By Paula Ellis, VP/Strategic Initiatives

Knight Foundation is featured in a new book about how how funders are going beyond grant making to help make transformational change in communities.

Do More Than Give: The Six Practices of Donors Who Change the World features the Knight Community Information Challenge, which encourages community and place-based foundations to fund news and information projects.

Tonight, Paula Ellis, Knight’s vice president for strategic initiatives, will talk about the challenge at the book launch, to be televised at 5:30 p.m. on C-Span Book TV.

Ellis will speak about how Knight is working with a network of peers – in this case community and place-based foundations – to help ensure communities are informed and engaged around issues important to them. To help build this network, Knight Foundation has gone beyond traditional grant making to push for catalytic change by:

• inviting foundation leaders to an annual seminar in Miami to learn about top media trends and issues;
• holding a media “boot camp” for grantees;
• offering tech assistance through consultants; and
• creating an easy-to-use guide for funders on journalism and media grant making.

As a result, the number of community and place-based foundations that fund in this area is growing. In a 2010 survey, 46 percent of foundations said their funding in news and information has increased in past three years, and 59 percent said it will increase in the next three years. Learn more about the challenge at www.informationneeds.org.

Do More Than Give was written by Leslie Crutchfield, John Kania and Mark Kramer of FSG, a nonprofit consulting firm.