$1.1 billion extraordinary gift from Phil and Penny Knight’s will build Oregon’s first women’s hospital
There is a particular kind of philanthropy that does not announce itself with a single grand gesture but instead arrives the way real trust always does — slowly, then all at once. On Tuesday, Providence Health & Services announced that Phil and Penny Knight, the Oregon couple whose fortune built Nike into a global empire, have pledged $1.1 billion to Providence St. Vincent Medical Center and its Providence Heart Institute, a sum Providence and outside trackers alike are calling one of the largest single gifts ever made to a healthcare institution in American history.
The commitment, to be delivered over ten years with the first funds already moving this year, will do two things at once: it will build Oregon’s first hospital devoted entirely to women’s health, and it will pour new resources into a cardiac program the Knights have quietly been nurturing, gift by gift, for more than a decade.
“Penny and I have always believed that real breakthroughs come from people willing to take on the toughest challenges,” Phil Knight said in Providence’s announcement. “Providence has shown that kind of ambition in cardiovascular care, and we see the same opportunity to do something truly distinctive for women’s health” .
Erik Wexler, Providence’s president and chief executive, called it “a significant and transformational milestone for Providence and healthcare in the greater Northwest,” adding that the gift “enables us to create new possibilities in women’s health, in cardiovascular care as well as enhance access and support for patients, as we work to be the best place to give and receive care”.
To understand why Providence — and not some marquee academic medical center on either coast — landed a gift of this scale, you have to look at what came before it. This was never a first date.
The Knights’ relationship with Providence Heart Institute began in 2014 with a $25 million gift that helped complete a $50 million campaign, deepened in 2019 with a $75 million commitment to build a heart transplant program, and deepened again in 2022 with a second $75 million gift once that transplant program had proven itself.
By early this year, before the announcement, the couple had given nearly $200 million to a single heart program at a single community hospital system — by Providence’s own account, one of the largest cumulative gifts any donor has made to a community hospital in the country.
Dr. Dan Oseran, the Heart Institute’s executive medical director, has watched that relationship compound in real time. “We were able, with their funding, to start a heart transplant program, which has been very successful,” Oseran told CNBC. “And we’ve been able to recruit people and give physicians administrative or research time to pursue their passion. So it’s created a very unique environment for us here”.
Of the new gift, Oseran told Becker’s Hospital Review, “There are a couple of components to this really unprecedented gift, and we’re obviously incredibly grateful. A significant portion of the gift is further investment in the Heart Institute”.
He described the ambition behind it in plainer terms to OPB: “With this type of gift over a period of time, we can not only keep up with technology, but sort of anticipate where technology is going”.
Anyone who has followed the Knights closely will recognize an undercurrent to their devotion to cardiac care that neither Phil nor Penny has ever needed to spell out for reporters. In May 2004, their son Matthew, then 34, traveled to El Salvador to help film a fundraising video for a Portland children’s charity. While scuba diving with friends in Lake Ilopango, he suffered a heart attack, 150 feet underwater, brought on by a congenital heart defect no one had known he carried.
Phil Knight stepped down as Nike’s chief executive later that year, and in 2011 the University of Oregon’s new basketball arena was named the Matthew Knight Arena in his son’s honor.
No Knight statement has ever explicitly drawn a line from that loss to a decade of eight- and nine-figure gifts aimed at building one of the finest heart programs on the West Coast. But the line is there for anyone who wants to see it, and it gives Tuesday’s announcement a weight that goes well beyond its extraordinary dollar figure.
The more visible half of the new gift is, in a sense, the more historic one. Providence intends to use a portion of the $1.1 billion to build what it describes as Oregon’s first hospital dedicated entirely to women’s health, a new tower on the St. Vincent campus in Washington County that will bring together labor and delivery, a modernized neonatal intensive care unit, gynecology, menopause care and women’s cardiology under one roof.
It is a fitting home for the idea: St. Vincent is Oregon’s oldest hospital, founded in 1875 by the Sisters of Providence, a Roman Catholic order of women who crossed the country to open it, and today women make up 60 percent of Providence’s patients while St. Vincent delivers more babies each year than any other hospital in the state.
The current maternity ward and NICU date to the 1990s, an increasingly awkward fit for a state where the birth rate has fallen even as a growing share of pregnancies involve complications such as diabetes and substance-use disorders, and where rural maternity wards from Seaside to Baker City have been closing their doors.
Among the concrete improvements planned: private rooms for families in the new NICU, replacing an older design that crowded incubators — known in the trade as isolettes — into a single shared room.
Dr. Ray Moreno, chief executive of Providence St. Vincent, said hospital leaders had discussed building something like this for years without ever finding a way to pay for it. “That was just a dream until this incredible transformative gift,” he said.
Providence expects the project to create hundreds of new clinical and nonclinical jobs once it is complete.
The remainder of the gift will flow into the Heart Institute, which already treats roughly 63,000 patients a year from across the Pacific Northwest and has been described as the highest-volume, most comprehensive cardiac program between Seattle and San Francisco.
The new money is earmarked for recruiting physicians from around the country, funding clinical trials and next-generation diagnostics, and — in a detail that says as much about the Knights’ sensibilities as any dollar figure — underwriting patient-support services that fall outside what insurance typically covers. “I think there’s a lot that we can do if we are thoughtful about how individual patients encounter the health system and how we can just make it easier for them,” Oseran said, noting that for many patients the investment could simply mean a shorter wait for an MRI or a CT scan at a moment when every day matters.
It also arrives at a moment when Providence, one of Oregon’s largest employers, needs precisely this kind of vote of confidence. The Renton, Washington-based health system has weathered financial losses, a statewide nursing strike, staff layoffs, service-line closures and the wind-down of its insurance division in recent years.
A ten-figure philanthropic commitment, arriving now, functions as both capital and encouragement — a signal, from two of the most disciplined donors in the country, that Providence’s cardiac and maternal-health work is worth betting on for the next decade.
For Phil and Penny Knight, both now in their late eighties, Tuesday’s gift is the latest entry in a philanthropic ledger that has become genuinely staggering in its scope. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the couple had already given more than $7.8 billion to nonprofits over the prior twenty years before this newest commitment, a figure that pushes their lifetime giving well past $8.9 billion once the Providence pledge is added in (
Just last August, the Knights announced a $2 billion gift to Oregon Health & Science University’s Knight Cancer Institute — the largest single donation ever made to a U.S. university, college or academic medical center, eclipsing Michael Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion gift to Johns Hopkins in 2018 — bringing their total support of OHSU to more than $2.7 billion since their first $100 million gift there in 2008.
“We are grateful for the opportunity to invest in the next stage of the Druker-led revolutionary vision of cancer research, diagnosis, treatment, care, and some day, eradication,” the Knights said jointly at the time. “We couldn’t be more excited about the transformational potential of this work for humanity”.
That gift alone made them the top philanthropists in the country for 2025, more than doubling the year’s next-largest single gift.
Beyond medicine, the couple’s giving map traces a portrait of two people determined to remake their home state from the ground up. They have given more than $2.2 billion to the University of Oregon, Phil’s alma mater, funding the Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, Hayward Field and the arena that bears their late son’s name.
They have committed roughly $400 million to Stanford, where Phil earned his M.B.A., including funding for the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience through Stanford’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
And in 2023 they pledged $400 million to the 1803 Fund, an initiative dedicated to rebuilding and investing in Portland’s historically Black Albina neighborhood, a striking pivot toward economic and racial equity from a couple more often associated with laboratories and lecture halls.
Their private foundation alone reported $4.47 billion in assets and $520 million in revenue in its most recent filing with Oregon’s Department of Justice, one of the largest philanthropic vehicles in the Pacific Northwest (
Phil Knight, whom sources places among the world’s hundred richest people with a fortune still tied overwhelmingly to the roughly one-fifth of Nike the family retains, has never formally signed the Giving Pledge, but he has said publicly, including in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, that he intends to give away the bulk of that fortune within the lifetimes of his children and grandchildren — a private, homegrown version of the same commitment Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates asked billionaires to make in 2010.
None of it would exist without a Portland State University accounting classroom in 1968. Phil Knight, unable yet to draw a salary from the fledgling shoe-import business he and his old University of Oregon track coach, Bill Bowerman, had started with a $1,000 handshake investment, was teaching Accounting 101 to make ends meet. In the front row sat a composed, sharp student named Penelope Parks.
He hired her to help keep the books at the company’s threadbare little office; not long after, he asked her to dinner. They married that September, and the shoe company they built together — first as Blue Ribbon Sports, then, after Bowerman famously ruined his wife’s waffle iron experimenting with a new sole pattern in his garage, as Nike — grew into one of the most valuable brands on Earth.
Six decades later, that same instinct for patient, unglamorous groundwork — the discipline of an accountant, the stubbornness of a distance runner — is unmistakable in the way the Knights have built their philanthropy: a $25 million gift, then two $75 million gifts, each one earned before the next was offered, culminating now in $1.1 billion and a hospital that did not exist anywhere in Oregon until a donor with three decades of trust in the institution decided it should.
That, more than the number itself, may be the real lesson in Tuesday’s announcement for anyone who raises money for a living or gives it away: the biggest gifts rarely arrive out of nowhere.
They arrive at the end of a long courtship, one careful investment at a time, from donors who have watched an institution keep its promises long enough to bet everything on what it might do next.