The 2017 Media Impact Festival honorees: Where are they now?

You may have heard political commentator Charlie Sykes talk about polarization in this country. He examined it in several newspaper op-eds. He hosted a show about it in President Trump’s first 100 days in office. And he talked about it at our 2017 Media Impact Forum back in June. Read More

The recent violence in Charlottesville, Va., has thrust racist ideas into the national conversation in ways Americans haven't experienced before. Of course, tensions around race relations in the U.S. have been steadily building over the past few years, with high-profile protests around police shootings and a resurgence in hate groups. Intolerance in the streets has mirrored a spike in divisive rhetoric online, where trolls "drown out the voices of women, ethnic and religious minorities, gays—anyone who might feel vulnerable," observes Joel Stein in Time. But most disturbingly, these same sentiments can now be heard in the highest corridors of power. 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

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

Editor's note: Back in February, we held an event with filmmaker Stanley Nelson to talk about his now Emmy-nominated film, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. The film sparked the No. 1 trending Twitter hashtag—#BlackPanthersPBS—in the world on the night it premiered on PBS’ Independent Lens. It is also Independent Lens' highest rated and most-streamed film. Below is the transcript from this Prince Theater event, where Nelson was interviewed by Norris West, director of strategic communications for the Annie E. Casey Foundation. If you haven't seen the film, you can watch the trailer below.  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

Media Impact Funders and Southern California Grantmakers held a convening of funders on Saturday, September 26 in Los Angeles, at the Annenberg Foundation's Skylight Studios to explore emerging strategies for supporting local and ethnic reporting projects. See our Storify from the day for highlights, speaker presentations and more. 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