In the latest installment of its $158 million commitment to fight poverty in the United States, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is leading a group of grant makers in a search for ways to get rid of misconceptions and negative stereotypes about the poor.
Gates, along with the Raikes, Robert Wood Johnson, and W.K. Kellogg foundations, is offering grants of up to $100,000 for groups that propose ways to change how Americans talk and think about people living in poverty. The details are still being worked out, but Ryan Rippel, who directs the Economic Mobility and Opportunity Program at Gates, expects the foundations to award about 10 grants next spring. Proposals are due by November 13.
Spreading fallacies about the poor can demean and dehumanize people with low incomes, Rippel says.
Common myths include the idea that people are poor because they are irresponsible and that rags-to-riches experiences are common, not outliers. On the other hand, the idea that all poor people are caught up in a crippling system and that they lack the ability to change their own lives is also false, Rippel says.
“There are so many stories out there about the nature of poverty that are inaccurate, and when you have an inaccurate story as the baseline, it’s very hard to know what solutions to focus on to actually create opportunity,” Rippel says.
First Step
The foundations are interested in ideas that use digital platforms and social networks to help spread ideas about positive social change, incorporate stories from a wide range of people, and use lessons of the successes and failures of anti-poverty programs.
Proposals will be judged by a panel of experts, to be named later. It isn’t clear, Rippel says, whether the first round of grants will lead to more investment.
“We see this as a first step to get a bunch of ideas on the table that could potentially help us get more accurate stories about the nature of poverty and what people are experiencing every day,” he says. “We’re especially interested in hearing from individuals with lived experience navigating poverty.”
Seeking Multiple Solutions
In addition to being part of the Gates Foundation’s big bet on poverty, the call for proposals is also a Gates “Grand Challenge,” which the philanthropy giant has been issuing for the past 16 years.
A Grand Challenge, Rippel says, is a call for ideas “where there is not a single idea or a single organization ready with a clear or complete solution.”
Past Grand Challenges have focused on a wide range of health and development issues globally, including saving lives at birth, heading off the spread of the Ebola and Zika viruses, and improving global mental health and early childhood development.
Emphasis on Data
By the end of the year, Rippel expects that one quarter of the $158 million earmarked for economic mobility and opportunity will have been committed.
Other projects include support for the Opportunity Atlas, a database that shows which neighborhoods give young residents the best chance to rise out of poverty, and the Eviction Lab, a national database of evictions developed by Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted.
This summer, Gates joined with the Ballmer Group and Bloomberg Philanthropies to direct a total of $12 million to 10 cities to test new ways to help people rise out of poverty.
The latest collaboration, Rippel says, brings together foundations with complementary strengths. The Raikes Foundation has made curbing systemic racism its major focus, Kellogg has a history of supporting anti-poverty programs and racial reconciliation, and Robert Wood Johnson is the dominant public-health philanthropy.
“Poverty is multidimensional,” Rippel says. “You have to come at it with a much broader movement of actors. We’re new to this space so we’re working with and alongside folks who have been doing this much longer than we have.”
Alex Daniels covers foundations, donor-advised funds, fundraising research, and tax issues for the Chronicle. He recently conducted interviews with the MacArthur Foundation’s Julia Stasch, who is stepping down after five years as president, and Unicef’s Caryl Stern, who has been tapped to lead the Walton Family Foundation . Email Alex or follow him on Twitter .
