Michael Dell, founder of the Dell Computer Corporation, and his wife, Susan, said this week they have given an additional $1 billion to their foundation, more than doubling the grant maker’s endowment.
The Dells will continue to support urban education, health, and economic mobility, long their favorite causes. And the foundation will continue giving to its hometown of Austin, Tex., as well as other parts of the country and in India and South Africa.
With the new money, the foundation plans to expand its support of social entrepreneurs, college mentoring programs, and innovations in education, Janet Mountain, executive director of the Dell Foundation, said in an interview Thursday.
Forbes pegs Mr. Dell’s net worth at $20.9 billion.
Along with the announcement of the gift, the couple released a paper called “A Philanthropist’s Guide to the Future,” which provides a blueprint for how the foundation will deploy the additional resources. The role of the couple’s philanthropy will shift from “one that focuses on capital to one that focuses on competence.”
To produce the guide, the foundation surveyed 697 social-impact professionals, including government officials, nonprofit leaders, and people who have overcome urban poverty.
Active Donors
The guide suggests the Dells will be active donors, seeking to connect grantees with high-level decision makers and advisers. The survey found that when asked if they would prefer a gift of $100,000 or nonmonetary help like introductions to people in a donor’s professional network, the majority of grantees said they’d prefer the noncash help.
“Michael and I believe the only way we can make progress on the hard problems we are tackling is to collaborate with the best partners we can find,” said Ms. Dell, in a statement. “A new generation of social-impact leaders is proving that the ability to affect social change is no longer tied to financial resources alone. Their contributions of time, talent, and skill are driving innovation and creating new solutions.”
The guide points away from an old version of philanthropy in which foundations gave grantees money to deliver “prescriptive solutions and interventions,” said Ms. Mountain. The new approach, she said, takes advantage of experts and connections made through modern technology.
“Philanthropic capital should really be focused on innovation and risk,” she said. The goal is to be flexible in how it provides support — through money, professional connections or expertise, for example.
Ms. Mountain said the foundation plans to increase grants and investments in social entrepreneurs. It will also ratchet up spending on programs designed to help college students succeed and efforts to develop new approaches in education. She did not provide specific spending plans but said the larger endowment would allow increased spending without cutting support elsewhere.
Like other philanthropists who have made fortunes in technology, such as Steve and Jean Case, the Dells believe that philanthropy needs to broadcast when it comes up short, so nonprofits can learn from mistakes. “If it doesn’t work, tell everyone” is one maxim included in the guide. Others include a call to “measure mindfully,” meaning that data is important but not all data is relevant. And d “stay the course,” because many social problems cannot be solved quickly.
Not All Are Impressed
The Dells’ commentary about the future of philanthropy has at least some shrugging their shoulders.
Their guide, says William Schambra, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a regular contributor to The Chronicle, lacks a clear statement of how it will use data, how its grant strategy will change to take a longer view, and what problems the foundation would like to solve.
Calling the guide full of “completely vacuous, empty rhetoric,” Mr. Schambra said that in recent years newly minted technology philanthropists have taken a grandiose view of their ability to solve big problems.
In doing so, they have produced strategies, like the Dells’ guide, which Mr. Schambra contends are detached from the people they are trying to help and lack a clear view of how to solve specific social ills.
“This is Davos talk,” he said, referring to the annual world economic forum in Switzerland that attracts political leaders, wealthy entrepreneurs, and intellectuals. “They will, no doubt, spend millions upon millions of dollars, and at the end of this process they will no more be able to explain what they hope to accomplish than they can now.”
Big Gifts to UT at Austin
The Dells created their foundation in 2000 with the sale of $114 million of the computer company’s stock. The foundation listed assets of $762 million in its 2015 Internal Revenue Service filings, the most recent year available. That year, the foundation made about $70 million in grants, including $5.7 million to the Dell Scholars Program, which provides college students with mentors.
In recent years, the Dells have steered at least $135 million to the University of Texas, including $50 million to University of Texas at Austin in 2006 for pediatric health research, programs on childhood obesity, and a new computer science building. Other gifts have included $25 million in 2015 for a teaching hospital at University of Texas Medical School and $50 million in 2013 for a new medical school at the university.
In 2003, the Dells made a $637.7 million gift to the foundation, putting them at No. 2 on that year’s Philanthropy 50 list of the largest donors, behind Joan Kroc.
Correction: The headline on a previous version of this article said the $1 billion was in the form of a pledge instead of an outright gift.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include comments from Janet Mountain, executive director of the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and William Schambra, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
