March 4, 2004 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The Benton Foundation, in Washington, is spinning off its technology-policy activities to renew its focus on promoting communications policies and programming that serve the public interest.
The foundation’s Digital Divide Network — including its popular Digitaldivide e-mail discussion list — will move to the new Center for Media & Community at the Education Development Center, an education and research charity in Newton, Mass. The Benton Foundation has awarded the organization $668,000 over three years, the largest grant in the foundation’s history, to start the new center.
Andrea Taylor, who has served as Benton’s president since October 2001, will join the Education Development Center as a vice president and director of the Center for Media & Community. Andy Carvin, director of the Digital Divide Network, and Elizabeth Winship, a research associate, will also move to the Education Development Center.
Karen Menichelli, executive vice president of the Benton Foundation, says that “constrained resources” played a role in the foundation’s decision to narrow its focus. She says that the foundation’s endowment is roughly $10-million. But program investments Benton made from its endowment, combined with losses in the stock market in recent years, had caused the endowment to drop as low as $8-million, down from a high of $15-million in the mid-1990s.
In addition to its work on communications policy, Benton plans to devote its time to educating foundations and nonprofit groups on how such policies affect their work and helping charities and other community groups produce diverse, locally relevant programming.
“We believe that now, more than ever, the issues of media policy, as arcane as they may seem, are really critically important to our democracy for assuring the values in our media that we hold important, like diversity, and equal access, and robust debate,” says Ms. Menichelli.
For more information: Go to http://www.benton.org and http://www.edc.org.
