At a time when donors like MacKenzie Scott are upending traditional approaches to philanthropy, Bill Gates pledged today in a personal blog post to stay on track with the kind of hands-on grant making that has been his hallmark.
In the post, Gates ruminates on whether his foundation, which has historically taken a technology-driven approach to solving social and environmental problems, is the right tool to generate change.
“Some people have asked: Why create a foundation in the first place?” he wrote. “Would it have been better to donate the money directly to existing groups?”
While he does not refer to Scott, the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, by name, it seems clear that he is talking about how she does her grant making — and how his former wife, Melinda French Gates, approaches hers.
Scott has made about $14 billion in gifts since 2019, surprising many nonprofits with large, unannounced gifts that are free of conditions on how the money is spent. And in an update to French Gates’s giving philosophy stated on the Giving Pledge website, she acknowledged the importance of using data and metrics to measure progress. But she urged philanthropic leaders to trust the expertise of their grantees more and stressed that philanthropy should take a back seat to movement leaders in determining a course of action.
Bill Gates isn’t buying it.
While he says all donors must come to their own conclusions, for him a muscular foundation with “innovative IQ” can solve more of the world’s problems.
In forming the foundation, he believed “the most effective way to do that was to build a new organization with people from the public and private sectors who know how to get new tools invented and delivered,” he wrote. “Two decades in, I still feel that way.”
Gates added that when the foundation eventually shuts down, its greatest contribution will not be the billions of dollars it will have made in grants but the “strategies, innovations, and partnerships” forged by its teams of experts. In 2010, Gates co-founded the Giving Pledge with Melinda French Gates and investor Warren Buffet in which wealthy donors commit to giving away the majority of their wealth. In September, Gates told Forbes he thought the foundation would finish its grant making within 25 years.
Power Struggles
The philanthropy embodied by the Gates Foundation is a combination of the expert-driven approach of legacy foundations like the Rockefeller and Ford foundations and the optimism that Gates and many of his generation share that technology can be a cure-all for the world’s problems, said Amir Pasic, dean of the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University. He credited that approach with helping build the field of public health in the case of the Rockefeller Foundation and sounding an early alarm about the dangers of the pandemic in the case of Gates.
While Bill Gates and other tech billionaires think evaluations based on metrics can be free of bias, people like Scott and Melinda French Gates see it entirely differently. They say as long as donors set the approaches to measurement, then they are wielding power over how grantees do their work, said Pasic, who had not read Gates’s letter.
“MacKenzie Scott and to some extent Melinda French Gates are emphasizing that communities have their own kinds of knowledge that are based in lived experiences as opposed to this idea that experts are elevated to stand above and dispense knowledge,” he said.
The differences between Bill Gates, on one hand, and Melinda French Gates and MacKenzie Scott, on the other, reflect a broader tension within philanthropy between an older model in which grantees have to prove their effort is worth a small grant and receive additional grants based on further evaluation and an approach that simply gives out large grants upfront, said Megan Ming Francis a political science professor and philanthropy expert at the University of Washington.
The approach favored by donors like French Gates and Scott, Ming Francis said, relies more on the “creativity” of people who know more about the problems being attacked. The disconnect between grant makers and grantees became especially visible in 2020 as foundations struggled to respond to calls for racial justice. While she had not read Gates’s post, she wished he would signal more of a change because the Gates Foundation is so large that when it alters its approach, it affects how billions of dollars are given each year and helps other philanthropies determine their priorities.
Ming Francis said that while the Gates Foundation prizes innovation among its grantees, it resists changing its own processes.
“One of the things that’s most striking, especially with Gates and a few of the other foundations that really pride themselves on innovation is that within the world of philanthropy, they are struggling with how to innovate,” she said
Math and A.I.
In the post, Gates outlines some of the foundation’s recent work, including U.S. education grants, which will now focus almost entirely on math; new artificial-intelligence technology that provides lower cost ultrasounds to pregnant women, and advances in gene therapy to cure AIDS.
Gates laments that progress has stalled, or even retreated, in some of the foundation’s key areas as a result of the pandemic. For instance, polio vaccines were not widely available during the pandemic because of lockdowns and logistical problems, leading to an increase in the number of cases.
And inaction on climate change, the war in Ukraine, and the looming threat of a new pandemic (which Gates said the world is a little more prepared for) make for a gloomy backdrop to Gates’s post. He says that because of his wealth, he is “insulated from many of those hardships. But, acknowledging his divorce and the death of his father, Bill Sr., in 2020, he said he has had some personal low points over the past few years.
“Being wealthy makes my life much more comfortable but not more fulfilling,” he wrote. “For that, I need family, friends, and a job where I work on things that matter. I’m grateful to have all three.”
Watching His Net Worth Fall
In the post, Gates shared his thoughts on the challenges the foundation and his Breakthrough Energy venture face in preparing for the next pandemic, responding to climate change, improving education, and advancing disease treatment and prevention.
Gates’s reflection comes nearly half a year after he gave $20 billion to the foundation. The gift will allow the foundation to make $9 billion in grants a year by 2026 — an annual increase of $3 billion compared with pre-pandemic levels.
His net worth, which Forbes places at about $104 billion, will surely decrease as he gives more to the foundation as part of his pledge to give away the majority of his wealth.
Wrote Gates: “Although I don’t care where I rank on the list of the world’s richest people, I do know that as I succeed in giving, I will drop down and eventually off the list altogether.”
