The head of the Gates Foundation this week is opening an offensive to beat back criticism of the organization — and demonstrate that the world’s biggest philanthropy wants to listen to grant seekers and detractors.
In an interview in her office here Thursday, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, Gates’s chief executive, acknowledged that the foundation’s work is “fuzzy or not so clear” to some people but said the institution is committed to transparency. With a letter released today marking her two-year tenure, she says she wants to make clear that Gates is a “learning” organization that not only shares its successes but also provides lessons to others when things don’t go as planned.
“What can I do as a leader?” Dr. Desmond-Hellmann says when asked how she encourages openness. “I can compliment, champion, role model, and I can encourage and reward that kind of behavior. You have to try extra hard as a funder to bring out complaints.”
In her letter, titled “What If,” she reflects on the successes and challenges she’s encountered at the helm of the $43 billion grant maker. She also asks readers to imagine a world without devastating infectious diseases, where all children can reach their potential.
Dr. Desmond-Hellmann, an oncologist who was chancellor of University of California at San Francisco before joining Gates, pledges to listen to the nonprofits and others working on global health in the countries where the foundation makes grants. The Gates Foundation “doesn’t have all the answers,” she says.
“None of us want to wall off any avenue to impact,” she writes.
Stymied on Education
To succeed in its two major grant-making priorities — improving health in the developing world and education in the United States — the foundation has to listen to everyone who has expertise in those areas, Dr. Desmond-Hellman says. The letter touts several areas as successes: the work in reducing rare diseases, including human African trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness; its role in curbing smoking around the world; and its leadership in nearly eradicating polio.
Dr. Desmond-Hellmann also highlights Gates’s grant making in an area where the foundation felt stymied: U.S. secondary education.
Gates and other foundations, along with teachers and policy makers at the state and federal levels, provided a broad base of support for the Common Core, a set of academic standards states began adopting in 2010. But early on, many from both sides of the political spectrum began to sour on the standards.
Sarah Reckhow, a professor at Michigan State University and author of Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics, says Gates may have been a victim of its own ambition. She said the foundation’s officials rushed to act because they sensed they had a limited window at the federal level to push for the adoption of Common Core standards.
“People got excited” at the prospect of enacting a vast overhaul of public education in the United States, she said. “Maybe they got too excited. You can have the appearance of agreement and a coalition at the federal level that can utterly dissolve when you try to implement that same policy in the states.”
Allan Golston, president of the Gates Foundation’s domestic programs, said in an interview that political views on education proved to be difficult to navigate.
“Is education harder than we thought?” he asked. “The answer to that [is a] resounding, unequivocal ‘yes.’ ”
When it came to investing in professional development of educators being asked to use the new curriculum, “it just didn’t get done,” Mr. Golston said.
Moving forward, the foundation will direct its education grants to groups that are working on technology solutions to improve education, such as LearnZillion, BetterLesson, and EngageNY, all of which provide digital lesson plans and online support for teachers.
Candid Comments
Mr. Golston credits Dr. Desmond-Hellmann with being able to elicit unvarnished feedback. A few months after she took the job, Mr. Golston and the foundation’s program staff went with her to visit education grantees in Memphis. The staff was ready to show off how well their work was progressing. Their pride deflated soon after Dr. Desmond-Hellmann began asking teachers questions.
She heard that the new curriculum was stressing them out. One teacher, remembers Mr. Golston, related how she spent hours at home on the Internet trying to cobble together lesson plans.
“She’s really gifted at creating that space where you can have what I call the real conversations,” Mr. Golston says of Ms. Desmond-Hellmann. “It was a great signal to us about her seriousness about transparency.”
Just 4 Board Members
Gates’s spending on education has just been one lightning rod of criticism in recent years. Although it is America’s wealthiest foundation, it is a family foundation with a four-person board, consisting of Bill and Melinda Gates, Bill’s father, William Gates Sr., and billionaire investor Warren Buffett.
Critics say the foundation wields enormous power, yet unlike a government with a system of checks and balances, the foundation is impenetrable to outsiders.
“The Gates Foundation doesn’t see like a state,” says Linsey McGoey, a sociology professor at University of Essex in England. “It sees like a blind, dumb, and deaf state, one that is not beholden to any sort of contract obliging it to engage with voices less powerful than its own,” Ms. McGoey wrote in her book “No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy.”
Ms. McGoey contends that “the Gates Foundation is there to impart knowledge — they are not there to understand.”
Not Stuck on Criticism
During the interview with The Chronicle, Dr. Desmond-Hellmann said the criticism would not slow the foundation’s work. It is to be expected, she says, for a wealthy organization co-founded by a global celebrity like Bill Gates to take some hits.
“Some people might think there’s some hubris in our big ambitions,” she says “We could get stuck on that, but I’m not going to let that happen.”
The best response to criticism, she says, is to focus on the impact the foundation is having. One example she is especially proud of is its grants to fight tobacco use, which have totaled $225 million since 2008. She credits those grants with the 2013 passage of a sin-tax law in the Philippines that generated nearly $1 billion in revenue. More than 43 million Filipinos received health insurance subsidized by the tax.
Perhaps most important, she says, is that the effort was a collaboration among Gates, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Philippine government.
“Smarter partnerships are a crucial success factor for me,” she says. “It starts with the acknowledgment we’re not going to do everything ourselves.”
‘A New Dialogue’
While Dr. Desmond-Hellmann did not spell out any major changes in grant making priorities at Gates, the foundation has continued to flex its muscles on multiple fronts.
Last week, it announced it would spend $80 million during the next three years to produce and analyze health, education, and economic data specifically about the women and girls in developing countries.
Meanwhile, Dr. Desmond-Hellmann in February announced a major study of what steps could be taken to improve social mobility and fight poverty in the United States. She said it’s too early to know what the researchers will suggest would be most successful, but in the interview she said she hoped it could prompt more action by the foundation.
As Dr. Desmond-Hellmann looks ahead to what’s next during her tenure, she writes in the letter that her primary goal is to hear from people outside the foundation about what matters most.
“I want this to be the start of a new dialogue with our partners, followers, and fellow optimists about the inspiring and humbling challenge of navigating the path to possibility.”
Correction: This article has been revised to correct several misspellings of Dr. Desmond-Hellmann’s surname and to clarify her quote about her role as a leader. It also clarifies her response to criticism of the foundation, which she said would not slow the philanthropy’s actions.