New Grant Rounds Fund Community Partners, Additional Media Partners and Public Television
Sound Partners for Community Health has become a laboratory for exploring how media can work more closely with partners in the community. Since 1997, the project has awarded 68 grants to public radio stations across the country to devise ways of engaging people through reporting and outreach around specific health issues. These media collaborations have resulted in the production of lively, award-winning coverage that has reached a wide cross-section of listeners.
In the next four years, Sound Partners will strengthen and replicate this model in new locales, with new kinds of partnerships, utilizing new media. Building upon the successes and lessons learned in the first two grant rounds, the project will provide funding and technical assistance for up to 12 public television stations and up to 60 additional public radio stations.
In the next two grant rounds, Sound Partners will extend its efforts to broaden partnerships by offering small grants to community organizations and other local media involved in project activities. The timing is perfect for the program to expand its model for media collaboration to public television, new community partners and new media partners. The growth of the Internet and the deployment of new digital standards in broadcasting provide a window of opportunity for a more vigorous and inclusive public dialogue.
Helping Community Partners
Community organizations are becoming more savvy about how to leverage their roles and resources when collaborating with media. As broadcasters continue to explore the possibilities of working with these groups, organizations may expand their roles, becoming content providers and information conduits. Sound Partners' vision is for broadcasters and community partners to reap an equal share of benefits from participation in the project. While partners understand the value of media exposure in advancing their community work, it has required many of them to overextend their resources. Mini-grants will substantially help community organizations involved in partnerships to expand their roles, increase their ability to provide collateral materials and mount events organized around health care topics.
Adding Media Partners
Involving additional media partners in the community will help health care messages reach beyond the demographic boundaries of public television and public radio. Many of our stations have begun to experiment with social marketing as well as with civic journalism campaigns. Owing largely to the collaboration of community partners, Sound Partners initiatives have achieved remarkable success in reaching targeted audiences. We envision a wide field of prospective media partners, ranging from Internet resources to non-English-language newspapers to commercial television or radio.
To qualify for these $10,000 media grants, partners must demonstrate how additional media will expand the reach and impact of programming and outreach. Only 15 media grants will be offered in each round of funding, to encourage thoughtful planning for authentic project activities involving additional media partners.
Partnering with PublicTelevision
Public television is repositioning itself for digital conversion and reexamining the way local stations relate to their communities. Stations are reaching out to new content partners as well as developing new production formats and interactive services to meet the public's need for information, communication and participation. Sound Partners grant funding will provide public television stations the opportunity to produce local programming on important health issues and utilize a variety of new content platforms.
Just as in radio, the grants to television stations will create an enormous amount of activity at the local level. And, following the Sound Partners' model, it is expected that public television stations will work closely with community partners to reach segments of the population not traditionally identified as viewers.
Only six public television stations will be selected to participate in each of the two upcoming Sound Partners grant rounds. Because so few stations will be represented in these two pilot rounds, potential grantees must demonstrate that the production staff and outreach professionals are committed to working as equal partners in defining the project.
As in the radio model, community partners working with a public television station will be required to place a value on the in-kind services they will provide as their stake in the collaboration. What is different is the requirement that local foundations or other funding sources must also provide funding to increase the local dimension of the project. Stations will be required to seek local or regional funding to complement the Sound Partners grant to demonstrate substantial local commitment to the topic and partners chosen.
In addition to providing funding for community partners and additional media partners, the new rounds of grantees will benefit from the exchange of ideas between television and radio. Sound Partners is unique in its efforts to bring public radio and public television producers and outreach professionals together in a dialogue around issues related to health programming, civic journalism and community engagement.
Over the next four years, Sound Partners grants will involve over 100 media collaborators and impact 72 media markets. Funding will support the efforts of public television and radio stations, community organizations and other media collaborators. By encouraging greater participation from a larger variety of partners and stakeholders, Sound Partners' outreach and programming activities will reach an even broader cross-section of Americans.