What We Look For

Knight focuses on building a more engaged San Jose with a focus on creating vibrant public life — drawing people out of homes, offices, and classrooms and into the community. In doing so, Knight seeks to create a safe, connected and people-focused city.

Since 2008, Knight has invested more than $38 million to forward this mission, including supporting innovation in alternative transportation, building capacity at the regional think-tank SPUR, and reimagining the public spaces in San Jose’s urban core whether it be downtown streets or urban parks like the Guadalupe River Park, Emma Prusch Park, St James Park or Backesto Park. Our investments seek to elevate and connect our incredibly diverse-community voices and urban visionaries working in San José’s community organizations or civic government.

Our San Jose program focuses on three themes: 

Creating competitively-differentiated physical and virtual public spaces where people can come together, share information and ideas, build trust, and commit to the city where they live, work, learn or play;
Provide platforms and resources for diverse talent to build power through networks and information so that they can work together to resolve complex issues that challenge San José; and
Foster innovation and learning in systems to support vibrant public life like transportation, regional planning, and economic development.

If you’re interested in our arts program, read more about our arts strategy. 

San Jose Community Advisory Committee members: 

Lan Diep, City of San Jose; Nuria Fernandez, Valley Transportation Authority; Michael Flynn, Google; Garrett Herbert, Deloitte LLP; Mary Papazian, San Jose State University; Greg Woock, Pinger.