Two New Grants – Rural Voices and Online Citizen Engagement and Media, Neighborhood Forums and Immigrants

We are proud, no make that ecstatic, to announce two new grants we’ve received:

• Rural Voices – Online Citizen Engagement and Media – The Blandin Foundation awarded us $49,000 for an 18 month project to promote rural voices in Minnesota online (full proposal PDF). The first six months will focus on a series of online citizen engagement and media outreach events across five rural regions of the state (planting seeds). From that active on the ground outreach we will identify at least three communities interested in starting new Issues Forums (tending the fields) as a part of our network and provide them extensive support and training. In addition to working closely with Blandin’s Get Broadband program, we will be tapping the statewide networks of our outreach partners to help spread word about this effort. They include Minnesota Rural Partners, the Minnesota Extension Service, KAXE – Northern Community Radio, the Minnesota Online e-Services effort of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities and both the Minnesota Journalism Center, and the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota. Our first step is to engage our partners to design the outreach events and collect your offers to host a regional event in your rural Minnesota community. The next step is to gather your input and interest in starting an Issues Forum in a rural Minnesota community if that is where you live. Drop us a note to get involved: team@e-democracy.org

• Neighborhood Forums in High Immigrant/Communities of Color/Low Income Areas of the Twin Cities – The MSNet fund of the Minneapolis Foundation awarded us $25,000 to deepen our local e-democracy efforts in Minneapolis and St. Paul through our new neighborhood forum efforts. We see neighborhood “life” forums as a way to dramatically diversify and democratize local online public space building from our active city-wide Minneapolis and St. Paul Issues Forums. While volunteers are encouraged to start neighborhood forums anywhere there is capacity, this grant will allow us to focus deeply on at least two new forums where the digital divide is the greatest and engage immigrants and communities of color populations in a real and meaningful way. According to our work plan, our initial focus in Minneapolis starts with outreach in the Cedar Riverside (West Bank) neighborhood with a very large East African community (Somali, Oromo, and more) and in St. Paul we seek to leverage the local St. Paul E-Democracy chapter-led digital inclusion efforts in the neighborhoods surrounding the Rondo Outreach Community Library. “Neighbourhood” forums are already part of our UK network in Bristol and soon Oxford. We are excited about the potential of neighborhood forums and encourage you to explore some the best examples we’ve discovered. To get involved contact: team@e-democracy.org