Power Couple Giving: The 10-Year Journey of Steve and Connie Ballmer

Bellevue, Wash.
When Steve Ballmer stepped down as Microsoft’s CEO in 2014, with a $23 billion fortune at age 58, he began wearing lime-green golf shirts and insisted for a few months that his top priority was to enjoy retirement. His wife, Connie, nudged him to think about philanthropy, but he was hesitant. And then one day, Steve Ballmer let it be known that he had just leased an entire floor of an office tower in this Seattle suburb.

“I said, ‘What!?’ Connie Ballmer recalled in a recent interview. “‘Are you kidding me? What are we doing with a whole floor?’”

Her husband’s laconic reply: “I think we’ll be doing something.”

Today that 30th-floor office, with its stunning view of Mount Rainier, is the home of a low-key philanthropic giant. By the Ballmers’ own tally, they’ve given away more than $3 billion in the past five years, including $767 million in 2024. The Ballmers do their giving through a donor-advised fund and don’t disclose its annual funding levels, so their charitable activity isn’t tracked in the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Philanthropy 50 rankings. But in sheer dollar terms, the Ballmers look to be among the nation’s top 10 individual givers during the past three years.

A close look at the Ballmers’ philanthropic coming of age isn’t just a story of grants, convenings, and mission statements. It’s also the saga of a mostly successful — but sometimes bumpy — journey from naïveté to mastery. The Ballmers and nearly two dozen of their grantees and advisers spoke to the Chronicle about the personalities, ideals, and frustrations that shaped the first 10 years of decisions.

At the moment, it is unclear whether the Ballmers’ top philanthropic priority — economic mobility — will be disrupted, aided, or left untouched by the Trump administration’s whirlwind of actions related to the nonprofit sector. The Ballmer Group’s second focus area, climate-related giving, led by the Ballmers’ oldest son, Sam, could make them a powerful funder and agenda-setter in areas such as rainforest protection and global methane-emissions tracking — although, likewise, it is unknown how this line of grant making would be affected by the Trump administration’s energy and environmental positions.

For now, Steve and Connie’s response is to wait and see. Legislators may go slowly on federal funding cutbacks if they feel such retrenchment could hurt their districts. On the other hand, big cuts in government programs such as Head Start, Medicaid, and renewable energy could weaken the existing resources of many nonprofits that the Ballmers back in areas that include early-childhood support and environmental-career training.

“Who’s the biggest grant maker in the country?” Steve Ballmer asked in a mid-February interview. “It’s the U.S. government. You could say some of those grants are probably okay to go away. Some of them probably aren’t.”

Before he could finish the thought, Connie Ballmer interjected: “And philanthropy cannot fill the hole.”

Finding the Bull’s-Eye

In 2011, the term “collective impact” entered philanthropy’s lexicon, describing a way of goading funders to build big alliances of nonprofits, government, and philanthropy to tackle society’s toughest problems, such as homelessness or chronic educational gaps between rich and poor school districts.

Connie and Steve Ballmer weren’t part of the conversation then. But by late 2014, the couple’s independent explorations pulled them toward a similar worldview, focusing on economic mobility for children and families in need. For Connie Ballmer, who started her career as a tech marketing specialist before moving into philanthropy, her longtime advocacy for foster children was the key.

“There’s no one issue that puts these kids in foster care,” she recently explained. “So then you’re taking on the whole child-welfare system, and then you’re looking at the stability of the home — and the education they’re getting.”

Meanwhile, newly retired Steve Ballmer — data wonk of longstanding — was digging into the inner workings of the U.S. economy. This eventually led him to create the USAFacts database, but more immediately, it nudged him to study why some families were stuck in poverty for generations while others darted ahead. Conversations with Harvard economist Raj Chetty sharpened that curiosity further.

Eager to get up to speed on key issues and meet the right people, Connie Ballmer in early 2015 turned for advice to Tom Tierney, the co-founder of Bridgespan Group, a leading philanthropy consulting firm.

“Connie and Steve had a real willingness to listen and learn,” Tierney recalled, unlike some philanthropists “who come in believing they have all the answers. You know, the type who believe they know everything about K-12 education because they were in school once. That’s short-sighted and naïve.” By contrast, Tierney said, “the Ballmers were humble learners.”

After helping the Ballmers define “the center of their bull’s-eye,” Tierney provided introductions to nine well-regarded nonprofits, including Cincinnati-based StriveTogether — an oft-cited champion of the collective-impact approach — as well as Harlem Children’s Zone and Minneapolis’s Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ). Under the banner of “cradle-to-career,” these organizations embrace the panoramic vision that the Ballmers craved: preschool programs, grade-school reading, college readiness, and more.

Asked to reconstruct her first meeting with the Ballmers, NAZ president and CEO Sondra Samuels couldn’t stop grinning. “They were so chill and disarming,” she recalled. “You actually forget that you’re talking to these crazy-wealthy people. Steve was turning over napkins and doing the math about how many families we were serving. Connie was more methodical, with this deep passion around having America work for everyone.”

Repeatable Successes

Not only did those early meetings click, but over the past decade, they have also led to more than $129 million of Ballmer funding for StriveTogether, plus smaller grants for NAZ and Harlem Children’s Zone. Economic mobility is now the dominant theme in the Ballmer Group’s portfolio of about 500 active grants, representing roughly 80 percent of giving. (Climate projects account for nearly all the remainder.)

“We’ve learned what the keys to success are in local communities,” said Jeff Edmondson, the Ballmer Group’s executive director of community mobilization (and the former CEO of StriveTogether). One cluster of Ballmer grants, for example, helps low-income school districts improve third-grade reading scores. In the past five years, in places such as Racine, Wis., and Spartanburg, S.C., such grants have led to 20-point or larger increases in the percentage of students reaching the “proficient” reading level.

Another type of Ballmer grant pays for summer enrichment programs in underresourced communities so students’ academic capabilities don’t wither in the months when they are out of school. Data shows Ballmer grantees have delivered sizable gains in Detroit and Los Angeles. A third cluster of grants has markedly reduced the risk that young adults aging out of foster care will end up in the criminal-justice system.

“We’re helping communities avoid pitfalls,” Edmondson said. By identifying repeatable practices that can lead to better grant outcomes, he added, “you could start to see communities that jump into a program, and within three or four years, they’re as far along as it used to take other communities in a decade. We’re actively learning, and we’re capturing a lot of lessons.”

The Ballmer Group’ doesn’t accept unsolicited grant proposals, and its preference for supporting programs and organizations with a proven record of success means that the tally of failed awards that “blew up” may be as low as two or three, Steve Ballmer said. “I don’t think it’s 10,” he noted. What’s more common, he explained, are situations where “you invest in something that just doesn’t wind up making much of a difference. We don’t feel too bad about those, but you could count those as misses.”

Obligation vs. Do-Goodism

Why give? Thanks to a huge run-up in Microsoft’s stock price over the past decade, Steve Ballmer’s fortune has swelled to an estimated $115 billion, making him the eighth-richest person in the United States, according to Forbes‘s calculations. The Ballmers’ annual giving — vast in dollar terms — still amounts to less than 1 percent of their total wealth, far below the minimum 5 percent they would be distributing if their wealth were in a foundation. And while the Ballmers have signaled that most of their fortune is destined for philanthropic use, they haven’t signed the Giving Pledge, popularized by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, that commits the ultrawealthy to give away at least half their money during their lifetimes.

At the moment, “we have more money than good ideas” for how to promote economic mobility, Steve Ballmer conceded in a January interview. “Most of the grantees are relatively small, and dumping more money on them than they can properly digest isn’t going to help.” Still, he’s mindful of the biblical language of obligation, which his wife often invokes. “As Connie says, for those to whom much has been given, much is expected,” he remarked.

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In a follow-up conversation five weeks later, the Ballmers opened up a lot more about the private reasons that keep nudging them to be more active philanthropically. “I definitely came from do-gooders,” Connie Ballmer said. Her story starts in the lumber-mill town of Oregon City, Ore., where her parents’ ethos was “help your church, help your school, and be good people,” she recalled. After marrying Steve Ballmer in 1990, she became the family’s original “kitchen table” philanthropist, championing the needs of foster children. “It was all about helping kids and families,” she recalled. “It still is.”

Steve Ballmer — famous in business for his booming voice and his data-driven analysis — owns up to a philanthropic tug that traces back to the Detroit area, where he grew up a half-century ago. During his Microsoft days, just after his mother was diagnosed with cancer, the CEO and his mom revisited the neighborhoods where she had grown up. To their dismay, “all the buildings had been vandalized and torn to the ground,” he recalled.

Determined to revive Beatrice Ballmer’s hometown, the Ballmer Group has steered more than $260 million to southeastern Michigan in the past decade — spread across 448 grants. One grant is paying for a new planetarium in Detroit. Another supports a jobs program for people coming home from prison. A third delivers an extensive summer-school program for the tri-county area’s neediest children. “I love the place,” Steve Ballmer explained. “It’s my place, and it just ought to be a healthy place for the people who are there.”

The Ballmers were among the early investors in Blue Meridian, a New York-based collective that looks to improve the life trajectories of young people and families in poverty. It has awarded more than 50 sizable grants, drawing on $4.5 billion of backing from 20 leading U.S. philanthropists, including MacKenzie Scott, the Gates Foundation, and the Sergey Brin Family Foundation.

Not only do the Ballmers invest, but they also lead. At Blue Meridian, Connie Ballmer chairs the organization’s main investors’ meeting and serves on multiple board committees. “Connie has been an amazing upside surprise,” said investor and philanthropist Stan Druckenmiller, one of Blue Meridian‘s earliest funders.. “She’s generated an atmosphere of collaboration, and she’s not afraid to challenge things. She also goes on all the site visits. She’s got not just the ear of the partners, but also the grantees. Somehow she has pulled it off.”

Data Focus, Human Focus

In 2014, when the Ballmers were starting to scope out their philanthropy prospects, Connie Ballmer told Forbes magazine: “I’m more of a save-the-world person than Steve is, so I need him to catch up with me. It’s all really new for him.” Today, both of them dispute that there’s any “head vs. heart” difference in their approaches to giving. “But we are very different people,” Connie Ballmer observed. “Steve’s the big thinker, and I needed that. I’m the practical sort of day-to-day person.”

Or, as her husband put it, “Connie has a great sense of the grantee. I’m better at strategy for sectors.” What’s more, Steve Ballmer insisted, he really is semi-retired now. “I budget my 9-to-5 time,” he confided, and last year I spent 440 hours on philanthropy. Because of travel, I spent more time on the Clippers,” the pro basketball team he owns.

Coalition for Responsible Community Development

The question of why Connie and Steve thrive as a philanthropic couple intrigues Jeff Edmondson, who has been part of the Ballmer Group since 2017. Such harmony isn’t always the case among the Seattle area’s other nationally prominent benefactors. (Think about the rift between MacKenzie Scott and Jeff Bezos. Or Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates.)

“We were visiting grantees in South Salt Lake City [Utah] a little while ago,” Edmondson recalled. “They had outcomes for kindergarten readiness on one wall — and Steve was just diving into the data. On another wall, they had a community-organization chart, with everyone’s face, and Connie was asking: ‘How do you keep these people working together?’”

“They were playing off each other beautifully,” Edmondson said. “Each one was in their element. That’s the sort of thing that connects them.”

$772 Million in Climate Grants

In April 2022, about 200 prominent philanthropists crowded into a Vancouver, Canada, auditorium for the annual gathering of the Audacious Project, an offshoot of the well-known TED conference. Nine speakers — leaders of ambitious nonprofits — cherished this as a make-or-break chance to audition their ideas before the sorts of people who could fund them in a heartbeat.

Seated together in the darkness were Connie and Sam Ballmer, a 2014 graduate of the University of Southern California. A few months earlier, Connie later recalled, Sam had made the decision that he really wanted to work on climate. “So we went specifically to introduce Sam to philanthropy.”

As promised, the conference included three intriguing, climate-related pitches on everything from permafrost protection to greater use of electric vehicles. Within a few months, the Ballmers decided to fund all three. In less than three years since, the Ballmers have awarded $772 million of climate-related giving, spread across 101 grants.

“This is one of the fastest-moving families we’ve ever worked with — and the most generous,” said Jennifer Kitt, president of Climate Lead. Her San Francisco advisory group helps top-tier philanthropists get up to speed on climate-related issues and the specific nonprofits addressing each issue. The Ballmers tapped into Climate Lead to build their own expertise; they also have awarded it a $15 million grant so the advisory group can brief other climate-curious philanthropists without charging a fee.

“Our hope is to inspire other funders to come into this underfunded area,” Sam Ballmer declared, in a call-to-action quote posted prominently on the Climate Lead website. “If we pool funds now, we can do a lot of the learning, failing, and succeeding that needs to happen, as soon as possible.”

Sam Ballmer declined to be interviewed, but he and perhaps his two younger brothers, Peter and Aaron, are likely to be on hand to carry the Ballmer Group forward if the philanthropy continues beyond its founders’ lifespans. “Sam in his late 20s realized that he wanted to devote his life” to climate philanthropy, Connie Ballmer said. People who have worked with Sam say he has a wide-ranging interest in both climate-mitigating technology and the geopolitical forces that can affect the pace of change. “He’s a mix of both his parents,” combining his father’s exuberant love of data with his mother’s knack for building coalitions, said Marcelo Mena, CEO of Global Methane Hub.

Last August, the Ballmer Group reorganized its climate work under a new banner, Rainier Climate, with Sam Ballmer as co-founder and Tom Steinbach, a longtime grant maker in the climate field, joining as president.

Advancing Economic Mobility

By its very nature, philanthropy centered on collective impact takes time. That’s especially true for anyone hoping to reshape the U.S. economic opportunity map so dramatically that everyone in the bottom 20 percent of income will have a greater chance of rising to better circumstances than they do today. Harvard’s Raj Chetty “measures this stuff,” Steve Ballmer said, “and he looks at changes that can take 40 years to unfold. It’s not going to happen in my lifetime.”

What has emerged from the Ballmers’ work since 2014, however, is sustained evidence of success in moving some factors, such as improving reading proficiency in low-income school districts. It’s likely — or at least possible — that such incremental gains could translate into greater economic mobility as today’s children become future decades’ workers.

In southeastern Michigan, where the Ballmers are funding more than 80 projects, some, such as a big summer enrichment program for grade schoolers, have produced rapid gains in students’ test scores. Other grants may simply be helping the Detroit area hold things together when “the infrastructure for our school system is so fragile,” said Darienne Hudson, CEO of United Way for Southeastern Michigan.

Amid these ambiguities, philanthropic backing for nonprofits focused on economic mobility such as Blue Meridian keeps growing. In addition, For example, within the past year, the Kauffman Foundation committed to an economic-mobility program in its hometown of Kansas City, Mo. The Ballmers, newbies of a decade ago, now are sought out for their expertise by emerging, next-generation philanthropists wanting to understand more about this intricate area.

“It’s tough; there will never be a point where we say we’re all done,” Connie Ballmer observed. “But are there incredibly encouraging, important milestones along the way?” she asked. “Yes, and that keeps everyone going.”

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.