Rockefeller Foundation Announces 2012 New York City Cultural Innovation Fund Winners

Some creative projects here that could offer insights to true community engagement for urban parks.

Selected from a pool of nearly four hundred applicants, the sixteen New York City-based organizations will receive two-year grants ranging from $50,000 to $250,000. The winners of this year's Cultural Innovation Fund competition include Harvestworks, which will partner with the Industrial and Technology Assistance Corporation to turn artists' technological innovations into entrepreneurial ventures; the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, which received a grant to engage traditionally underserved communities by bringing arts programming into public housing; and the Laundromat Project, which will promote civic participation through partnerships with community organizations that organize art workshops in local coin-operated laundromats.

NYC Cultural Innovation Fund

I especially like the definition of innovation:

Innovation is a new product, process or service that is discontinuous from previous practice and yields new pathways for solving acute problems or fulfilling mission. Social innovation is often recombinant: a hybridization of existing elements that are combined across boundaries in new ways to yield better solutions, also leaving healthier social relationships in their wake. *

*This definition has been compiled from different articulations by Richard Evans, Geoff Mulgan and Andrew Hargadon