Concept drawing of the new hospital tower dedicated to women’s health that will be built on the Providence St. Vincent campus in Washington County. The hospital will be made with a $1.1 billion pledge from Nike founder Phil Knight and his wife Penny Knight.
Courtesy of Providence St. Vincent
Nike founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny Knight, have pledged $1.1 billion to Providence St. Vincent Medical Center and to Providence Heart Institute, Providence announced Tuesday.
The gift is pledged over a 10-year period, with the first distribution of funds this year.
Providence plans to use part of the gift to build a new hospital tower dedicated to women’s health on the St. Vincent campus in Washington County. The hospital, which Providence says is Oregon’s first of its kind, will be anchored by an updated labor and delivery unit and neonatal intensive care unit, along with cardiac care, menopause care and gynecology.
The gift will also support new cardiovascular treatments, diagnostic tools and prevention strategies at the Providence Heart Institute, also headquartered on the St. Vincent campus.
In a statement provided by Providence, Knight said the gift will change what’s possible for communities across Oregon.
“Penny and I have always believed that real breakthroughs come from people willing to take on the toughest challenges,” said Phil Knight. “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.”
The Phil and Penny Knight Pavilion on the Providence St. Vincent campus in Portland, Ore., in an undated handout image.
Courtesy of Providence St. Vincent
The gift further cements the Knights as Oregon’s leading philanthropists.
Last year, they pledged $2 billion to Oregon Health & Science University’s Knight Cancer Research Institute, a gift the Chronicle of Philanthropy called the largest public donation of the year. They’ve also made major gifts to the University of Oregon and the 1803 Fund, an initiative investing in Oregon’s Black community and neighborhoods in Portland’s urban core.
And it offers a major tailwind for Providence, one of Oregon’s largest employers and healthcare providers. In recent years the health system, based in Renton, Washington, has weathered financial losses and a statewide nursing strike, laid off staff and closed service lines, and announced the shuttering of its insurance division.
New women’s hospital ‘a dream’
St. Vincent is Oregon’s oldest hospital, founded in 1875 by the Sisters of Providence, a Roman Catholic women’s group.
Today, women make up 60% of Providence’s patients, and St. Vincent delivers more babies annually than any other hospital in the state. But hospital leaders say the maternity unit and NICU were built in the 1990s and have grown out of date.
While the birthrate in Oregon has fallen, a higher percentage of pregnancies involve complex health conditions, from diabetes to substance-use disorders.
Across the state, healthcare providers have struggled to maintain maternity wards, with closures in recent years from Seaside to Baker City.
Dr. Ray Moreno, the chief executive for Providence St. Vincent, said he and others at Providence have long discussed the idea of a women’s hospital with more centralized, coordinated care and better technology to support women across their lifespan. But he said until the Knights’ gift, they didn’t have a path to make it happen.
“That was just a dream until this incredible transformative gift,” he said.
Among the facility upgrades planned: The NICU in the new women’s hospital will have private rooms for families, replacing an existing older design featuring a single shared room with a long row of specialized incubators called isolates.
First image: James Colhoff Jr. Second image: Chris Hornbecker.
Goal to make cutting-edge heart healthcare ‘easier’
Over the past decade, the Knights have contributed $200 million to the Providence Heart Institute, helping to expand it and establish a heart transplantation program. The institute treats about 63,000 patients from across the Northwest.
Dan Oseran, the institute’s executive medical director, said their new pledge will allow them to recruit top talent from around the country, invest in research like clinical trials and stay at the cutting edge of diagnostics and treatment.
“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,” he said.
Oseran said he expects the gift will also ease the way of patients dealing with a stressful cardiac diagnosis. For individual patients, the investments in technology could mean shorter waits for an MRI or CT scan. Providence says it will also invest in some patient support services that go beyond what can be billed to insurance providers.
“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.
The Knights’ family foundation reported $4.47 billion in assets and $520 million in revenue in 2024, according to the most recent public filings with Oregon’s Department of Justice.
