Two New Impact Grants Awarded!

The Brown Institute is proud to announce two new Impact Grants!

  • Kinfolk will cultivate a national network of community organizations, cultural institutions and schools to change how we teach and learn about Black and Brown historical narratives, building a catalog of augmented reality representations of different historical figures.
  • Nueva Nación will collect and organize data about the operation of  the government of Panama — they created the country’s first truly accessible public data platform, and will use it to train a new generation of data journalists in the country.

Impact Grants were introduced last year, a joint effort of the Brown Institute and the Helen Gurley Brown Foundation. They were designed as a kind of second  year of Magic Grant funding, but targeted. With them, we are looking to support ventures that have the potential for strong commercial or not-for-profit impacts in media and technology. A key goal for these projects is to establish a well-defined path to financial sustainability. These are ventures for the long-haul.

Impact Grants are up to $200,000 and are meant to last for a year. Here’s how this new pair of Impact Grants describe their work ahead.

Kinfolk, a Brown Institute 2021-2022 Magic Grantee, is an augmented reality archive of Black and Brown monuments. Kinfolk’s goal is to increase access to diverse learning and narratives, expanding the reach of local, regional, national, and global under-told histories. With support from the Brown Institute, Kinfolk will be activating local histories through public programming, workshops, and curriculum in order to deepen the impact of technology and narrative change in communities across the country. This project will allow Kinfolk to create a national network of community partners, cultural institutions, schools, and artists that will support the organization’s sustainability and long-term impact.

Nueva Nación, a Brown Institute 2015-2016 Magic Grantee, will advance transparency and democracy in Panama through the “Expanding El Tabulario” Project by creating new and improved open databases, developing high-end data journalism products for both subscribers and syndication partners, underwriting a public service newsroom with a hyperlocal bent and training journalists in the skills necessary to keep Panamanian journalism competitive in the 21st Century. The project will generate thousands of new data points, provide newly gathered high-quality information to a growing subscriber base and offer ready-to-publish media packages to traditional media companies to increase brand reach, while developing a national network of local journalists through training.

Congratulations to our winning teams! We’ll keep you posted on their progress.