Nike co-founder Phil Knight made national headlines Monday for his $400 million donation to fund education and arts for Black residents of Portland’s North and Northeast neighborhoods.

The gift from Knight and his wife Penny Knight to the 1803 Fund — a new initiative revealed Monday — is meant to fund education services, art programs and other projects for Black Portlanders in the inner North and Northeast Portland neighborhoods once known as Albina.

The contribution certainly isn’t Knight’s first foray into philanthropy. Oregon’s wealthiest resident has long been known for his largesse.

Still, most of Knight’s big-ticket donations have headed to health care facilities, academic institutions and political campaigns.

Knight, 85, and his family, are worth $46.9 billion as of April 26, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That as the 27th richest in the world. Oregon’s two other billionaires –  Dutch Brothers CEO Travis Boersma and Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle, with their estimated personal fortunes each totaling about $2 billion.

Over $2 billion of the the Knight family’s fortune has been donated to research, academics and politics in the last two decades.

Health care

The Knight family’s contributions to health care in Oregon is well into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Knight poured $125 million into the Oregon Health & Science University’s plans for a program of cardiovascular medicine and research in 2012, now named the OHSU Knight Cardiovascular Institute.

It was the largest gift to OHSU at the time, and it was likely the largest contribution ever made by living donors to benefit a single Oregon organization.

Just four years prior, Knight pledged $100 million to the university for the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute.

Also in the health care field, Knight and his wife donated $25 million to kick off a fundraising effort to create the Providence Heart and Vascular Institute, marking the largest single gift in Providence Health System history, as of 2014.

Five years later, the Knights’ $75 million donation in 2019 helped continue to grow the Providence Heart Institute.

Academics

Giving back to his beginnings in business school and on the sidelines of the track, Knight has donated well over $1 billion for educational institutions on the West Coast.

The Knights invested $1 billion into the University of Oregon in two tranches for the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerated Scientific Impact for bioengineering and applied scientific research and training.

Out of the classroom, the Knights have donated hundreds of millions of dollars into a new library, a new law school building, a basketball arena and improvements to Hayward Field and Autzen Stadium.

To Stanford University, Knight’s alma mater, he donated $400 million to launch a graduate studies scholarship program in 2016. Knight’s donation made it the largest fully endowed scholarship program in the world, at the time.

Politics

Most recently, Knight’s contributions to Oregon came in the form of political donations to key players.

Knight donated to two candidates in the 2022 race for Oregon governor.

In early October, Knight donated $1 million to Republican candidate Christine Drazan, who was running a razor-thin campaign against Democrat Tina Kotek.

Prior to supporting Drazan, Knight contributed $3.75 million to unaffiliated candidate Betsy Johnson’s campaign for governor, the largest contribution total of his involvement in Oregon political races.

Kotek won with 47% of the vote to 43.5% for Drazan. Johnson came in a distant third at 8.6%.

In 2018, Knight donated $2.5 million to Republican Knute Buehler, who lost the election to incumbent Gov. Kate Brown. 

Oregon Capital Bureau reporter Gary A. Warner contributed to this story.