By the end of its first year, The Mosaic project had brought in an additional $50,000 in grants to train Lincoln’s immigrant community to produce content for the website and to increase the flow of information to and from the city’s large refugee community.
Despite a heart attack that waylaid project leader Tim Anderson mid-way through the year, the project, based at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications, scored “substantial progress” in designing the website and making connections in the community, Anderson said.
“Though we were thrown off-track this spring by my health problems, we have not stood still. We have worked hard to expand our infrastructure and our reach into the community,” he said.
Funding
Dean Gary Kebbel successfully applied for a $24,000 grant from the Lincoln Community Foundation. The funding will allow the project to teach its New Voices class in one of Lincoln’s 25 Community Learning Centers, as well as fund extra graduate student assistance, video cameras, and editing equipment. That grant helped to leverage a $26,000 grant from the Knight Community Information Challenge.
The city’s Community Learning Centers serve the immigrant communities by “providing support to immigrants, refugees and in-need people.” They also contain multimedia rooms that will be used to teach the public, Anderson said.
Anderson is now working to determine which center has the highest concentration of one of Mosaic’s targeted immigrant groups: Iraqi, Sudanese or Karen refugees from Burma.
“Our goal is to teach [the refugees] to participate in our New Voices project…to increase the information flow to and from the refugees as a means of aiding their assimilation into Lincoln,” he said.
Community Connection
Following Anderson’s heart attack, the spring semester class created to further the project was cancelled, and an agreement with a local newspaper, the Lincoln Journal Star, to publish newspaper reports on New Voices’ website was postponed.
However, graduate student Charlie Litton and Anderson joined the health and housekeeping committee of the local New Americans Task Force. As a result, Litton is currently working on two videos for the prevention and eradication of bed bug infestation, which will be released both on the Mosaic website and distributed via DVD to the refugee communities.
That project grew out of Mosaic’s close working relationship, begun last fall, with Lincoln’s Center for People in Need.
Anderson said cooperation throughout the community and among resettlement agencies has been enthusiastic.
Design
Additionally, the functionality and looks of the website are being improved. The new design will better display news and information, as well as “a running calendar of events and links to our growing list of partners,” Anderson said.
