The Fledgling Fund offers insights on funding virtual reality

Editor's note: Earlier this month, Media Impact Funders brought funders together at Philanthropy New York with organizers and presenters from the first VR for Change summit to explore how immersive platforms offer new ways to engage and mobilize users around social issues. Because this is a new and quickly evolving medium, attendees had many questions. The lively conversation ranged across definitions of new technologies, ways to match funders’ goals to VR productions, emerging research on impact, and the costs of supporting such projects as platforms continue to roll out. Diana Barrett of the Fledgling Fund has thought through many of these questions in her own practice. In this post adapted from a piece published in the online publication Immerse, she shares what she’s learned about the impact of VR, and how Fledgling chooses the projects they support.  Read More

By Meghan Ventura | Community & Operations Manager, Games for Change With VR’s promise to help us see the world from someone else’s point of view, one word has become nearly synonymous with virtual reality projects on real-world issues—empathy. Read More

Inauguration day is just around the corner, and many funders and journalists are increasingly concerned about the role media play in a free and democratic society. The field is moving quickly to understand the impact of “fake news,” propaganda, hoaxes and biased coverage—both in how they skew information relating to the issues funders care about, and in how they contribute to undermining journalism and democracy. Read More

This post originally appeared on the Ford Foundation's Equals Change blog on Sept. 21, 2016. Not everyone knows the name Sir Tim Berners-Lee, but they certainly know his invention: the World Wide Web. And if being responsible for one of the most important innovations in human history wasn’t enough, early on Berners-Lee made the generous and vital decision to give it away for free. Read More

On July 24, the night before the opening of the Democratic National Convention here in Philadelphia, Van Jones—CNN commentator, social activist, author and president & co-founder of The Dream Corps—offered his candid thoughts on the state of our increasingly divided nation. Read More

Editor's note: This piece was updated on Aug. 5, 2016, to include DNC contributions by graphic journalist and VR/AR expert Dan Archer, the Youth News Team, and the NoVo Foundation. This week's Democratic Convention is taking place in our hometown. So, we're reporting from both inside and outside the event on how nonprofit outlets and their funders are addressing issues at the center of this highly contested election. Here are some initial observations; we'll be updating this as we go.  Many thanks to our partners at LinkTV for securing us a pair of press passes—follow their conference coverage here. Read More

Vince Stehle, our executive director, attends a lot of meetings and conferences throughout the year. Each time, he returns with something new: a connection, an idea for collaboration, a project worthy of more attention. Read More

What is it: A campaign launched by Ford in late January that seeks to raise awareness about inequality in all its forms and what can be done about it. Ford asked people on social media one question: “Finish this sentence: Inequality is…” Read More

At this year’s Media Impact Forum, we asked two important questions: “What do we want from media innovation in the public interest?” and “How do we get it?” To explore answers, we brought together leading thinkers, funders and media innovators to share their ideas and projects for an inspired digital future. The key theme for the morning was inclusion—from providing tech opportunities for all to ensuring access to knowledge for all. Wendy Hanamura of the Internet Archive served as the emcee, and David Rousseau of the Kaiser Family Foundation as the day’s host, welcoming attendees to the foundation’s Menlo Park headquarters. Watch videos from the day here. What do we want? We started with Van Jones who masterfully grounded our conversation in contrasting stories of hatred and exclusion versus those of love and inclusion. In the agricultural age, he noted, African Americans were property. In the industrial age African Americans were also at the bottom of the economic ladder and the last to be included in industrial revolution. Now with digital age, how will we create one that includes everyone? The good news? It’s only after we have a breakdown that we… Read More