Purpose Prize

Marc Freedman Portrait

The Latest from CoGenerate

New Survey Reveals Benefits of Older-Younger Tutoring Teams

New Survey Reveals Benefits of Older-Younger Tutoring Teams

For the past year, Ampact, with support from CoGenerate’s Generations Serving Together program, placed cogenerational pairs of AmeriCorps members in elementary schools. The older and younger adults worked side by side to improve students’ reading and math skills. A...

The Billionaire Who Gave Away His Fortune Took a Big Chance on Us

The Billionaire Who Gave Away His Fortune Took a Big Chance on Us

We at CoGenerate (formerly Encore.org) are mourning the loss of Chuck Feeney this week. Without Chuck's vision and generosity we likely would not exist as an organization. Twenty-five years ago Atlantic Philanthropies took a chance on our start-up, playing a...

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Alexandra “Sandy” Close

New America Media/Pacific News Service
Purpose Prize Fellow 2006

Promoting the editorial visibility and economic viability of ethnic media

Alexandra “Sandy” Close, founder of the Pacific News Service, launched New California Media in 1996 to unite ethnic and youth media outlets under one news service, giving them far greater reach and economic viability. Youth media had been of interest to Close for some time, who at Pacific News Service had broadcast the work of both lower income and incarcerated youth writers. Ethnic media are the primary source of news for more than half of California’s new ethic majority. In boosting the visibility of this sector of American journalism, Close hoped to build an inclusive public discourse and to connect lesser known or marginalized ethnic news and youth media to decision makers in government, business, foundations, and academia. The organization expanded to include 2000 outlets across the country and was renamed New American Media. The resources provided by New American Media include a news wire streaming the work of its own writers and editors; an ethnic media association; a marketing service to provide greater access to advertising dollars; and a multilingual polling program to gauge the views of non-English speaking and ethnic minority populations normally excluded from mainstream public opinion surveys.