Two weeks after Melinda French Gates announced she would leave the Gates Foundation, the philanthropist has spelled out how she’ll distribute $1 billion in the next two years to help women and girls.
The philanthropy dollars will flow to leaders and organizations working to improve women’s health and amplify their power both in the United States and internationally.
The effort adds to a separate $1 billion French Gates committed in 2019 through Pivotal Ventures, an organization she founded to make charitable and business investments.
“With the rollback of women’s rights and headwinds to social progress in the U.S. and around the world, Melinda believes that now is the time to provide urgent capital to people and organizations fighting to protect and further equality and remove the barriers that hold women back,” Pivotal said, in a statement.
The commitment will be split three ways:
- Nonprofits and collectives, 16 of which have already been named, including the Collaborative for Gender + Reproductive Equity, the Ms. Foundation for Women, and the 19th, a news organization focusing on gender and politics, will receive a total of $200 million.
- Twelve people will receive grants of $20 million each that they can redistribute to organizations doing “urgent, impactful, and innovative” work to help women’s health and well-being. The leaders picked by French Gates include Crystal Echo Hawk, a Native American advocate and founder of IllumiNative, Hauwa Ojeifo, a Nigerian mental health advocate, and Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister of New Zealand.
- Lever for Change, a nonprofit spun off from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, will manage a $250 million global open call to identify organizations working to improve women’s physical and mental health. Lever for Change managed a similar open call for MacKenzie Scott, which resulted in gifts totaling $640 million to benefit community-led organizations.
How the remainder of the $1 billion will be used will be determined later in the year, according to a Pivotal spokesperson.
The grants to organizations will be flexible, allowing each nonprofit or project leeway in determining how the money is used. The gifts to the individuals will be managed by the National Philanthropic Trust, a donor-advised fund sponsoring organization. The leaders will have “autonomy in identifying and recommending organizations they believe will have an impact,” and neither French Gates nor Pivotal will review or approve the grants they make, Pivotal said.
Today’s $1 billion announcement from French Gates is likely just the beginning. Upon her separation from the Gates Foundation, French Gates received $12.5 billion that she can use to advance causes important to her. She has said that helping women and girls would be her main objective.
Some of the recipients of Pivotal’s aid were stunned to learn they had been selected as beneficiaries.
Although leaders at the Ms. Foundation for Women have been in touch with Pivotal Ventures over the past year to share information about the impact of their grants and needs of the broader cause, the grant came as a complete surprise to the nonprofit’s president, Teresa Younger, who returned from a weekend of hiking to read about it in an email Monday evening.
Younger said the organization is still planning how it will use the money. She declined to say how much the Ms. Foundation received but characterized it as significant relative to its annual grant making budget of about $7 million, which also includes support for strategic communications and capacity building.
The grant will largely help the work expand its support to grassroots groups in the South and Midwest that it has identified as key areas in need, as well as expand its national grant making portfolio that focuses on girls and women of color, Younger said.
Such a surge of support, Younger said, is needed at a time when there are “real attacks on women and women’s bodies.”
The 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade, which has sent abortion battles to the states, has made reproductive rights a critical battle, Younger said. She said it was also necessary to provide philanthropic capital to groups working on other issues that will have a big impact on women, including pay equity, environmental justice, and the last summer’s U.S. Supreme Court decision upending affirmative action.
The money from French Gates, Younger said, will allow grassroots women’s groups to go on the offensive, rather than simply react to events.
“The kind of movement that Melinda Gates has put together allows us to look at long-term planning,” she said. “It’s not like it’s going to fold and go away.”
Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, founder of MomsRising, a national membership organization, said the grant would help build a case for public policies like mandatory paid maternity leave and more affordable health care.
Childcare, she said, in many cases costs more than college, and the amount of philanthropy that has been directed to support women and girls – less than two percent of all foundation giving according to the Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy’s Women’s and Girls Index – is far from enough to fill gaps left by public funding.
Rowe-Finkebeiner declined to say how much French Gates gave the organization, but said it would be used over the next three years to galvanize support and keep women from going broke trying to pay medical bills.
“It’s important that each and every person knows that when this many people are having the same types of crises at the same time, we don’t have an epidemic of personal failures,” she said. “This funding allows us to get the word out, to partner with our over a million members and to let people know they’re not alone, and that there are solutions.”
