MacArthur Foundation

The newest area of work in MacArthur's long-standing Journalism and Media Program is support for organizations that enable, encourage, and amplify civic media-making. We are supporting nonprofit organizations that train and amplify fresh voices, with a particular emphasis on empowering young people and historically marginalized communities to tell their own stories, shape the public narrative, and assert influence over the matters that concern them. We call this work "participatory civic media."

Eight bold solutions to critical social problems were named semi-finalists in 100&Change, a global competition for a single $100 million grant from MacArthur. The proposals include 1) providing libraries and learners free digital access to four million books, 2) educating children displaced by conflict and persecution, and 3) providing virtual access to specialist medical care for underserved US patients.

1) The Internet Archive would expand libraries’ ability to deliver on their role as great equalizers, providing access to books and other resources to those who might not otherwise be able to afford them, regardless of geography. The Internet Archive would enable libraries to unlock their analog collections for a new generation of learners, enabling free, long-term, public access to knowledge. The project will curate, digitize, and make available in digital form four million books to any library that owns the physical book. The Internet Archive would start with the books most widely held and used in libraries and classrooms. The scale of the project will reduce digitization costs by 50 percent or more. The Internet Archive has prototyped this model for more than six years, digitizing 540,000 modern books originating from 100 partners and lending them to the public in a process that mirrors the way libraries traditionally lend physical books.

2) The International Rescue Committee and Sesame Workshop would develop and deliver multi-media content to meet the critical educational needs of children affected by conflict. The partnership would provide learning opportunities for refugee children, as well as their parents and caregivers, in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, enabling them to grow and thrive. The new educational content would feature the trusted and recognized Sesame Street Muppets—adapted to reflect and mitigate the adverse effects of experiences of refugee children and their parents. Multiple digital delivery platforms plus printed materials would be used to reach the largest possible number of children and their families. The project will tap extensive distribution networks reaching refugee and host communities via schools, community centers, social protection programs, and health clinics. The initiative would create programs and culturally relevant content for children, as well as tools to help parents and caregivers more effectively engage with them to build resiliency and support learning. It will establish an evidence-based model that can be adapted and redeployed by other organizations to reach millions more children in crisis.

3) Led by the Human Diagnosis Project, Specialty Net is an alliance of the nation's physician societies, licensing boards, and academic institutions that aims to close the specialty care gap for the nation's uninsured and underinsured. Specialty Net is an open, online system that seeks to provide public health and safety net institutions low-cost access to specialty care expertise. Specialty Net would engage 100,000 volunteer specialists to provide electronic consultations to three million patients in the U.S. safety net system over the next five years. Researchers at Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of California, San Francisco, are currently validating the system’s technology performance, cost, outcomes, and educational and training value. Patients would receive the specialty care they need, without having to wait or pay out of pocket. Specialists would receive credits toward their medical education, ongoing licensing, and maintenance of certification requirements. Each patient helped will add to an online system that combines collective intelligence with machine learning, helping to close the safety net specialty care gap and, ultimately, deliver this expertise globally.