Knight funded our ReadySetLearn campaign during the second year of its challenge grant program. The idea was that if Knight gave our initiative the early publicity it needed, it could help spark an initiative that the community foundation would endorse, fund and work to pass in the fall.

The dream is starting to come together!

After a year of negotiations and a lot of public messaging about the importance of early childhood education, the Boulder Valley School District last week put a $22.5 million mill levy override question on the Nov. 2 ballot. Most importantly to our initiative, they have earmarked a full $5 million per year if this passes to preschool and full-day Kindergarten for low-income students in the district.

If it passes Nov. 2, kids in the achievement gap will be served by 65% more preschool classrooms and twice as many full-day Kindergarten classrooms than currently exist in the southern half of Boulder County.

Our research indicates that this is one of the smartest and most leveraged investments our community could make, to begin to close the achievement gap.

Chris Barge

The Community Foundation Serving Boulder County

In her graduation picture, Samantha Guzman is wearing a purple feathered dress clutching a diploma. Her mom picked up the framed portrait the day after she was shot and killed on a Bronx street corner while walking to catch a bus.

“I lost my child on Mother’s Day,” her mom Diana Rodriguez said in a video shown to close to 500 New York City students this week.

The video, produced by young filmmakers, is part of the Beyond Bullets campaign. Funded by the Knight Community Information Challenge and the New York Community Trust, the effort aims to use the power of the media to quell America’s gun violence epidemic. Young filmmakers have been chronicling the effects of the violence, and their works will be shown to students and posted at beyondbullets.org.

The project’s “Cybercar,” a bus equipped with a TV production studio and viewing area, traveled to New York schools this week to show the video about Samantha Guzman and host town hall meetings on how to prevent the bloodshed.

After one forum, organizers asked people in the audience to raise their hands if they knew someone who died from gun violence, the Wall Street Journal reported. Every hand went up.

Here’s some impressive journalism – and proof of the potential for hard-hitting public service reporting in new media ventures.

During its first week of operation, NJ Spotlight – a grant winner in the second year of the Knight Community Information Challenge – published a report revealing that PSE&G Power, an unregulated affiliate of Power Service Electric & Gas, has failed for years to pay a state-mandated energy surcharge. In 2009 alone, PS&G Power should have paid an estimated $47 million into the societal benefits charge (SBC) fund, according to one estimate.

The very next day, NJ Spotlight published a follow-up report detailing a call by a powerful state senator for an investigation by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office. Under the state’s deregulation law, passed in 1999, all gas and electric customers are required supposed to pay the surcharge to support clean energy and energy assistance programs for low-income customer. A spokeswoman for PS&G Power, which is PSE&G’s largest customer, told NJ Spotlight that the arrangement was “was approved by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities in a number of open, on-the-record proceedings.”

The original NJ Spotlight story was referenced and linked in a report by The Star-Ledger, highlighting NJ Spotlight’s credibility (its founding editorial team is made up of veteran, award-winning New Jersey journalists) and the innovative partnerships that are emerging between new and traditional media.

In 2009, the Community Foundation of New Jersey received a $352,000 matching grant from Knight Foundation to create a public interest news service providing online news, continuously updated, as well as online discussion forums. NJ Spotlight describes itself as “non-partisan, independent, policy-centered and community-minded.”

The grant was part of Knight’s Community Information Challenge, a five-year, $24 million initiative. The matching grants are awarded to community foundations to support creative ways to use new media and technology to keep communities informed and engaged about the issues that affect their lives.