Knight Awards Grants to Support Use of Data to Improve Health

Two and a half years ago, DoSomething.org, an organization that connects teenagers to volunteer opportunities, received a text message that said, “He won’t stop raping me. It’s my dad. Are you there?”

Unequipped to respond to messages from troubled teenagers, DoSomething developed Crisis Text Line, a support line with counselors available to talk by text message at any hour of the day.

Though still in its testing phase, Crisis Text Line has already had 17,000 conversations with teenagers. The project plans to expand nationally and begin analyzing the data it is collecting, thanks to a $350,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

DoSomething is one of seven organizations that received $2.2-million in grants from Knight for programs that seek to use data to improve health and well-being.

Other winners include:

PersonalGenomes.org received the largest amount, $500,000, to create the Open Humans Network, an online tool that will connect people willing to publicly share their health data with researchers. Born out of the Harvard Personal Genome Project, the online tool will allow people to view in one place health data from all the studies in which they participate.

Public Laboratory, an environmental-science nonprofit, received a $350,000 grant for its Homebrew Sensing Project, which provides low-cost tools to people who live in environmentally sensitive places so they can monitor and evaluate oil-refinery emissions and other factors affecting air and water quality. Started in 2010 after the BP oil spill along the Gulf Coast, Public Laboratory has worked to involve communities in research collaboration.

The grant winners were chosen from a pool of 686 applications. Nine other projects won $35,000 grants through the Knight Prototype Fund, which supports experimental ideas still in their infancy.

For more information: Go to newschallenge.org.