Knight Foundation seeks a local, social investor with a passion for St. Paul, Minnesota and a belief that a more effective democracy can be achieved when people are informed and engaged. In this role, you will serve as the foundation’s lead investor and point person in St. Paul.

The community director role is incredibly rewarding and complex. Our most successful directors operate as a principal in their community and are unwavering in focus on grantmaking for long term transformational change. In this role, you will become a principal in your community by identifying organic trends and developing a strategy that leverages and accelerates those trends. Driving impact is the ultimate outcome; smart and diligent management of outputs–identifying investments aligned with strategy and investment management–is how success is achieved.

We are seeking candidates who are informed and engaged citizens, embedded in their communities. To succeed in this role, you will need to have and easily establish and maintain close, meaningful relationships with local leaders in business, government and philanthropy so that when the best ideas for community impact are surfaced, they come looking for you.

You will sit on an investment committee of your community peers responsible for advising on new opportunities. This process is competitive. You will oversee the assessment, evaluation and recommendation of all grants in your portfolio. Your deal flow and due diligence will determine the number of grants you manage, the size of your portfolio and ultimately the impact your work achieves for St. Paul.

We look for the following qualities in a successful candidate:

Investor: who identifies exceptional investment opportunities and teams to support, is business-minded and analytical and understands market forces and trends.
Entrepreneur: who demonstrates business acumen, is an intelligent risk-taker and open to new ideas, takes an agile approach to problem-solving, communicates clearly when presenting new ideas and is conversant in digital technologies and data.
Diplomat: who is tactful and skillful in public speaking, negotiations and managing complex situations and differing points of view and is comfortable saying no and is resilient and flexible.
Manager: who is detail-oriented and conscientious with an open and orderly mind, excels in prioritizing work and managing people, projects and resources.
Trusted advisor: who is highly communicative and collaborative, skilled in synthesizing information, providing advice and guidance to others.

You will report to the vice president/communities and national initiatives and be one of eight local directors in cities across the United States promoting success through investments in local ideas. You will work with these colleagues and other Knight Foundation staff in a fast-paced, highly collaborative environment. Expect to travel approximately ten percent of the time.

As social investors, Knight Foundation supports democracy by funding free expression and journalism, arts and culture in community, research in areas of media and democracy, and the success of American cities and towns where the Knight brothers once published newspapers.

Our approach is inclusive and non-partisan, we value freedoms of speech and the press and we often embrace new and innovative technology to achieve our goals. The qualities we look for are openness to new ideas, courage to push for change and the expertise and tenacity to achieve the desired results. Tell us what excites you about this opportunity and why you are right for it.

Send your resume to: [email protected]

Knight Foundation is an equal opportunity employer.