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6/14/01:

Knight Foundation Awards Funding to Redevelop Overtown

The Collins Center for Public Policy was given a grant of $3 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The grant, announced at a special dinner Monday night, was the largest grant to a single organization in a package of Knight grants totaling $24 million that celebrate the end of Knight's 50th Anniversary Year. We have been working on this since the beginning of the year.

This grant will focus on redeveloping Overtown, a divested neighborhood immediately northwest of Miami's CBD. $1.5 million will be used over 3 years to fund an Overtown Civic Partnership and Design Center and $1.5 million will be used to start a Community Land Trust. Our grant will complement and supplement grants of $2 million to LISC and $2.5 million to the Trust for Public Land that also focus primarily on Overtown and the adjacent Miami River corridor. This work is the next step in our initiatives to promote the mixed-use, mixed-income, environmentally-friendly, and culturally diverse redevelopment of the Overtown neighborhood.

Additional related grants include $600,000 to Habitat for Humanity for 10 homes in Overtown, $500,000 to Miami Inner City Angels to construct a community center in Overtown, $160,000 to Miami-Dade Community College to plan a partnership to build cultural bridges between East Little Havana and Overtown (with the Artime Theater, the Black Archives/Lyric Theater, and the Dr. Rafael A. Penalver Clinic), $400,000 to the Greater Miami Progress Foundation (the non-profit arm of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce) to establish a regional South Florida Consortium of Higher Education, and $120,000 to the Human Services Coalition for a community leadership institute and collaborative neighborhood planning efforts.

Other grants will benefit East Little Havana, cultural facilities in the Omni area, and the work of the Museum of Science, Children's Museum, and Miami Art Museum (with our hope, at least, that they will choose to develop west of Biscayne Boulevard instead of in Bicentennial Park).