From the New York Times Headway initiative: A bid for public space that doesn’t displace

What began with a plan to build a new park in Washington, D.C., has become something much bigger: a quest to find a way for communities to build attractive public space without getting swept up in gentrification that pushes out the people meant to enjoy it.

Learn how $85 million has been spent in the neighborhood of Anacostia so far, a year before a new park there breaks ground, and how an idea for repurposing old bridge infrastructure came to take this shape. Read the Headway story.

Headway brings together leading journalists to look at the world’s challenges through the lens of progress, aiming to give the public free access to in-depth new reporting on the environment, health, infrastructure, the economy, and social issues that looks beyond the daily churn of news. Over the course of the three-year initiative, a team of journalists from the Times will continue to explore big challenges at the national and global scale from the perspective of how we can make progress toward resolving them. All of Headway’s stories will be freely accessible without a subscription.

Read the stories included in the first round from Headway, which looked back at past predictions of the future; the second and third, which focused on peatlands; and the fourth, which explored paths forward from homelessness.

SNF proudly supports the Headway as part of an effort to help maintain independent and accessible journalism as a pillar of democratic society, especially efforts like Headway that are able to step back and take a long view to offer useful insights. The Foundation also supports a “bootcamp” at the Center for Strategic and International Studies where journalism students produce a long-form investigative reporting project on a timely international topic. Another such organization is iMEdD (the incubator for Media Education and Development), a journalism nonprofit launched in 2018 with exclusive support from SNF that produces interactive data-driven projects, in addition to incubating new journalistic projects and organizations and much more.

Here’s how The New York Times describes philanthropic involvement in Headway: “The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway's public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.”