Program Director, Community Impact

About the role

The California Knight Foundation seeks a local, social investor with deep California roots in both San Jose and Long Beach. This role presents an opportunity to serve as the foundation’s lead investor and principal presence in your city, shaping how Knight’s capital drives lasting, transformational change.

Responsibilities

• Execute portfolio strategy across one or more focus areas, ensuring investments, partnerships and learning efforts are tightly aligned with the foundation’s strategy and theory of change.
• Apply deep field expertise and judgment to shape how financial, knowledge and social capital are deployed across ecosystems and communities.
• Set learning agendas and define how impact is measured at the portfolio level — using evidence, reflection and partner input to adapt strategy and practice.
• Steward grants throughout their full lifecycle, maintaining active engagement with grantees, monitoring progress against agreed outcomes, and ensuring responsible use of funds.
• Build and maintain relationships with practitioners, community leaders and field partners to stay informed about emerging ideas, needs, risks and opportunities — and to contribute insight that strengthens the foundation’s presence and credibility.
• Represent Knight publicly through field engagement, thought leadership and external partnerships.
• Collaborate internally with Communications, Finance, Legal and other functions to ensure effective execution and stewardship of resources.

Qualifications

• Field Expert: Substantive, recognized expertise in one or more of Knight’s focus areas. Perspective is sought after. Knowledgeable about the landscape, actors and ideas that matter.
• Strategic Investor: Identifies exceptional opportunities and the teams best positioned to execute them. Understands how markets and ecosystems work and can align capital to accelerate change.
• Learning-Oriented: Establishes clear outcomes, tracks them honestly and treats evidence as a tool for improvement — not just a reporting requirement.
• Skilled Relationship Builder: Earns trust across sectors — with grantees, community leaders, peer funders and colleagues alike. Direct, transparent and skilled at navigating the inherent power dynamics of a funding relationship with integrity.
• Collaborative by Instinct: Sees across silos and actively pursues opportunities to reinforce colleagues’ work and be reinforced by it. Brings a team orientation to a role that can easily become siloed.
• Values-Driven: Engages with openness and respect, takes shared responsibility for learning and feedback, and brings rigor and adaptability in equal measure.

Benefits

Knight Foundation offers a generous benefits package including a hiring salary range of $180,000 – $200,000.