Thank You from Lisa and Poetry in America

Dear
Jeffrey
(and please see note at bottom),

This end-of-the-year letter is to catch you up on developments and to report progress made in 2016
by Poetry in America, by its associated non-profit production company, Verse Video Education, and
by (and with) our new Harvard partner, the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. Whether
you are a longstanding adviser and supporter of Poetry in America, or you’ve more recently joined
our circle of proponents, your contributions, thought partnership and enthusiasm have made this
year’s successes possible.

Last fall, | knew this would be a crucial year. Goals for 2016 included moving our co-produced
television series, Poetry in America, toward a concrete release date (now entering post-production,
we launch nationwide in April 2018), converting our six HarvardX MOOC modules into for-credit
courses (now complete and being offered by Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education), and
getting the word out on our first course developed especially for K-12 educators, Poetry in America
for Teachers: The City from Whitman to Hip Hop. With a mission of creating and distributing the
highest-quality humanities content for a wide variety of learners, our projects now rely on a salaried
production staff of five, a rotating corps of part timers and contractors, and a growing cohort of
Harvard graduate students, undergraduates and interns whom we train in the public-facing
humanities. Growing fast, in 2016 we more firmly established Verse Video Education as a nimble
and stable producer of humanities-based content (now including an archive of over 120 separate
interviews with distinguished discussants), while also defining a forward-looking partnership and
growth strategy with Harvard. As 2016 draws to a close, | have much progress to report.

Verse Video Education: Independent 501c3

In April 2016, Verse Video Education, the fledgling production company |’d founded in 2014,
received IRS approval and became a 501c3. Now capable of accepting philanthropic contributions,
Verse Video Education has also begun to generate revenue by producing high-quality educational
media for other institutions. Clients within our first year included Greenwich Country Day School,
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Schlesinger Library, Harvard Institute for Global Health, and
Project Zero. While philanthropic donations remain essential, work for clients allows us to amplify the
impact of philanthropic donations, not only permitting additional investment in our flagship
partnerships with WGBH and Harvard, but also fostering development of new partnerships and

from barnaby -

she could apply, but she should know that there are only a few grants in each round; most projects proposed
don't get funding. It is like rolling the dice. what people don't understand is that many grants are not funded not
because they are defective in any way, but simply because there is not enough funding to cover even a part of
what comes in (there are thousands of applications and hundreds of millions of dollars of requests that go all
through different kinds of review; it is hard to know what will make it through because different people make
the priority decisions at different stages of review; and it depends what other applications are in the pool ina
given cycle). There is no "direct" route anymore.