WASHINGTON — CPB announced $500,000 in new education innovation grants for public media stations at the annual National Educational Telecommunications Association conference Monday.
Up to 50 stations can receive grants for educational engagement initiatives “beyond existing models such as camps and workshops,” CPB said in the announcement. More information on the grants will be available starting in March. Examples include projects “to amplify youth voices and support civic engagement and media literacy; to develop local curriculum and/or test new content, or to target new learning audiences on digital platforms.”
The new grant opportunities “will surely jumpstart promising projects,” said NETA President Eric Hyyppa.
The grants, as well as the daylong CPB-sponsored Public Media Thought Leader Forum that opened this week’s NETA conference, are part of the corporation’s Partnership 2020 station engagement initiative to help stations be more responsive to their communities. Partnership 2020 was announced at the 2016 PBS-CPB General Managers planning meeting.
The Monday forum was created to focus on ways public media stations “can enhance their educational content and services for new, diverse generations,” said CPB President Pat Harrison. The slate of speakers includes J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis; Mimi Ito, professor and MacArthur Foundation chair in Digital Media and Learning at the University of California, Irvine; and rapper Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, co-founder of the Felix Organization, which assists children growing up in foster care.