As we enter a new year, I want to thank The McKnight Foundation’s grantees and
program partners and update you on McKnight’s priorities for 2013. Much of the
power and impact of our work derives from the quality of our relationships with
people closest to the issues we address. Our grantees are vital contributors,
and we believe shared understanding among our partners helps everyone to work
more effectively together.
I am pleased to report that McKnight’s core giving of $79 million in 2013 will
be on par with recent years. As our endowment continues to recover slowly from
the economic downturn, we will hold steady our funding in support of the arts
and artists, education and learning, Mississippi River resilience, sustainable
regional growth, statewide rural economic and community development,
neuroscience and collaborative crop research, and community development in
Southeast Asia.
Beyond the forecasted $79 million, in coming months we will also finalize
grants for the remaining $25 million of our initial $100 million commitment to
mitigate climate change and encourage renewable energy development. With
impacts from climate change already being felt worldwide, our board of
directors this year strongly reaffirmed its commitment to grantmaking that
accelerates the transition to a clean energy economy. We will share updates
online as decisions are made regarding the Foundation’s future energy- and
climate-related spending.
Such strategic attention to shifting external trends is a real-world example of
McKnight’s Strategic Framework in
action. Released publicly in mid-2012, the McKnight Strategic Framework was
developed by the Foundation’s board and staff to guide our work during the next
three years. Rather than a collection of new ideas or a traditional “strategic
plan” detailing specific activities in a given timeframe, our framework offers
a sense of how
we approach our work every day — grounded in adaptive
leadership, an approach that we believe is essential when dealing
with complex issues that defy simple or siloed solutions. It lays out our board
and staff’s shared mission, values, and approach to guide the Foundation, and
it provides coherence across the organization while honoring the diversity of
program goals and structures.
We define “adaptive leadership” as strategic agility that is informed by
constant examination of the communities we serve and fields in which we work,
looking for trends and patterns that could impact our ability to reach goals.
The practice drives us to consider the best alternatives in all situations,
always with an eye toward opportunistic efforts for innovation and leverage.
Examples are apparent throughout key program developments at McKnight in 2012.
At the center of the Region
& Communities program is a core belief that sustainable and
equitable metropolitan development requires cooperation and alignment across a
variety of systems and interests. With updated funding guidelines released in
2012, McKnight concentrates on strategies for integrative, sustainable regional
planning and development; affordable housing strategies to benefit all
Minnesotans; and the promotion of economically vibrant neighborhoods. In 2012,
to highlight the crucial role of design and architecture in the creation of affordable
housing that is good both for people and for place, McKnight announced our
first annual AIA Minnesota/McKnight Foundation Affordable HousingDesign Award recipient: Cermak Rhoades Architects,
recognized for its Higher Ground Homeless Shelter and Permanent Housing Project
in Minneapolis. Also in 2012, McKnight was pleased to co-fund the University of
Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies’ report Maximizing the return on transitway investment,
emphasizing strategies to ensure that the network of 14 Twin Cities transitways
planned for 2030 achieves its greatest potential. Dr. Yingling Fan’s research
breaks new ground in linking job access, equity, and economic development, with
one key finding that concentrating development near transitway stations leads
to measurable gains in job accessibility — especially beneficial for
populations with lower incomes.
In the past year, McKnight’s relatively new Education & Learning preK-3rd grade
literacy focus began to hit its stride. Only a few years ago, Minnesota had
been unable to gain traction on efforts to improve early learning services; by
2011, however, our state was awarded three large, highly competitive federal
grants to fund important efforts including quality care and education for
pre-kindergarten children. Co-funded by McKnight in 2012, Into the Fray by the Foundation for
Child Development, New York, is an independent case study about the
philanthropic efforts in Minnesota that led to a statewide sea change in early
education investments. It tells a story of Minnesota funders, including
McKnight, who mobilized stakeholders for high-impact early learning
investments, guiding Minnesota’s successful pursuit of federal early education
grants totaling nearly $90 million. Our regional experience offers important
national lessons for those working to advance the cause of early childhood
education. In the Twin Cities, with new grants totaling over $9 million,
McKnight is now working with three metropolitan school districts and two
charter schools to create a seamless pipeline from pre-kindergarten through
grade 3, and increase the percentage of successful third grade readers. At
school sites in Minneapolis Public Schools, Saint Paul Public Schools, and
Brooklyn Center School District, as well as the charter schools Community of
Peace Academy and Academia Cesar Chavez, McKnight supports high-quality
literacy development, including data-driven strategies to improve classroom
instruction. According to metrics compiled by the Urban Education Institute, a
majority of Brooklyn Center students demonstrated a full year’s worth of accelerated literacy
progress by just February in the 2011-2012 school year, through use of the
initiative’s tools and resources.
In March, the Environment
program celebrated the State of Louisiana’s acquisition of
33,000 acres of critically important Louisiana coastal wetlands within the Lake
Maurepas/Pontchartrain Basin, about an hour northwest of New Orleans. The
purchase from two private land owners was facilitated by The Conservation Fund
and made possible by $6.5 million in McKnight program-related investment loan
funds; after acquisition, loan funds are repaid to McKnight for reuse in future
grants or investments. Located adjacent to the Mississippi River, the forested
Pontchartrain swamp is a critical habitat for threatened bird species, and its
acquisition will prevent further wetland development while enabling additional
projects to restore even more acres of coastal wetlands. And this fall,
McKnight co-funded the State of the River report, a
collaborative project of Friends of the Mississippi River and the National Park
Service, highlighting 13 indicators of river health to help non-scientists
understand how McKnight and our environmental partners along the river are
doing to improve water quality and river health. With a main focus on the 72
miles of Mississippi winding through the Twin Cities, the report’s Stewardship
Guide offers insights and suggestions for everyone to share responsibility in
protecting this crucially important national waterway that provides drinking
water for 18 million people, as well as wildlife habitat, transportation, and
recreation.
Since 1983, McKnight has invested nearly $25 million to support some of the
most vulnerable and marginalized people and communities in Cambodia, Laos, and
Vietnam. Over the past three decades, the Foundation’s Southeast Asia program
has adapted strategies to address shifting regional politics, economics, and
environmental conditions, while always maintaining a central, place-based focus
on deep, productive relationships with local non-governmental and
community-based organizations. Recently, McKnight engaged The Philanthropic Initiative
(TPI) to assess our Southeast Asia program, with a focus on its unique origins,
evolution, and key “pivot points” over 30 years. TPI interviewed past and
current members of McKnight’s board of directors, staff, consultants, and
grantees involved at various stages in the program’s lifespan; reviewed years
of related reports and documentation; and analyzed grantmaking patterns. The
program’s history provides insights into effective family philanthropy, melding
personal family connections and hopes for war-affected communities with deep
expertise to evolve strategies as needs change. Separately, TPI surveyed our
recent Southeast Asia grantees to learn about their experience with McKnight
and to gather information that will help us be a better partner to our grantees
in the future. Both the program’s historical overview and an executive
summary of the grantee survey results are on our
website.
The overarching goal of McKnight’s Arts
program is to support an environment in which artists are valued
leaders in our community, with access to the resources and opportunities they
need to succeed. In 2012, we recognized the McKnight Artist Fellowships
program’s 30th anniversary, celebrating more than 1,500 fellowships since 1982.
Currently, we invest about $1.7 million each year in support of fellowship
programs run by nonprofit partners representing 12 different arts media. To
honor the special anniversary, McKnight engaged with dozens of creative
partners on several projects. Early in the year, we launched the State of the Artist blog, dedicated to “conversations about, among, around,
between, by, for, and with artists,” with guest posts by regional and national
thought leaders and critics. In June, McKnight invited all artist fellows since
the program’s creation to join us for an evening of site-specific visual and
performance works commissioned by former fellows, as well as remarks by
National Endowment for the Arts chair Rocco Landesman and nationally renowned
storyteller Kevin Kling. An event slideshow is posted on Facebook.
And in September, McKnight launched a companion website at Diagrams.StateoftheArtist.org
— an interactive database of graphical interpretations of artists’ careers,
pulling data directly from individual artists’ résumés and professional
histories.
The many links to online resources throughout this letter are no afterthought.
In addition to our focus on adaptive leadership, McKnight’s Strategic Framework
places a heavy emphasis on strengthening program influence and impact by
intensifying our efforts to share relevant knowledge throughout the networks in
which we operate. In 2012 we launched a new website at mcknight.org,
to help us reach out and share important information better. You can also learn
about the McKnight
Endowment Fund for Neuroscience’s support of outstanding
scientists and interdisciplinary collaboration at neuroscience.mcknight.org;
and learn about the McKnight
Collaborative Crop Research Program’s efforts to help
smallholder farmers feed their world at mcknight.ccrp.cornell.edu.
And we encourage you to follow the latest updates about McKnight and our
grantees on Twitter and Facebook.
While McKnight’s Strategic Framework allows freedom in what we do to adapt to
external shifts, it also makes powerful promises about how we work: We support
the people, places, and possibilities that help our state and our world create
a more vibrant future for everyone. And it is through daily collaboration with
hundreds of key partners in Minnesota and around the world that The McKnight
Foundation achieves core objectives in pursuit of our mission. In this, we are
grateful for your good work and for your continued partnership.
Sincerely,
Kate Wolford
President