CNN commentator Van Jones breathes life into national conversations around racial & political divides

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

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

On November 20, 2014, as the world waited for the Grand Jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri, Media Impact Funders and The Atlantic Philanthropies hosted a conversation on race, justice and media with philanthropic leaders and media makers. The event was designed to explore how media is changing public opinion and policy on multiple criminal justice issues — from the school-to-prison pipeline, to racial profiling, to wrongful prosecution and beyond. Now, with another grand jury deciding not to indict another police office in the killing of yet another unarmed black man, Eric Garner, protests are erupting around the country. This makes it more crucial than ever for funders and producers to consider how the narratives around people of color have played out in mainstream media, and how that correlates to representation, judicial policy and policing. Our event laid out high-impact examples in three core areas — documentary and narrative film, journalism and social and advocacy campaigns — and examined how these forms intersect. We learned how journalism from FRONTLINE informed the creation of the action movie Snitch, which spawned an advocacy campaign on mandatory sentencing minimums. In the same vein, the best-selling book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in… Read More