Fund for the City of New York

American Geographical Society

The Fund for the City of New York (FCNY) works with local government agencies and organizations in New York City using innovative solutions to have an impact and improve the quality of life for underserved communities in the five boroughs and beyond. FCNY envisions a world where civic innovation, community solutions, and excellence in public service are cultivated and celebrated.

American Geographical Society (AGS)—a fiscally sponsored partner organization of FCNY—is a 21st-century learning society dedicated to the advancement of geographic thinking, knowledge, and understanding across business, government, academic, and social sectors. The award supports the Proximity Project—an initiative of AGS—to develop, curate, codify, and evangelize new ways of thinking about ‘proximity’ in the 21st century, which fully embrace the frontier of thinking around ‘cyber-social geography’ and related areas of thought. This includes considering the implications of these new frameworks in relationship to considerations of justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The Center for Court Innovation (the Center) works to create a more effective and humane justice system by designing and implementing operating programs, performing original research on effective practices, and providing training and technical assistance to reformers around the world in launching new strategies. This award supports the Center’s continued participation as a site coordinator in the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), the Foundation’s criminal justice reform initiative aimed at reducing over-incarceration and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities by targeting the misuse and overuse of jails. The Center works with the Foundation and other initiative partners on the ongoing planning, monitoring, and coordination of the initiative. It also provides intensive technical assistance and subject matter expertise to a group of SJC Network sites seeking to understand the drivers of local jail usage and racial inequities, and to implement and sustain strategies to address them. The Center’s activities have expanded to include participation in various efforts to extend the initiative’s reach and spread its influence to new jurisdictions and to the nation as a whole, including the sharing of learning and policy and practice innovations across peer and professional networks and a sharper focus on eliminating racial inequities. The Center also coordinates the Challenge Network's Racial Equity Cohort, a select group of Challenge sites and community partnerships poised to go deeper on addressing racial disparities in their local jails. The Center operates as a project of the Fund for the City of New York, which provides administrative, legal, and other support to nonprofit enterprises such as the Center.

The Center for Court Innovation (the Center) works to create a more effective and humane justice system by designing and implementing operating programs, performing original research on effective practices, and providing training and technical assistance to reformers around the world in launching new strategies. This award supports the Center’s continued participation as a site coordinator in the Safety and Justice Challenge, the Foundation’s criminal justice reform initiative aimed at reducing over-incarceration by targeting the misuse and overuse of jails. In addition to working with the Foundation and its partners on the ongoing design and coordination of the initiative, the Center provides technical assistance and support to Safety and Justice Challenge Network sites as they seek to understand the drivers of local jail usage and racial disparities and as they develop and implement plans to address them. The Center for Court Innovation operates as a project of the Fund for the City of New York, a foundation that provides administrative, legal, and other support to nonprofit enterprises like the Center. The Center is responsible for its own program development, operations, and raises all its own operating funds independently.

The LAMP (Learning About Multimedia Project), housed at the Fund for the City of New York, is a national youth development and media literacy organization. It provides programming for New York City youth to make and create media as a means of making sense of their communities, speaking out on issues they care about, and challenging stereotypes that they find harmful or misleading. This grant supports the LAMP to launch and implement the 22x20 campaign, a new nonpartisan national media literacy and civics campaign targeting the 22 million young people who will be eligible to vote in 2020. The campaign – which is a collaboration between The Lamp and the Center for Information and Research on Civics Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University – will unite the efforts of youth-serving organizations, agencies and companies from across the country to provide training and engagement opportunities to young people aged 13 to 17, with the ultimate goal of increasing and diversifying youth voice and engagement in public debates and electoral processes leading up the 2020 elections.

The Fund for the City of New York (FCNY) is a nonprofit with the broad mandate of improving the quality of life for all New Yorkers. This grant supports a planning summit organized by The Lamp, a project incubated at FCNY that provides media literacy programming for youth as a means of preparing them to be good citizens in today’s digital world. The grant supports The Lamp to convene media, civic and digital literacy experts in New York in September 2017 to plan a national campaign designed to ensure the 22 million young people who will be eligible to vote in 2020 are informed, engaged citizens. The campaign will harness the reach and power of youth media organizations, libraries, technology companies and others to build the media making and civic skills of youth from across the political spectrum. Youth will learn to create and remix media online, become informed about issues important to their communities, and understand the role citizens can play in influencing policy.