Knight Foundation Grant Impact
Posting: Monday, March 30, 2026
By: Marty Walker, Director of Operations & Finance
Grant Amount: $220,000 | Purpose: Operational Infrastructure & Capacity Building
Overview
A $220,000 grant from the Knight Foundation gave JFP the rare opportunity to invest in infrastructure that is difficult to prioritize without dedicated support. Rather than directing these funds toward programming, JFP used this support intentionally — hiring dedicated operations leadership and funding a suite of interconnected infrastructure upgrades that have fundamentally changed how a three-person organization manages complex, multi-stakeholder work.
The result: JFP now operates with systems and controls that are built to scale.
What We Built
A Custom Grant Management Platform — and a Team Operating Model
JFP invested in a purpose-built fiscal sponsorship and grant management platform developed on Airtable, paired with a unified contact database. The platform was built in partnership with Coefficient, a consultancy specializing in Airtable development, who remain an ongoing support partner as the system continues to grow. This system replaced a patchwork of spreadsheets, email threads, and institutional knowledge that lived outside any shared system — with a shared, role-based infrastructure that the entire team works from.
The platform is organized around three distinct operational roles:
Grant Manager — client-facing relationship management and contract execution
Finance — logging receivables and payables, disbursing funds through Ramp
Reporting — grant fulfillment tracking and funder reporting coordination
This structure means JFP no longer depends on a single inbox or spreadsheet to know where things stand. Information is accessible, accountable, and organized by function.
Because Airtable operates like a modular system — new tools and programs can be connected and built on top of the platform — the investment compounds over time. Automations running across the platform today span the full arc of JFP's work: Slack notifications alert staff the moment a CQ fellow or mentor application is submitted; separate notifications are triggered when new grants or financial data are entered into the grant management system; and when a disbursement is ready, the platform automatically pushes the bill to Ramp for review and approval — eliminating a manual handoff that previously required staff intervention at every step. In JFP's second year administering the Chips Quinn Fellows program, the team built a dedicated Airtable base to manage the entire fellowship cycle: accepting applications from both fellows and mentors, enabling reviewers to individually score candidates through a structured scorecard, and facilitating mentor-fellow matching by time zone. The same platform now also runs AI-assisted field agents that conduct research, analysis, and vetting of potential funders and newsrooms — capabilities that would have been out of reach without the infrastructure in place.
Financial Systems Redesign
After a historical reconciliation of grants across Airtable and QuickBooks, JFP engaged YPTC, a leading nonprofit financial management firm, to conduct a full assessment of its QuickBooks setup and align it with the new grant management platform. The engagement introduced a structured system of classes and categories that enables precise tracking and reporting by fund, program, and funder — a critical capability for a fiscal sponsor managing restricted funds on behalf of multiple clients. Now fully implemented, this redesign has positioned JFP for cleaner, more efficient audits going forward.
Modernized Expense Management and Disbursements
JFP onboarded to Ramp, a modern expense and accounts payable platform that eliminated manual check-cutting and bank wire transfers by onboarding vendors, newsrooms and Chips Quinn fellows to be paid via ACH. In addition, staff has been provided company cards, each operating within a structured approval chain that governs all expenses and accounts payable. Ramp syncs directly with QuickBooks, closing a key gap in financial recordkeeping.
In its first year of implementation, Ramp saved JFP approximately $5,000 in wire transfer fees for grant disbursements to newsrooms — a direct, recurring cost reduction that more than offsets the platform's overhead.
Employee Handbook and HR Legal Foundation
With a distributed workforce spanning multiple states, JFP faces real compliance complexity — labor laws, leave requirements, and employee protections vary significantly by jurisdiction, and a single misstep carries legal and reputational risk. That’s why we hired Ballard Spahr, a nationally recognized law firm to review and revise our first employee handbook. The handbook addresses that complexity directly, establishing clear, legally vetted policies, protections, and expectations for staff regardless of the state in which they work. It is a foundational step in building a professional, legally sound workplace — and a necessary one for any organization that operates across state lines.
Why This Matters
These upgrades are more than operational housekeeping. Taken together, they represent a deliberate transformation of JFP into an organization with the financial controls, data infrastructure, and institutional documentation required to manage significant philanthropic capital responsibly.
That capacity has been recognized at the highest levels. Google selected JFP to administer a $10 million private fund through the California Civic Media Fund — a role that demands precisely the kind of rigorous systems, audit-ready financials, and compliance infrastructure that the Knight Foundation grant made possible. As a further reflection of that trust, Google approved JFP's implementation of a sweep account structure across its accounts, protecting funds with full FDIC coverage while generating interest income — a level of financial stewardship that speaks directly to the confidence JFP has earned as a partner.
For a three-person organization, that selection is a direct validation of what operational investment can unlock.
The Knight Foundation's support didn't just help JFP run better. It helped JFP become the kind of organization that others trust with their most important work.
About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation: The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is a national foundation that invests in journalism, communities, and the arts. Knight Foundation's mission is to foster informed and engaged communities, believing that a well-informed citizenry is essential for a healthy democracy. Visit online.
About JFP: The mission of Journalism Funding Partners is to strengthen the depth, diversity and sustainability of local news by building and shepherding relationships between funders and local news organizations. JFP is a recognized nonprofit that acts as fiscal sponsor, allowing foundations and individual funders to contribute directly to local news, regardless of the news organization’s business model.
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Media Contact: Rusty Coats, Executive Director | rusty@jfp-local.org | (813) 277-8959
