Just like their more modest peers, many of America’s wealthiest mega-philanthropists favor place-based giving. That makes sense: Funding often follows affinity, and geographic affinity can be a powerful motivator for charity. But in the case of mega-donors at the very top of the philanthropic food chain, place-based funding for hometowns and alma maters often evolves into something broader, even if a certain attention to favored places remains.
Take Steve and Connie Ballmer, who combine focused funding in southeast Michigan, Los Angeles and Washington state with national grantmaking for economic mobility. Or Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, who pay plenty of attention to the Bay Area even as they pursue a far wider agenda across many issue areas.
Then there’s Nike co-founder Phil Knight, with a net worth ranking up there with the best of them at $47 billion, and a record of big giving stretching back quite a while. However, unlike the Ballmers and Zuckerberg and Chan, let alone globe straddlers like the Gateses or Mike Bloomberg, Knight has kept most of his philanthropy very local and relatively quiet — a marked contrast from the bombastic international cachet of the company that made him a multibillionaire.
A major recent development in the annals of Knight’s Oregon-focused giving doesn’t exactly change that, but does add a new dimension to a philanthropic record that’s been rather muted next to the fortune involved. Earlier this week, Phil and Penny Knight announced a $400 million commitment to the Rebuild Albina project, the inaugural effort of the 1803 Fund, a newly established hybrid philanthropic and private investment vehicle focused on Portland, Oregon. The project’s aim, according to the announcement, is “to transform current and future generations of Black Portland through investments in education, place and culture and belonging in the Albina community, with benefits that will ripple across Portland.”
Though what that will involve remains unclear, there are things to like here. For one, this marks Knight’s first large-scale foray into explicit racial equity work. And it comes on the heels of a tough several years for Portland, where racial tensions formed part of the backdrop for prolonged social unrest following George Floyd’s murder. The 1803 Fund frames Rebuild Albina as a “historic” effort to turn things around for the neighborhood, a longtime hub for Portland’s Black community that fell prey to a familiar list of woes — redlining, predatory lending, “urban renewal” and being sliced and diced apart by highways.
Details on what Rebuild Albina will actually involve are still sparse, however. The announcement cites three focus areas but no specific projects: “education and education-related services,” “projects and initiatives to deepen and strengthen roots” and “building and sustaining visibility and community through art.”
The 1803 Fund — the name is a tribute to York, an enslaved man who was the first African American to cross the continent as part of Lewis and Clark’s expedition — will benefit from the leadership of Rukaiyah Adams, its CEO. A native Portlander, Adams was previously chief investment officer at the $1.1 billion Meyer Memorial Trust, where she tripled its assets managed by women and underrepresented people, and served as a much-needed counterpoint to the legions of highly compensated white men who manage the money of even very progressive foundations.
Still, though, there are a lot of ways to imagine this failing to live up to the hype. For one thing, billionaires in general have a history of swooping into local places and institutions with big, splashy gifts. Perhaps the classic example is Mark Zuckerberg’s much-maligned $100 million commitment to improve Newark’s schools, which has become synonymous with naive billionaire philanthropy. Knight calls Oregon home, but he’s still no stranger to dropping such funding bombs.
The thing is, those commitments often end up achieving little in the face of vaster structural problems. That’s an inherent weakness of any ultra-local, big-dollar funding effort. And it especially applies to those with top-down billionaire backing, where even hundreds of millions can end up paying for just a few big capital projects that may look cool, but do little to improve ordinary residents’ lives, much less transform them. In the case of the 1803 Fund, while it’s good to see Adams and a couple of other local Black nonprofit leaders on its board, the presence of two Nike executives, including Nike CEO John Donahoe, is less reassuring.
Will this end up serving more as a publicity platform for Knight and Nike’s generosity, and less as an actual pathway toward racial equity for the city? While that’s not guaranteed (the billionaire no longer holds any official leadership role at Nike), Knight’s record of big giving isn’t exactly cause for confidence.
He’s best known for his vast private largesse at the public University of Oregon, his alma mater, where Knight met his former track coach and later Nike cofounder Bill Bowerman. As Nike grew into a behemoth, Knight swooped (or should I say swooshed?) back into the university as a major donor, bestowing it with upward of $1.5 billion over the years. Stanford University, Knight’s other alma mater, also felt the love in the form of a $400 million gift for its business school and another $75 million for brain research last year. And did I mention a $500 million gift to the Oregon Health & Science University in 2016 for cancer research? In many of these cases, something was renamed; the University of Oregon’s main campus in Eugene is littered with tributes to the sportswear mogul.
For the most part, these past mega-gifts fit into the popular category of billionaires doling out big sums to “eds and meds” in exchange for lasting adulation and a named building or two. To their credit, Phil and Penny Knight’s new commitment to Rebuild Albina and the 1803 Fund does break that mold in that it’s oriented toward racial equity on the community level. But this is a big leap from Knight’s track record of pumping money into research and higher ed institutions in support of things like campus facilities, athletics programs or a business school. Even with such a massive investment, it feels a little like Knight is trying to transfer a fairly conservative, brick-and-mortar approach to philanthropy onto a deep, profound systemic problem. Is he up to the task? Does he understand the issues and communities he’s wading into? We’ll have to wait and see whether this really creates “benefits that will ripple across Portland” — and if so, whether those benefits last.
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