John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

For the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, one of the most pressing challenge of the digital age is the demise of traditional journalism business models and the reduction local media coverage, which used to provide residents with critical information they needed to ensure a more fair and transparent democracy. With major metro dailies going bankrupt and cratering news outfits nationwide, millions of people in communities in the United States are quickly losing local news that matters to them. “We’re already in an era where it is more likely that a high school student can more easily access information about swine flu or the crisis in Darfur than corruption in city government or decisions about education in his town,’’ says Alberto Ibargüen, CEO and president of Knight Foundation. To combat this trend and preserve investigative journalism and community news, the Knight Foundation could have started making grants to nonprofits concerned with protecting and preserving democracy. This would have been easy enough to do with Knight’s $2 billion in assets and their robust staff based in Miami, FL. But they didn’t. Instead, Knight seeded and is building a national network—working with and through foundation peers at the community level—to incite them to tackle this problem. By launching the Knight Community Information Challenge and other innovative programs, Knight leverages its national brand and considerable funding base to create the conditions so that community foundations and individuals can help solve the local news and information crisis—for themselves. Knight is an excellent example of the best practice in Do More Than Give of “forging nonprofit peer networks.”

Examples of large private foundations we studied that do more than give include:

• Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• David and Lucille Packard Foundation
• Fundación AVINA
• John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
• Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
• Rockefeller Foundation
• William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and more