Steve Bender, President of The Rotary Club of Newport Beach, has announced that Rotary Club member Anahita Dalmia and her talented team have secured a $1 million grant from the Federal Department of Education.
This funding will support the further development of their innovative media literacy game, Agents of Influence, aimed at educating students about the dangers of misinformation and disinformation.
As part of the Rotary Club of Newport Beach’s Democracy in a Box initiative, Agents of Influence is designed to engage 11- to 13-year-olds, teaching them critical thinking skills to help identify media bias, logical fallacies, and confirmation bias.
The game’s unique approach draws inspiration from Rotary’s Four-Way Test, encouraging young people to critically evaluate the information they encounter, fostering discernment in an age dominated by social media.
This exciting news coincides with Agents of Influence being featured in the upcoming October issue of Rotary Magazine. The article, titled “Beyond Truth vs. Fiction: Teaching Media Literacy,” emphasizes the importance of equipping communities with media literacy tools to navigate today’s complex information landscape.
The full article will be available in the October edition of Rotary Magazine and online at Rotary Magazine’s official website rotary.org.
Adding to the momentum, Rotary’s presence at EarthX 2025 in Dallas Texas, will spotlight the highly anticipated Sea 2 Sky Myth-Busting Conference, which will focus on misinformation and disinformation surrounding environmental issues.
The event will tackle pervasive myths such as “windmills cause cancer” and “electric vehicles are worse for the environment than internal combustion cars.”
This important gathering will examine the origins and persistence of these myths, while also offering strategies to effectively debunk them.
For more information, visit EarthX.org.
For those interested in piloting Agents of Influence or participating in ongoing research studies, volunteers are needed. Your feedback helps improve the game. You have the opportunity to pilot and/or participate in one (or multiple) ongoing research studies.
For more information about Agents of Influence and how to get involved, visit www.agentsofinfluencegame.com.
