ITF's "New Interactive Media for Progressive Change Initiative" Awards First $250,000 in Grants
January 29, 2010 -- A total of 7 nonprofit organizations
were recently awarded a total of $250,000 for grants submitted online
to the New Interactive Media for Progressive Change Initiative launched
last year by the Instructional Telecommunications Foundation.
The following are the nonprofit organizations selected for the awards with a short description of the project funded:
1. Air Traffic Control Education Fund, San Francisco, CA: $50,000 for Music + Mobile Advocacy Tools to collaborate with musicians to engage new constituencies in progressive social change through mobile technologies.
2. IDEPSCA/Mobile Voices, Los Angeles, CA: $50,000 for Mobile Voices to expand the use of mobile phones by immigrant families to enable their participation as citizen journalists; learning to publish multimedia stories about their lives and communities directly from their mobile phones to online platforms.
3. Media Mobilizing Project, Philadelphia, PA: $40,000 for Community Journalism & Digital Inclusion Initiative to build an independent distribution platform for web and SMS text messaging and train low-income workers, youth and immigrants in Philadelphia to use media for telling their stories.
4. People’s Production House, New York, NY: $40,000 to develop Cell Phone Literacy Toolkit for educators and organizers covering consumer awareness, federal policy, key technological issues, and media production. This suite of skills will help build the base of people who can use available mobile technology for progressive social change – and transform the underlying policies that currently restrict the usefulness of the technology for such ends.
5. Philippine Forum, Woodside, NY: $30,000 for Project 7Queens.com, a hyper-local, multi-media online publication servicing the immigrant communities built around the route of the NY Metropolitan Transportation’s 7 train in Queens, NY.
6. Fellowship of Reconciliation, Nyack, NY: $20,000 for the Enough Fear Campaign to engage citizen diplomacy between the USA and Iran using media including a Facebook-based pen-pal program, and a one-on-one online chat application to randomly match participants in America and Iran in real time.
7. Prometheus Radio Project, Philadelphia, PA: $20,000 for The Key to Internet Radio project designed to overcome the main barriers to entry for community radio stations to web stream, remote broadcast, and optimize their sites for mobile devices, thus helping stations seize the potential of broadband for social transformation.
ITF is a non-profit organization that undertakes to expand the dissemination of media, and points of view carried by them, that offer dissenting, alternative, or critically constructive information and concepts. It also supports the provision of quality and diverse instructional media content and capabilities to educators and students. Log on to www.itfitv.org for further information.
For further information, contact Halcyon Liew, Program officer at grants@itfitv.org
