The following, about Knight Community Information Challenge project Floodlight, is written by Rebecca Arno, VP/communications for the Denver Foundation. This year's challenge is accepting applications from community and place-based foundations through June 1. Photo credit: Floodlight.

This time of year in Denver, gardeners know that deep freezes and spring snow are behind us and it’s finally safe to plant. It’s also when the residents of the Whittier neighborhood will begin putting in their community garden – on a site formerly used by gangs to hide drugs and guns.  They’ll need to recruit volunteers, but that shouldn’t be a problem, because they’ve already started telling their story and connecting their neighbors to the vision, through a new tool called Floodlight.

Floodlight is a partnership of The Piton Foundation, a private operating foundation created by energy entrepreneur and philanthropist Sam Gary, and The Denver Foundation, the oldest and largest community foundation in the Rockies, with generous support through the Knight Community Information Challenge. Both Piton and The Denver Foundation have longstanding commitments to helping people in low-income communities make change by using the power of data and storytelling. 

Floodlight provides an easy-to-use, intuitive set of story-building tools to help users create a visually rich, shareable story that is tagged by subject and geography.  The tool can embed video, audio, photos and data visualizations easily with text.  The design team, using the flexible Django open source platform, used research about effective storytelling to put together templates that walk users through the complex process of crafting a compelling story.

The site also contains numerous skill-building tools to help storytellers up their game.  They can learn from Denver writer Patricia Dubrava about the elements of an effective story (structure, detail, authenticity, and emotion), walk through a guide on data and visualizations, and discover how sound can bring an online story to life.

The following blog post is written by Michele McLellan, a Circuit Rider for the Knight Community Information Challenge, which is accepting applications from community and place-based foundations through June 1. Photo credit: ModeShift on Flickr.

Six years ago, the Knight Community Information Challenge set out to encourage community foundations to fill gaps in local information created by shrinking newsrooms.

Along the way, though, many challenge winners found that their news and information projects increased civic engagement – in fact, that’s what more than two-thirds reported recently in a survey by FSG.

FSG surveyed more than 50 community foundations that have sponsored local news and information projects in the first five years of the challenge, which is accepting applications from locally-focused funders through June 1.

Among the overall survey findings:

• 66 percent reported they had increased community engagement in issues they care about.
• 74 percent report contributing towards a more informed community, to greater media attention to local issues, and to greater collaboration among community issues.

FSG cited these examples:

• ACT for Alexandria in Virginia created an online town hall called “Ask the city council candidates.” This prompted online discussion and the local Democratic party used questions from the town hall in its final primary debate. The project reports that residents have also been more engaged in local problem solving. For example, during a competition to promote engagement, residents generated 22 different ideas for how to improve the play opportunities for children in Alexandria.

Most of the world sees San José, Calif. as the capital of Silicon Valley, a creative tech hub drawing extraordinary talent to some of the world’s largest media companies like Google, Facebook and more.

Yet the country’s 10th largest city faces significant challenges, including gaping economic disparity and a significant digital divide. Richard Florida, a leading intellectual on economic competitiveness, writes that wage inequality in San José, Calif. is the second largest in the country.

We recently asked several of the community’s leaders from philanthropy, government and the arts what they see as their city’s greatest assets and biggest challenges.

Here’s what they had to say:

Erica K. Wood, vice president of community leadership and grantmaking at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation:

E.W.: San José and Silicon Valley are rich in diversity – its residents represent an incredible range of cultural traditions and languages, and we enjoy an environment that encompasses beautiful open spaces, farmland and vibrant urban neighborhoods. The innovations generated by our universities and businesses – from global corporations to one-person startups – often make Silicon Valley residents feel as if the solutions to the world’s toughest problems must surely be within reach.

And yet there are still enormous issues that divide us. Serious and growing economic disparity between rich and poor, unequal access to digital technology and education, lack of affordable housing and inadequate transportation systems are among them. Striving to narrow the gap between those who have and those in need is what makes our work at the community foundation rewarding.

Connie Martinez, managing director and CEO of 1stACT Silicon Valley (which seeks to make downtown San José a more viable, fun and friendly place to live) and Executive Director of the Arts Council of Silicon Valley: