KNIGHT COMMUNITY INFORMATION CHALLENGE QUESTION

Knight Community Information Challenge: When Your Community Foundation Has Few Unrestricted Funds

The Knight Community Information Challenge makes grants directly to community or other place-based foundations for projects aimed at informing communities. If your station wants to propose a project, but your local community foundation has limited or no unrestricted funds, what can you do?

The Grant Center posed this question to Susan Patterson, Knight Foundation Program Director for Charlotte, North Carolina, who works on the team coordinating the Community Information Challenge. She responded:

“Many community foundations have few unrestricted dollars to grant. Most have many more donor-advised funds that they hold. Knight's match requirement gives a community foundation great flexibility: community foundations can raise the match from their fund-holders or even other foundations. In some cases, the implementing project partner does more of the asking, in fact.

Knight will accept applications from other place-based foundations. Our interest here is in having other dollars in the game from a funder that is geographically focused and interested in the broader community's issues. In this sense, a university foundation would not work because they tend to exist to raise money for university issues.

Knight recommends -- and I certainly did on the conference call – a partnership with the community foundation because most know their communities well and exist to serve them. I still think they're a good place to start for that reason. But, if their unrestricted dollars are limited, the project folks' approach may be more about the community foundation championing the cause and helping with fund-raising, rather than contributing all the dollars.”