Chutzpah perhaps best describes these happenings. Today, it’s Ibargüen who is trailblazing.

From neither man would you expect such outside-the-box thinking. Jack Knight, whose portrait hangs on the office wall of the Knight Foundation, looks like a partrician member of a foreign affairs council from the Eisenhower era. Ibargüen himself is buttoned down right to his suspenders. But haberdashery belies their philosophies.

Radical Approaches
“When I think about the work of the foundation, I really don’t think about charity. I really do think about social investing. I want to fund opportunity. I think Jack Knight and Jim Knight made a deal with the IRS, and in exchange, the people, the communities where we were, got a really pretty good deal. They got an organization that is supposed to fund things that are going to make that community better,” says Ibargüen.

Don’t expect to read about community centers here or announcements about new wings for museums. Some of the things Knight invests in sound as if they stem from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn or Mountain View, Calif.

Take Symphony in D. It’s a crowd-sourced symphony the Detroit Symphony Orchestra will perform “by, for and with the people of Detroit.” The project proposes to create a musical portrait of Detroit using notes and noises submitted by the general public. Knight supported the effort to solicit and collect material.

Its St. Paul, Minn., art challenge similarly coaxes the general public’s involvement by giving people a chance at funding their ideas. The main requirement is that the idea has to take place in or benefit the city.

Media contests run the gamut from innovative publishing platforms to social media movements such as Hollaback!, an online anti-bullying tool to fight harassment.

Politics, too, gets its day. Knight funds information technology that adds more transparency to the voting process. A Library Freedom project engenders privacy rights by giving librarians tools to battle surveillance, censorship and free speech. In all, I count more than 100 projects Knight is funding. All different. All disruptive. Importantly, almost all of these programs can be considered an investment, as a distinct return is produced.

The symphony generates ticket sales. Art leads to auctions. And media innovation has its obvious commercial applications.

“When you do charity, the gift is the end of the line. You’ve given and you will get your reward in heaven. That, to me, is charity. Whether it turns into a thing, that’s another story. It is no longer your concern. It’s anonymous. You clothe the poor and feed the hungry. That’s really the end of your obligation as a charitable person. You have given. If you’re a social investor, like any other investor, you require a return,” says Ibargüen.

Knight, like most foundations, has a “real” investment arm that invests in the capital markets. Of late, even that has been upended.

Like many other institutions, the Knight Foundation had a problem to fix when it came to diversity issues.

“If you’re going to talk about diversity, and if you’re going to talk about inclusion, and if you’re going to talk about engaging everybody in the community, and yet you run a $2.4 billion portfolio [without any minority money managers] ... well, Houston, we have a problem,” says Ibargüen.