This week the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced two grants for two organizations that can be useful resources for community news, information and engagement efforts.

Yesterday Knight announced a $4 million grant to the Sunlight Foundation: "Knight's funding will allow Sunlight to broaden its tools, to both add new data sets and make them more useful to citizens, rather than just journalists and advocates. In addition, Sunlight will expand its focus on state and local government, where government data is often most closely connected to people's lives."

Furthermore, "Sunlight will also bring together a team of experts to evaluate what's working in the field of open government data. The insights will be shared as a way to help set priorities for the emerging open government field.

Also, a Knight Blog post yesterday announced a $175,000 grant for Neighbor.ly -- a year-old crowdfunding site for local civic projects such as community wifi access, bike paths, and public transit improvements.

Founder Jase Wilson noted that this grant will allow Neighbor.ly to offer "Expanded tools for communities to propose, create, manage and fulfill their own campaigns. It will enhance usability and add new funding sources. Perhaps most exciting, we will be able to lower our platform fee to a fraction of the industry standard (5%) to something much more appropriate for civic crowdfunding."

Can community new, engagement, and information sites use Neighbor.ly to crowdfund reporting, site upgrades, or special projects? Maybe. Here's what the Neighbor.ly help section says about who can list projects on this site:

"Neighbor.ly provides a unique opportunity for local governments, civic organizations, and civic ventures to obtain funding for civic-natured projects. While there's not yet any hard and fast rules defining who cannot list projects on Neighbor.ly, the following types of entity are almost certain to qualify:

• Constitutionally chartered municipalities
• County and metro-conglomerate government entities
• Public/private partnerships
• Institutions, private, or non-profit organizations whose mission caters primarily to civic infrastructure (e.g. bike share startups)

So far it doesn't seem that any community news sites have used Neighbor.ly for crowdfunding -- but Wilson said on Twitter that this is a "great idea." He also noted, "there will be a much better toolkit for doing so thanks to Knight." 

Similarly, community foundations also could use Neighbor/ly to help fund community projects and programs. Suggest a civic project idea.