With the goal of supporting cutting-edge projects that use new media, Natan is launching a New Media grant area. The  grants will support cutting-edge projects that use new media to

• create new access points to Jewish life and learning,
• build Jewish communities, and/or
• inspire and enable people to be a part of Jewish life.

In this pilot round of the New Media grants, Natan expects to give away at least $100,000 in grants ranging from $10,000 – $40,000.

According to Felicia Herman, Natan’s executive director, “We’re excited to launch this new grant area with an experiment in crowdsourcing. In keeping with the ethos of the field, and inspired by calls for funders to “open up to new inputs” (as the Monitor Institute puts it in this report), Natan is opening up a draft of the application materials for this new grant program to public commentary. We’ve set up a blog where we’ve posted the draft of our application materials. The draft materials will be open for commentary until 5pm on Wednesday, May 18. Anyone can comment on the materials on the blog, and we’ll integrate what we’ve learned in this public commentary period into our final application materials. The final application will be live by June 1.

We’re excited about this experiment. One of the things we heard as we were researching the new grant area is that we should learn as much as we can from experts in the field – practitioners, theorists, users – and we thought this was an interesting way to try to do it.”

We’ll all be looking for feedback on this crowdsourcing experiment. Check out the blog and share your thoughts.