The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Friday that it will support a two-year effort to brainstorm ways to help poor people in the United States, a subject far removed from the foundation’s well-established efforts to improve global health and fix American schools — but a topic that is growing increasingly popular with the nation’s grant makers.
Housed at the Urban Institute, the U.S. Partnership on Mobility from Poverty will gather 24 academic, nonprofit, and business leaders to research ways to improve social mobility. The group, which will meet for the first time this spring, will not produce a comprehensive report. Instead, members will regularly report their findings to the partnership, which intends to serve as a reservoir of information on combating poverty.
At $3.7 million, the Mobility and Poverty grant is relatively small compared with the massive expenditures Gates has steered to its signature global health and U.S. education programs. But Sue Desmond-Hellmann, Gates’ chief executive, said the new grant could lay the groundwork for future support.
“This is new territory for the Gates Foundation,” she wrote in a statement announcing the grant, adding that the effort’s goal was “setting an agenda for action.”
Education Remains Top Priority
But it is unclear whether Gates, which has assets of $43.5 billion, making it by far the nation’s largest private grant maker, is testing the waters for any kind of full-blown grant-making effort.
In her statement, Ms. Desmond-Hellmann said the grant was an attempt to build research and generate ideas on poverty, but that education remains its primary focus in the United States.
In its work in schools and colleges, the foundation discovered that while education is a “critical driver” of economic mobility, “it is not the only intervention needed to address poverty here at home.”
In an interview, Ryan Rippel, senior program officer for special initiatives at Gates, stressed that the grant maker’s domestic priorities haven’t shifted, but that Gates will “consider additional opportunities where we can have impact” on poverty.
“This is very sincerely and genuinely a learning effort,” Mr. Rippel said. “We’ll learn alongside the group and it will inform more broadly our mission of reducing inequity in the United States.”
Growing Attention
Gates’s new interest in fighting American poverty follows the Ford Foundation’s announcement in June that it all of its grants would seek to close the inequality gap, including income disparities. Last week, the James Irvine Foundation made economic opportunity and giving California’s working poor a political voice its grant-making focus, shifting away from other topics.
By setting up a partnership that invites a variety of approaches to solving poverty, Gates’ approach suggests a “pendulum shift” among large foundations that seek and respond to input from others on their work, said Don Howard, Irvine’s president.
“They’re clearly not starting with a solution in mind,” he said.
David Ellwood, a professor of political economy at Harvard University, will serve as chairman of the mobility partnership.
