Connie Yowell: MacArthur Foundation
Franklin Madison: ITAC
Chinwe Onyekere: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Jim Kim: Surdna Foundation
Brad Lewis: Learn and Serve America

Brad Lewis: First type of funding: Every three years a national competition. 110 organizations who have been funded will be making subgrants.

Find out about subgrants at http://www.nationalservice.gov, scroll down and see what is going on in your state.

Franklin Madison, ITAC. ITAC and www.sbirworld.com are good places to get funding.

Children’s progress has a game that helps educators determine if children have a learning disability. There are sources of funding available.

Chinwe: Talking about the funding briefing that happened yesterday. Some of the goal is to find out what each other is thinking and to find synergies. It was an opportunity to start a dialog. Some of the discussion was about getting folks from the game space together with the health care space.

Connie: Education officer at the MacArthur foundation. Traditional foundations, those based on dead money. They have a board. Then, there are the live money foundations, like the Gates foundation, and the corporate foundations.

Depending on the type of foundation, you get different views. So, everyone on the MacArthur foundation board is over fifty, so selling the idea of video games is harder.

The MacArthur foundation is looking to games and digital media in terms of how it funds the ongoing work. What is the relationship between games and the sort of education that is going on. First grant was to do a longitudinal study of how kids are using digital media. From this, there will be quantitative studies, such as how does this effect civic engagement by kids.

Also, there is a desire to be involved in field building. They are producing the MacArthur Series in Digital Media in Learning. It will be six volumes:
(try to get people talking across disciplines). The topics include, credibility
identity, ecology of games, unintended consequences, and civic engagement.

They have also given a grant to Global Kids, to get kids to talk about digital media in their lives. This included an island in Teen Second Life.

Another issue is partnership, understanding the relationship between non-profits and profits.

MacArthur foundation also made a grant to University to Wisconsin to get kids to start designing games. The goal is to get kids to understand that they live in a world that is designed and understand the design process.

Connie talks about ‘incremental radicalism’. The idea of making radical change through small incremental steps.

Question: What has changed?
More funding… More companies tapping into funding…

Right now, it looks like a lot of the grant making is likely to come from corporate funds, right now.

Question: What do people from the board look for, that they don’t get?
Connie: They are looking at it in terms of games, and not education.
e.g. We’re funding the international criminal court, why do you want us to fund the creation of games?

Brad: When I was working as a social worker in Bridgeport Connecticut, wearing a Suit, I used to think of myself as a lamb in wolf’s clothing. He uses this as an explanation of how to speak the language of both the foundations and the people you are working with.

Connie: Foundations the places that should be able to take risks and keep the long term vision.