Media, Inequality, and Change Center

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The Media, Inequality, and Change (MIC) Center is a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School and Rutgers University's School of Communication and Information. MIC produces engaged research and analysis while collaborating with community leaders to help support activist initiatives and policy interventions. The Center's objective is to develop a local-to-national strategy that focuses on communication issues important to local communities and social movements in the region, while also addressing how these local issues intersect with national and international policy challenges.

The Center's core principles are to research, educate, connect, and engage. MIC accomplishes this by assessing social movement strategies and democratic deployments of technology; contributing to policy interventions that encourage structural reform; committing to long-term field building in political economy, media, policy and technology studies and other cognate areas; assisting social justice campaigns, and making material interventions around media and democracy. Bringing together scholars, journalists, policy makers, activists, philanthropists, and diverse constituencies, MIC strives to create more democratic media systems that serve community needs.

The Center is a forum for faculty, students, activists, policy makers and journalists to grapple with questions related to media, democracy, and social change. With an emphasis on community engagement in Philadelphia and New Jersey, MIC focuses on research, teaching and learning, community engagement, and field-building.

Grants Awarded to Media, Inequality, and Change Center

$211,000 - Awarded December 2021

Focus areas
Media Policy
Description

A two-year grant to assess and recommend corrections to the policy failures that enable digital-redlining and other exclusionary practices that disproportionately harm low-income families and communities of color.

$80,000 - Awarded December 2021

Focus areas
Community-Centered Journalism
Description

A one-year grant to continue the organization's work with the Shift the Narrative collaborative which helps build power in local communities by bringing together journalists and communities members to learn from and work with one another on collaborative reporting projects, with the goal of building lasting trusted relationships and creating community-centered processes and narratives within newsrooms.

$58,000 - Awarded September 2020

Focus areas
Media Policy
Description

To lead research into how recent protests have changed national narratives and journalistic practices with respect to coverage of police brutality and criminal justice.

$60,000 - Awarded April 2020

Focus areas
Media Policy
Description

COVID-19 Emergency Fund to 2019 Grantees.

$1,001,945 - Awarded December 2019

Focus areas
Movement Media
Policing and Community Safety
Description

Through this three-year grant, in collaboration with Free Press and Media, Inequality, Change Center, Movement Alliance Project (MAP) will convene and connect community-based organizations and local leaders in an educational and strategic visioning process that will lead to action-taking to reshape narratives around safety, trauma and violence. In this work, MAP and their community partners will center, support, and help cohere people impacted by violence and the criminal-justice system.

$798,000 - Awarded December 2019

Focus areas
Media Policy
Description

With this three-year grant, Media, Inequality, and Change (MIC) Center will lead two integrated, multi-phase research projects focused broadly on Philadelphia's media ecosystem and community networks, while convening researchers, practitioners and activists to collaborate on outlining a vision for remaking media in ways that reflect communities' information needs. Together, with Free Press and Movement Alliance Project, MIC aims to transform prevailing media narratives and elevate complex stories about trauma, safety, crime and criminal justice in Philadelphia.

$850,000 - Awarded December 2019

Focus areas
Community-Centered Journalism
Description

This three-year grant supports Free Press' collaboration with Media Mobilizing Project and Media, Inequality, Change Center to organize journalists, newsrooms and community media allies to bring them into closer relationships with residents who want to take an active role in shaping local news. Free Press will also produce guides and workshops for constituents, support community-newsroom collaboration, and develop strategies to disincentivize the dominant “if it bleeds, it leads” newsroom mentality.

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