There may be no funder that’s lately thrown more spaghetti up on the wall to see what sticks than the Knight Foundation. Its creative and experimental grantmaking has now been going on for a decade. Where has it been leading and what lasting impact might it have?
Skeptics of Knight’s approach haven’t been hard to find. The Miami-based foundation got dinged last year in a report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, which portrayed it as chasing “bright shiny objects” while lacking “well-articulated long-term goals and strategies.” The report said that Knight wasn’t doing enough to help marginalized communities in the 26 cities where it makes grants, nor engaging key stakeholders as well as it might. This was a foundation, NCRP suggested, that seemed more interested in appealing to the “cool kids in the cafeteria” with its blizzard of grants for innovation, many tech-related, than in advancing lasting social change.
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