. She has come from a midnight press conference at the new quarters of the Emergency Operations Center, which itself has been forced to flee from water surrounding its downtown location at the police station, only six blocks from the Herald.

She tells us officials say there will be three to four feet of water around the Herald by sunrise.

I go to the pressroom to warn the crew to keep an eye on the alley behind our plant. We agree to try to get the run off.

I leave for home at 1:30 a.m. The streets are still dry. Then I drive near the police station, which now sits as in a lake, streetlights shimmering in the surrounding water.

The battle to save my own neighborhood has not been conceded. When I arrive home, I join neighbors in one final effort of sandbagging before falling into bed. At the paper, the press is cranked to its limit. About 10,000 of our 40,000 run has been printed. At 2 a.m., the water has topped the rise formed by railroad tracks between us and the police station. It rushes into our streets. Fountains spurt up through the holes of manhole covers. Inexorably the gutters fill, then the roadway — and then the alley behind our plant.

Our editor goes through the newsroom to make sure all employees are out. Circulation orders all trucks to depart, loaded or not. The production director shuts down the press, then cuts the main power.

It is 2:20 a.m. We have abandoned ship.

Our concern now is how to publish for Sunday. We never doubt that we will.

When I awake at dawn, the first thing I do is attempt to reach the newspaper. I can only get to within four blocks before the water is at the hood of my big four-wheel drive.

Back home, tendrils of the river are snaking down the gutters of our street. My wife and I evacuate. Phones are spotty, but I arrange a meeting with our editor, Mike Jacobs, who by chance is fleeing to the same small town south of Grand Forks. I am able to reach Knight-Ridder’s chief troubleshooter, who jumps on a plane to St. Paul, first calling the publisher to arrange for airplanes for Sunday morning.

It is 9:30 a.m. The Herald building has gone under. My home has been abandoned. A sense of liberation rises within me. All that is superficial has fallen away.

Jacobs and I make our way to the University of North Dakota, where we meet with the president, who that morning has canceled classes and sent the students home. We tell him we need computers and a phone line. He gives us a lab at the student union.

As the river engulfed the city, our staff scattered to the winds. The newspaper’s phones are dead. No one can communicate with us. Just after noon, Jacobs goes on radio to ask all Herald employees to meet at the union at 2 p.m.

When I walk into the building at that fateful hour, I do not know what I will behold. Maybe an empty room. Maybe a handful of staffers.

There are 25 people there, mostly from the newsroom but including our circulation director. A wave of joy comes over me. This is the Grand Forks Herald before me, not the flooded building nor the silent press. Those are nonessential. We need only human capital to create and distribute our newspaper.

Although there is neither water nor sanitation, we are thrilled to take over the computer lab. We pull in 20 phone lines. We set up the telecommunications link with our sister newspaper in St. Paul, which has been gearing up all day to help us. We make story assignments, set deadlines, send the reporters and photographers out. We are working on the next edition.

We make plans to publish a 12-page edition, flying the copies to our region on two airplanes, one to North Dakota and the other to Minnesota. The bridges between the states have been closed, and over a third of our circulation is in Minnesota.

We charter a flight to send two editors and a photographer to St. Paul. Our reporters will file stories to them, and they will produce the Herald on St. Paul’s system, in effect cloning our newspaper’s look and feel.

As the plane flies eastward in the late afternoon it circles the downtown, which is now on fire.

We do not yet know it, but that blaze will burn two of our three buildings, including our newsroom with all its 100 years of clips and files and photographs. Our story for Sunday is now both the evacuation of virtually our entire city of 50,000, and the destruction of its historic heart.

When the last story has been modemed to St. Paul that night, we hold a meeting with the staff to thank them for their heroic effort. I tell them the Grand Forks Herald is going to publish come hell or high water.

By Sunday morning, I will learn we get both.

The papers printed in St. Paul arrive around 11 a.m. I take a bundle to the crowded Emergency Operations Center, where I walk around with them like a first-time father handing out cigars.

The readers are delighted — and amazed. They hunger for the printed word. They pore over the stories and photographs and maps. They savor names, locations, hard facts on paper. It takes a few minutes before it sinks in that the newspaper in their hands came from a city that flooded, from a building that burned, from people without homes.

They want to thank us, and they want to know how we did it. But there is little time to explain. The river is still rising.

We are forced to leave the university that day, and move to a kindergarten-through-8 school in Manvel, a town of 400 people just north of the city. We will eventually take over its computer lab, library, band room and two classrooms.

We will bring in four construction trailers that will house offices, computers and even a typesetter on wheels. We will assemble an RV park of 19 vehicles to house our people. We will do all this while school goes on around us, bells ringing on the hour, song practice in the gym, kids lined up for sloppy joes in the noon lunch line.

The first edition we produce in Manvel is for Monday, April 21. By now the full impact of the flood and fire are evident. The Herald carries a headline for the ages: Come Hell and High Water.

It is now 30 days since the flood. We are still in Manvel, and we have published every day. We have been given a forceful lesson in how fundamental a newspaper is in the media ecosystem. We do not have radio’s immediacy, nor television’s visual impact, nor online’s depth and detail, but our readers have told us, passionately, that our role is to set the framework, to undergird all other media, to provide a sense of shared community, be-cause only a newspaper can create a tangible, comprehensive, authoritative, enduring version of the news.

This is our core as a news medium, and it flows out of the irreducible values we at the Herald hold as individuals.

We are a newspaper. What we do is publish. We have a covenant with our readers that we will not break, come hell and high water.

When all else is stripped away, this is the value that remains at our core.

Thirty years ago, I left Columbia imbued with a sense of that ideal. It has stood me well.

As you begin your new lives, take care to nurture what you have been given here.

At some point or another, you will be tested to your core. Leave here with that knowledge, and be stronger for it.

Knight foundation's trustees approved $1 million in emergency grants to help the Grand Forks communities recover from the floods.

Common Interest in Academic Research Brings Knight Chairholders Together

North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park region was a suitable setting for the latest gathering of the Knight Chair in Journalism professors in late May. The subject: Research.

Phil Meyer, Knight chairholder at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a noted expert on journalism research and public opinion, hosted a three-day workshop on academic research for the nine current Knight chairholders. They were joined by several members of the foundation's Journalism Advisory Committee, Foundation staffers and a team of researchers assembled by UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications.

Since the Knight Chair program began in 1990, the Foundation has endowed 10 teaching professorships with up to $1.5 million each at some of the nation’s best journalism schools. While all but one of the Knight chairs are automatically tenured, the North Carolina session was designed to acquaint the journalists-turned-professors with various methods of research and allow them a chance to discuss individual or group research projects.

"The Knight Professors in Journalism are becoming sort of a team, an informal network of scholars that share the same experience of moving from the newsroom to the academy," said Rosental Calmon Alves, the Knight Chair at the University of Texas after the gathering. "My last research work, for instance, was enlightened by very sage suggestions from my colleagues."

There will be 10 Knight chairholders once the University of Missouri completes its search for a Knight Chair specializing in editing.

"While we will always view the Knight chairholders primarily as teachers relying on their experience and expertise, they do recognize the importance of research in academia," said Del Brinkman, director of journalism programs. "North Carolina was kind enough to put this seminar together. If this group of chairholders decides to collaborate in some way on applied research, it will be a valuable and respected contribution to the field."

Family Service Agency Initiative Takes Off In Newark

With Newark’s New Community Corporation providing both the setting and an example of fully integrated community development, 52 senior executives from family service agencies met in late May to learn about community-oriented approaches to strengthening families.

The Executive Leadership Forum in New Jersey was an early step in Family Service America’s Community-Centered Initiative, funded in part by a $450,000 Knight Foundation grant.

The two-day seminar was designed to help the executives understand that family service agencies can build upon their counseling expertise by offering new services that strengthen both families and communities.

The FSA initiative is encouraging family service agencies to reimagine themselves as community builders — integral pieces of a larger network that addresses their communities’ social and human service needs. While that might involve some organizational transformation, those who make the transition will be prepared to collaborate with new partners such as community development corporations and banks and offer more services in such settings as public housing and schools.

The forum’s participants got a first-hand look at the host New Community Corporation, formed 30 years ago in the wake of Newark’s riots. NCC has revitalized major portions of the city’s urban core, providing a continuum of care — education, training, jobs, housing, day care, senior care and economic development. They met with Monsignor William Linder, whose leadership and direction has turned NCC into a $100 million economic powerhouse.

Representatives from family service agencies in a number of Knight communities attended the Newark gathering. The foundation's grant will help FSA develop the initiative and support participation by agencies in Knight communities through on-site consultations, technical assistance for boards, attendance at training programs, site visits to community-centered programs and funds to develop innovative projects. FSA will design a process to determine the agencies’ readiness and the most appropriate types of support.

"I got insight into a new way of thinking about serving families," said Robert Labbe, president and CEO of Family Services in Akron. It is not just important that we serve families but even more important that we involve them in the planning and governance process of service. The challenge is in finding ways to do this at the neighborhood level while maintaining the high quality of professionalism which has been our hallmark for years."

Linda L. Raybin, the foundation's director of Community Initiatives programs, participated in the Newark seminar and kicked off a panel on funding.

"This meeting was an ideal way to jump-start this initiative," she said. "This has great promise to help family service agencies address the needs of contemporary families. It will require organizational change, however. That’s rarely an easy process. The Newark program helped participants see that the potential benefits are well worth some of the hurdles they’ll encounter."

Public Journalism Project Celebrates Success, Looks Ahead

Even as they toasted the success of public journalism in redefining news coverage, participants in a late June seminar discussed how a committed network of practitioners has made some headway — but not quite enough — in using journalism as a means of re-energizing civic participation.

"Public Journalism at Age Four: A Review and Appraisal" brought proponents, practitioners and educators to the Washington, D.C., area to assess the Project on Public Life and the Press. A collaboration of The Kettering Foundation, American Press Institute (API) and New York University, the project received four years of funding from Knight foundation's journalism program.

In those four years, the collaborators, led by Jay Rosen of NYU’s Department of Journalism, held workshops and seminars, conducted research and spread the word about dozens of newspaper-led efforts to encourage greater interaction on community issues with newspaper readers, TV viewers and the general public. They found that the partnerships created between newspapers, other media and other partners heightened public awareness and provided more opportunities for engagement and participation.

"I thought the seminar was effective in both moving the needle forward to give us a sense of what’s going on in the field and also from a closure standpoint in looking at the progress we’ve made," said Steve Smith, executive editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph. "I came away more convinced than ever that we’ve changed the fabric of the industry. More important, we’ve redefined the relationship between our readers and ourselves."

Less certain was the future, as the workshop’s 70 participants discussed the next steps to be taken by public journalism veterans.

"I think a lot of the folks at the conference felt that public journalism was making it safe to take risks," said The Poynter Institute’s Pete Weitzel. "But along with the celebration there was a very real sense that there’s so much more to be done."

Among the things that are being done are regional workshops on public journalism supported by Kettering; the continuing growth of the Civic Practices Network, which uses the Internet to post the latest studies and practices in the field; and an informal electronic network organized by Holly Heyser, a Norfolk Virginian-Pilot reporter.

Rosen says the project challenged journalists to consider their role in the looming civic crisis in America.

"Once journalists reimagine their relationship to the community and see journalism as part of the process of democracy and implicate themselves in public life, that’s when the real work begins," he said. "The number of people who have made that shift is rather small, but the power of it is huge."

"What I felt at the workshop was a palpable sense of commitment by these professionals to a set of ideas developed around public journalism," said Lisa Austin, the project’s research director. "They have seen that public journalism transforms their communities, and, not incidentally, their professional lives. What has been built over the past four years is a real sense of social capital and civic infrastructure."

"Knight Foundation has been pleased to stimulate the discussion about improving the quality of journalism with this project focused on reconnecting newspapers with their communities," said Del Brinkman, director of journalism programs. "The collaborators put together a successful project that will continue to encourage journalists to improve their work so that citizens can be well informed on society’s most important issues."

Museum Loan Network Makes Grants, Goes Online

The Museum Loan Network Advisory Committee has approved 24 grants to the national museum community totaling $280,000 — the greatest number and largest amount yet — in its most recent grant cycle.

The network, jointly funded by Knight Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts and based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, makes art objects available for long-term loan to cooperating museums throughout the country. The MLN has now funded survey, travel and implementation grants in 29 states, including Alaska, and the territory of Puerto Rico.

The network has recently launched a home page at http://loanet.mit.edu/Web/. In addition to learning more about the program at the site, museums can request a password from the network office to search the MLN Directory, a database of art objects.

For more information, contact Director Lori Gross at (617) 252-1888, or by e-mail at loanet@mit.edu.

Knight Commits $4 Million To Community Development Consortium

The National Community Development Initiative — a historic consortium of foundations, corporations and the U.S. government designed to create a quiet revolution in America’s urban neighborhoods — has moved into its third and final phase.

Knight Foundation, an NCDI partner since 1991, contributed $4 million in Phase III to a $107 million investment pool that will be used to reclaim 350 neighborhoods. Those projects include previous efforts to support community development corporations — CDCs — in Detroit, Philadelphia, Miami and St. Paul. The partnership’s total investment of $258 million has been leveraged many times over to build thousands of units of affordable housing, create jobs and business opportunities, develop empowerment zones and improve the quality of lives in our inner cities.

The Foundations’ trustees made $2 million grants each to the NCDI intermediaries: The Enterprise Foundation and the Local Initiatives Support Corp., in December. Knight will have invested $14 million in the project by its conclusion in 2001.

The partners announced Phase III in Washington, D.C. in late June. Other foundations in the initiative include Rockefeller, The Pew Charitable Trusts, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, W.K. Kellogg, Robert Wood Johnson, Surdna, Annie E. Casey and McKnight. Six other banks and corporate funders are also involved.

"Nothing is more central to Knight foundation's goal of improving the quality of life in our cities than what community development corporations are doing," said Creed C. Black, president and CEO. "When we became a founding partner in NCDI, the CDCs were already a standout success story in a landscape littered with failed anti-poverty programs and experiments. They have been substantially strengthened in the first two rounds of NCDI, and we are enthusiastic supporters of this concluding effort."

In Philadelphia, $4.7 million in grants and loans will help eight different CDCs and neighborhood associations. In St. Paul, at least $3.2 million in grants and loans will help that city’s thriving CDCs. In Detroit, $2 million will go to 10 different CDCs. Miami’s $2 million will support nine CDCs.

Missouri Selects Lee Hills Chair

Stuart Loory, a veteran journalist and news executive most recently with Turner International Broadcasting Co., has been chosen as the first Lee Hills Chair in Free-Press Studies at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

Loory spent 17 years with Cable News Network and Turner Broadcasting after a career as a reporter, correspondent and editor at U.S. newspapers including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Sun-Times. He joins Missouri’s faculty this fall.

The chair was endowed in 1995 by a gift from Lee Hills, former chairman of the foundation's board and trustee since 1960, and his wife, Tina. The gift was matched by the state of Missouri.

Hills attended Missouri’s School of Journalism before beginning a distinguished career in journalism that included serving as board chairman and CEO of Knight Ridder Inc.