When Bill and Melinda Gates created their philanthropy in 2000, they named it after both of them. Bill was still running Microsoft, so Melinda had a bigger role running the organization. But it was rare to hear from her. That changed in 2006, when Warren Buffett decided to give a big chunk of his fortune to the Gates Foundation.
Answering questions from reporters soon after the couple joined Buffett to make the announcement of this stunning philanthropic merger at the New York Public Library, Gates says she realized how crucial it was for her to speak up about the foundation’s work. In her new book, The Moment of Lift, she writes that she realized the best way to advance the philanthropy’s mission was to speak out about crucial issues.
The new book, whose subtitle is How Empowering Women Changes the World, is an attempt to extend her voice even further. While much of the book focuses on the women she has met who have transformed her thinking about what philanthropy can do, it’s also a candid look at what it’s like for a couple to work together to give away their dollars.
And perhaps most interesting for people who work in the nonprofit world, it talks frankly about the challenge grant makers face in hearing what their staff members really want to say.
Gates recounts the time Sue Desmond-Hellmann, the foundation’s CEO, asked her to sit in front of a video camera.
Gates was then given a stack of cards, each one with something a foundation employee didn’t want to tell her in person. The statements were bold, she writes, and the last one really stung. “You’re like Mary F@$*ing Poppins — practically perfect in every way.”
She burst out laughing in nervousness, she writes, but she says it made her realize she needed to let her guard down more often and be herself so that others at the foundation — especially other women — could do the same.
In an email interview with Gates, the Chronicle’s editor, Stacy Palmer, asked her more about her own giving and how she sees women faring in the nonprofit world:
Taking Women Donors Seriously
Palmer: We have heard from many women of wealth that their male spouses and partners still get far more attention from fundraisers, board members, and CEOs seeking big gifts — even when the women are the decision makers . Are nonprofits doing enough to make sure women donors are taken seriously and what more would you like to see them do?
Gates: The savvy ones are — and for good reason.
The Women’s Philanthropy Institute at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy released a report a couple years ago that found women donate as much money as men — and sometimes, like on Giving Tuesday, they donate more. That’s a lot of money to leave on the table if you’re not including women in your outreach.
Furthermore, it’s not just a matter of adding a name to a fundraising letter. We’ve learned from new platforms that explicitly engage women — like the Maverick Collective and Women Moving Millions — that women give differently than men do. They’re especially interested in collective learning and in following the impact of their giving. Any nonprofit that’s still focusing its fundraising efforts on men or not tailoring its outreach to women is making a lot of inaccurate — and ultimately expensive — assumptions.
Equal Partnership With Bill
Palmer: One of my favorite parts of the book is when you talk about how you wrestled with getting an equal partnership with Bill. How does that play out in your philanthropic decision making? And can you tell us how you got people to stop thinking of your philanthropy as Bill’s foundation?
Gates: In the early years of the foundation, Bill was still very focused on his work at Microsoft so I was doing the majority of the day-to-day foundation work, but I was very much behind the scenes. I was protective of my privacy — and especially of my kids’ privacy — so I wasn’t giving speeches or doing interviews. Meanwhile, Bill was out there publicly. When the press would ask him questions about the foundation, he’d answer them, and fairly quickly people began to write and talk about it as “Bill’s foundation.”
Bill and I talked about it and decided that the way to address the inaccuracy was for me to step up in public as co-founder and co-chair.
Palmer: You also note that in the early days foundation employees wanted you to split your responsibilities — you could oversee education and libraries and work in the Pacific Northwest and Bill could oversee global health. But you say you decided against that approach. Why? And looking back, was that the right decision?
Gates: It was absolutely the right decision. Both for us and for the work we do. Whatever we learn and read and see, we share with each other, and that makes us much more effective.
Palmer: Another part of the book I enjoyed was your talk about Warren Buffett’s 2006 announcement that he would be giving your foundation a large part of his fortune to give away. I watched you in person that day, and I realized it was the first time I had heard so much from you. You say you recognized that the foundation needed you and Bill and Warren to have an equal partnership. Can you talk more about why that was so important?
Gates: That press conference was a turning point for me. I honestly hadn’t realized how passionate I was about the work until I heard myself talking about it in public with the two of them.
I saw so clearly that this needed to be an equal partnership — again, it wasn’t just Bill and I that needed it, but the foundation needed it, too.
Because there are ways I see agriculture and family planning and infectious diseases that complement the ways Bill sees them, and we’re able to do more and be smarter together than we would be as individuals.
Disagreement Over Annual Letter
Palmer: The annual letters you and Bill write about the foundation and your thinking drive a lot of the conversation about philanthropy — and I especially like how each year you approach them differently so it’s not a staid annual report from a traditional foundation. Can you talk about how the annual letter pushed forward your equal partnership with Bill?
Gates: The foundation’s 2013 annual letter was a watershed for us. Bill had been writing an annual letter for five years, and I’d been busy with other foundation work and with our three kids.
But this was just after the London Family Planning Summit, which I’d helped put together and which had brought enormous energy and investment to this issue I care about so deeply. I felt a keen sense of ownership over our family-planning work, and I wanted to write about it in our annual letter.
When I said so to Bill, though, he said he didn’t see why things should change. It got hot. We both got angry. It was a big test for us. In the end, we survived, and though the letter went out under his name, it included a family-planning essay under mine.
The next year, Bill wrote two thirds of the letter, I wrote a third, and it went out as “2014 Gates Annual Letter.” In 2015, the headline was “Our Big Bet for the Future — Bill and Melinda Gates.”
That completed the evolution of the annual letter from his into ours and the evolution of our partnership into something even stronger.
Palmer: You have made a point of investing in companies founded and run by women and minorities. Do you use that lens in your philanthropy? If so, how?
Gates: From the beginning, our philanthropy has focused on people who are marginalized. Being a good philanthropist requires being a good partner, and a lot of our partners are people who live and work and in the communities we serve.
The more I’ve learned about how vital it is that development work uplift women, the more we’ve placed them at the center of all our programs. In 2014, we added gender equality as a central plank to our foundation’s work, alongside health and poverty. Development work that isn’t about women is development work that won’t succeed.
So I suppose the short answer to your question is “yes.”
Answer to HIV: Anti-Violence, Not More Condoms
Palmer: Another powerful moment is when you talk about what you learned in a visit to Calcutta, where you thought the foundation’s money was going into HIV but it turns out it was going into violence prevention. Tell me more about what you discovered and how it helped you see that local grant officers often need to make decisions that you couldn’t have understood without seeing it in person.
Gates: In 2004, I visited Calcutta in preparation for work we wanted to do to prevent HIV infection among sex workers. Our plan included programs about condoms, testing, and awareness. But when we met with sex workers, they almost laughed at us. “We don’t need your help with condoms,” they said. “We’ll teach you about condoms. We need help preventing violence.”
What we learned was that these sex workers’ clients would beat them up if they asked them to use condoms, and the police would beat them up if they were carrying condoms. They knew perfectly well that condoms reduced HIV infection, and they were perfectly ready to use them. What they needed was a way to do so safely.
We had to adjust our thinking. We ended up helping them set up a speed-dial network: If a woman was attacked by police, she would dial a three-digit code, and a group of 12 to 15 women would come running and shouting, along with a pro bono lawyer and a media person. And the police would back down. One woman returned to a police station where she had been beaten and raped, and they offered her a chair and a cup of tea. The head of our India office put it bluntly: “Every man who’s a bully is scared of a group of women.”
Since then, not only has violence against Indian sex workers plummeted, but so has HIV.
No matter how many charts and graphs and reports philanthropists read, sometimes there’s simply no way they can teach us as much as a single conversation with the people we’re working for.
Daughters’ World
Palmer: As you look ahead to the world your daughters will enter, what advice do you have for their own philanthropic decision making — and what mistakes would you tell them to avoid?
Gates: I think listening is one of the most important parts of our job. It’s the only way to truly understand people’s lives — to learn who they are, what they want, what they believe, and what barriers are standing in their way. The day we stop listening to people and trying our best to understand their context, their values, and their needs — that’s the day we stop being able to do anything to make the world better.
