Grantcraft Case Study: "New Routes is a meta-communications project to cultivate other communications projects"

New Routes Grantcraft Case Study>>

"When people say community media, they often mean the local news. But at New Routes to Community Health, community media means participatory media," says Karen Menichelli. She is program liaison for the Benton Foundation which manages the project with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

In 2007 eight sites were awarded three years of funding and technical assistance, including webinars, grantee conferences, and more. At each site, media is being created by and for immigrant on health issues that participants themselves identify as important. The goal is to build authentic community leadership and collaboration, resulting in healthier, more informed and empowered immigrant communities.

New Routes project media includes digital storytelling, community radio, commercial and in-language media and social networking on the Web. Menichelli says it was important for there to be "authentic partnerships of equals - that it wasn't just media determining the content too early and it wasn't nonprofits and health groups purely in it for some PR." Each of the eight New Routes projects includes an immigrant organization to link to the target communities, a media organization to provide and outlet and technical expertise, and a high-capacity community organization to act at managing partner. The intent was to form new partnerships that would outlast the funding and demonstrate the value of working together.

New Routes to Community Health is one of nine projects highlighted in a new guide, "Communicating for Impact: Strategies for Grantmakers". The complete guide is available on the Grantcraft website.

Download the New Routes case study as a PDF.

Tags: Benton Foundation, Grantcraft, RWJF
Topics: Building Community, Community Media, Immigrants, Leadership, Media production, Social networking, Storytelling, Training, Web 2.0