Civic Engagement

The Rita Allen Foundation seeds new ideas and approaches in the field of civic engagement, believing that aware, informed and engaged citizens are our greatest assets for solving the most critical problems in our communities.

Our investments include innovative approaches to strengthening civic engagement in the United States through new technology, information and tools for citizens. Supported projects are nonpartisan, encouraging an informed and vibrant democracy without promoting particular political parties or policies.

This is an urgent time to strengthen civic participation. The weakening of traditional and investigative press coverage, the influence of money in politics, the perception that voting doesn’t matter, the polarization of politics and the often hostile tone of public debate have had serious, detrimental effects on people’s willingness and ability to productively contribute to the democratic process. Yet new technology and knowledge across sectors provide powerful new tools for democratic engagement and problem solving. We embrace learning through experimentation, network building and knowledge sharing to advance the civic potential of people and technology.

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SELECT CIVIC LITERACY AND ENGAGEMENT GRANTS

Knight News Challenge on Elections +
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation $125,000

Knight News Challenge on Elections

This Knight News Challenge awarded 22 grants for innovative projects to encourage civic participation before, during and after elections. The challenge is a collaboration between the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the Hewlett Foundation and the Rita Allen Foundation. The winners, selected from more than 1,000 submissions, include a searchable archive of campaign speeches, an open-source tool for mining campaign-finance data, a toolkit to help election offices better inform prospective voters and an effort to help people with prior felony convictions apply to restore their voting rights.
Prototype Fund Open Call for Ideas to Improve the Flow of Accurate Information +
$100,000

Prototype Fund Open Call for Ideas to Improve the Flow of Accurate Information

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund and the Rita Allen Foundation sponsored an open call for ideas to address concerns about the spread of misinformation and produce ways to build trust in journalism. The funders collaborated to choose 20 winning projects and provide a total of $1 million in grants; a contribution from the Rita Allen Foundation is supporting two of the selected projects. Several of the projects focus on involving the public in news gathering and developing tools to better reach diverse and politically disparate communities. Some focus on media literacy, providing ways to help people become responsible consumers of digital content. Others offer tools that advance deeper, and more thoughtful methods of fact checking; including better ways to track misinformation, understand its sources and channels, and more effectively communicate the credibility of information.
Exploring Machine Learning at the TV News Archive +
Internet Archive $100,000

Exploring Machine Learning at the TV News Archive

The Internet Archive’s TV News Archive opens new avenues for journalists, scholars and citizens to track and evaluate political news. This database, developed with support from the Rita Allen Foundation and others, includes more than 1 million TV segments and thousands of linked fact-checks. A new grant will enable the Archive, in partnership with machine learning experts, to enhance its capabilities for transcription, speaker and topic identification, and more—making its collection more useful for research and data analysis.
The Coral Project +
Mozilla Foundation $80,000

The Coral Project

The Coral Project conducts robust research and builds free, open-source tools that empower newsrooms to build constructive dialogue with their communities. Support from the Rita Allen Foundation will allow The Coral Project to improve its tools, as well as provide resources and training to help journalists use them effectively and, ultimately, to promote a culture of trust.
News Revenue Hub
$150,000
Improving and Increasing Fact Checking in Journalism +
American Press Institute $100,000

Improving and Increasing Fact Checking in Journalism

RELATED STORY: Beyond “Just the Facts”

Rigorous fact checking of public figures by journalists can give people essential knowledge for making informed decisions about civic issues. The American Press Institute’s fact-checking project, launched in 2014, is building research, tools, networks and training to refine effective fact-checking techniques and extend them to newsrooms of all sizes. With support from the Rita Allen Foundation, the American Press Institute is extending this work into the 2016 election season as well as studying economic incentives for fact checking by tracking reader engagement with fact-checking content.
Code for America Fellowship Program +
Code for America $150,000

Code for America Fellowship Program

Code for America’s flagship Fellowship program connects talented individuals in technology and data science (including software developers, designers and project managers) with local governments and citizens to create new approaches to solving their communities’ trickiest problems. Together, they build tools that enable people from both inside and outside public institutions to collectively solve local problems. During the yearlong fellowship, developers, designers and researchers work alongside local public officials to build digital tools, foster new approaches to problem solving and tackle community issues. Ultimately, Fellows are building a movement for civic innovation within local government, breaking down obstacles to using new technology to address a host of civic challenges.
Accelerating the Civic Tech Nonprofit Ecosystem
Fast Forward $50,000
Expanding TurboVote Corporate Partnerships +
Democracy Works $150,000

Expanding TurboVote Corporate Partnerships

RELATED STORY: Partners for Democracy

Democracy Works is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization using technology to help voting information “fit the way we live” in the 21st century. Democracy Works technologists partnered with the Pew Charitable Trusts, Google, and state and local election officials to develop the Voting Information Project, which has been supported in part by the Rita Allen Foundation. The Voting Information Project collects and disseminates polling information and election results into standardized, readily available online formats, and will provide data for more than 70 elections in 2016. The Rita Allen Foundation also supported the advancement and expansion of Democracy Works’ TurboVote, an online application that streamlines voter information. Partnerships with higher education networks helped to bring TurboVote services to more than 250,000 people by 2014. Additional funding from the Rita Allen Foundation will allow Democracy Works to move toward financial sustainability through new partnerships with companies and other nonprofits.

The Rita Allen Foundation is also supporting a project that will bring the lessons of Democracy Works’ growth to aspiring social entrepreneurs. Seth Flaxman and Kathryn Peters launched Democracy Works after earning master’s degrees in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Now, the Harvard Kennedy School Case Program has created a case study and companion video on Democracy Works, to be used in teaching public policy students how to analyze a problem, gather resources and take actions to address it.
Voter’s Edge +
MapLight $150,000

Voter’s Edge

MapLight, a nonpartisan research organization that tracks and publicizes information about money’s influence on politics, is working to make comprehensive, customized voting information more accessible to citizens. In 2014 MapLight piloted Voter’s Edge, an online tool that allows users to enter a home address and view personalized, nonpartisan information on candidates, ballot measures, campaign finance data and more. MapLight partnered with the League of Women Voters of California Education Fund to offer local voting information to Californians, and the Rita Allen Foundation supported the expansion of Voter’s Edge to include details on federal and state-level candidates in all 50 states. Now, funding from the Rita Allen Foundation is enabling MapLight to improve on the Voter’s Edge prototype by creating a standardized, replicable model that will eventually provide federal, state and local voting information for all jurisdictions in the United States. Assessing the effectiveness of Voter’s Edge during the 2016 general election will guide future efforts to expand the platform to cover federal, state and local voting information for every state.
State Integrity Investigation 2.0 +
The Center for Public Integrity $300,000

State Integrity Investigation 2.0

RELATED STORY: New Report Grades State Governments on Ethics and Transparency

The Center for Public Integrity produces original investigative journalism on significant public issues. The Center is making its mark on reform efforts and movements for better government, and its State Integrity Investigation, in collaboration with Global Integrity, promotes transparent state government in the 50 U.S. states. This initiative provides a basis for national and local reporting that helps citizens understand if their governments are adhering to the principles of ethics and openness. The Rita Allen Foundation has partnered with the Omidyar Network and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation to support the latest iteration of the State Integrity Investigation. Among the many national outlets that wrote about the results of the investigation were USA Today and The Washington Post.
Digital Democracy
Institute for Advanced Technology and Public Policy, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo $200,000
Raising Voices for Science: A Test Campaign (including Rural Mississippi Extension) +
ScienceCounts $300,000

Raising Voices for Science: A Test Campaign (including Rural Mississippi Extension)

Americans have an overwhelmingly positive view of science, yet remain ambivalent toward government’s leading role in driving scientific advancement. According to a recent benchmark study conducted by ScienceCounts, a nonprofit focused on enhancing public support for federally funded science, only one in four Americans recognize that government’s support of the scientific enterprise is irreplaceable and cannot be offset by funding from the private sector. “Raising Voices for Science” is a social marketing initiative launched by ScienceCounts to bolster public support for scientific research. The initial step—a groundbreaking national benchmark study completed in 2016—yielded invaluable data and insights into public attitudes toward science. The Rita Allen Foundation, in partnership with funders from philanthropy, industry and academia, is sponsoring the next stage of this work—a test campaign that seeks to discover, through careful measurement and analysis, public engagement strategies that effectively garner public support for a robust federal role in scientific research. Beginning in four mid-sized communities, the campaign will conduct and evaluate engagement approaches—including activities in schools and museums, community events, and broadcast and online media. These projects will take advantage of existing enthusiasm for science among broad swathes of the public, and help to connect the promise of scientific research with concrete benefits for individuals and communities. The results will inform a larger campaign and a suite of proven engagement strategies to be shared with the scientific community through the American Association for the Advancement of Science and other professional societies.
Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium on the Science of Science Communication III +
National Academy of Sciences $125,000

Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium on the Science of Science Communication III

The third Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium on the Science of Science Communication, supported in part by the Rita Allen Foundation, built on the consensus study report Communicating Science Effectively: A Research Agenda as a framework for advancing both research and practice in science communication.

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