A Community-Driven Model for Public Media

Nonprofit tech blogger Amy Sample Ward‘s latest contribution to the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog focuses on how libraries can operate as community-driven organizations, allowing these valuable institutions to innovate, as she puts it, “at the speed of communities.” Reading through her post, replace “libraries” with “public media” and her thinking resonates just as strongly.

Ward is getting at a key idea for community engagement: collaboration between local organizations and the communities they serve can work best when those institutions are focused on the community, and move with it over time. Organizations, she points out, “can provide the map, the gas, and even the car, but the community needs to be the driver. That will ensure passion and impact can go into steering, knowledge can help guide the way, and if no one wants to drive you have a pretty clear answer to adoption!”

Public Media’s Place in Convening Community

There’s a great story out of Jacksonville, Florida recently announced by the the Jessie Ball DuPont Fund, in which 14 area non-profits came together to share resources to achieve a collective goal of combating hunger in their community. In this case, the DuPont fund convened these organizations to have them share their best thinking on the needs of the community, and the needs of each organization. According to the Fund’s announcement: “Despite the similarity of their mission and clientele, the representatives of these organizations had never sat around a table with one another. They worked, in some cases, just blocks apart, but did not know one another.” Then, together, they were able to take action.

What are the chances there are similar circumstances in your community? Could public media play the role of the convener? Absolutely. A good starting point could be to map your network, as we wrote about in a previous blog post. What do you learn about the relationships you’ve built, the resources provided by your network, and where are there opportunities to increase connections?

The activities the DuPont Fund engaged in with this project map closely to the Community Engagement Framework (those elements that we believe lead to successful public media community engagement efforts). We have multiple resources on our site to help you accomplish the work of convening your community, from how to host leadership summits to info on improving community partnerships – and much more. Have a great story about how your station has been a community convener? Share it by adding it to our Stories of Impact on PublicMediaMaps.org!

Network Mapping: Crucial to Your Engagement Work

Author Beth Kanter (The Networked Nonprofit) gives some great advice about network mapping in this recent blog post. The exercise of mapping your network (detailed by Kanter in her post) can strengthen your work across several parts of the community engagement framework – particularly when it comes to understanding your assets and value as an organization, building relationships across your community, and collaborating with others.

NEA to Support Creative Community Engagement

Are you considering collaborating with others to serve the needs of your community through the arts? The National Endowment for the Arts Our Town grant program offers grants ranging from $25,000 to $250,000 to organizations partnering for the purpose of Creative Placemaking to strengthen and engage their community. Supported projects will be those in which:

“…communities, together with their arts and design organizations and artists, are looking to increase their livability, and specifically are seeking to:

• Improve their quality of life.
• Encourage creative activity.
• Create community identity and a sense of place.
• Revitalize local economies.”

The NEA is hosting a series of webinars regarding this and other upcoming grant opportunities over the next several weeks.

How Can Public Media Engage a Generation?

In this recent post, blogger Andrew Taylor reflects on the way 10 Trends of 20-Somethings may challenge traditional aspects of performing arts organizations. There’s also room for public media stations to consider these trends when seeking local engagement opportunities with Millennials. How might knowing that those in this group tend to lead more local lives, for example, impact engagement efforts in your community?