"It's truly an idea contest," said Dennis Scholl, the Knight Foundation's vice president/arts. "It goes to the best ideas. This contest shows that a great idea can come from anywhere."
Theater company Tiny Dynamite Productions' "a Play, a Pie and a Pint" seeks to make theater more accessible by enticing audiences with a slice of pizza, a beverage and a one-act play. "We really did not expect to win," said Emma Gibson, Tiny Dynamite's artistic director. "We appreciate that we're a really tiny company. We entered the challenge just to get further as a company."
The Philadelphia Challenge is a three-year, $9 million program, based on a similar Challenge pioneered in Miami in 2008. Knight focused on Philly because it was one of the cities where the Knight brothers once owned newspapers - the Daily News and Inquirer.
Scholl said that certain themes emerge from the winning ideas. Community engagement was a prime component of many of them, such as City Hall Presents, a program that will bring film screenings and performances to City Hall, or the Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra, funded to mount short lessons in conducting before a live audience.
Student-focused projects also made a mark, such as the $75,000 to the Fresh Artists Studios, a print studio that will employ teen apprentices. A Passport to the Arts program will give every 10th-grader in the city free admission to participating cultural institutions for a year to inspire a lifelong love of the arts.
The next step for the winners is to raise matching funds, but Scholl noted that all the Miami winners were able to reach their match.
