As part of a previously announced $1 billion commitment, Melinda French Gates Wedneday announced $250 million in competitive grants for women’s mental and physical health, including reproductive health and access to abortion, both in the United States and internationally.
Since resigning from the Gates Foundation in May, French Gates has shone a public spotlight on women’s issues by making a $1 billion commitment to nonprofits working to improve women’s health and increase their political sway.
“To fully exercise power over their lives, women need to be mentally and physically healthy,” said Melinda French Gates in a statement. “And yet, women’s health is being neglected everywhere.”
The grants will range from $1 million to $5 million and are meant to support small organizations. Lever for Change, a nonprofit spun off from the MacArthur Foundation in 2019 that serves donors who want to make open calls, will manage the competition, called Action for Women’s Health. Pivotal Ventures, Melinda French Gates’s investment and philanthropy organization, aims to start making the grants to winners by the end of 2025.
This is the second time that French Gates will use the competitive process run by Lever for Change. In 2021, French Gates, MacKenzie Scott, and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies made a combined $40 million in grants in a competition called the Equality Can’t Wait Challenge, which was designed to expand women’s power and influence in the United States.
Returning to Lever for Change to manage a philanthropic contest indicates that, at least for now, French Gates doesn’t plan to build a large foundation with the $12.5 billion in charitable funds she obtained under a separation agreement with her former husband, Bill Gates.
By focusing on smaller organizations in the current challenge, French Gates will be able to identify nonprofits working in areas that may have been overlooked or that are addressing emerging threats — a form of “trendspotting,” said Haven Ley, Pivotal’s chief strategy officer.
“We don’t want to be the funder sitting in Seattle picking winners,” she said. “We want to be throwing out the net as broad as we possibly can.”
Using ‘Small and Nimble’ Teams
Nonprofits must register to apply for the grants by December 3. There are no guidelines for how much money will go to support reproductive health versus women’s mental or general health, and it has not been decided how many grants will go to U.S.-based nonprofits versus international groups.
While her previous Lever for Change challenge involved other funders, French Gates is going solo on the Action for Women’s Health Challenge to ensure the money gets to grantees as quickly as possible, Ley said.
Since the Equality Can’t Wait Challenge, Ley said Lever for Change has streamlined and clarified the contest process, allowing large donors to use an existing application template that can be modified for each contest.
For her next chapter, it is unlikely that French Gates will grow Pivotal into a huge institution like the Gates Foundation, which has more than 2,000 employees and 10 offices internationally, Ley said. Pivotal has about 100 employees. Lever for Change charges a fee of $1.5 million to $2.5 million for most of its competitions.
“Melinda believes that philanthropy can be effectively done through small and nimble means and teams,” she said.
Intermediary groups like Lever for Change won’t replace institutional giving, said Cecilia Conrad, the nonprofit’s executive director. Private foundations play important roles in being a “critical friend” to grantees by working with them long after the grant, she said, and by bringing larger groups of policymakers and nonprofit leaders together to work on pressing subjects.
Conrad said the current contest benefits from the fact that the group has worked with French Gates before. The competition, she said, can also attract other donors interested in not just the winners but also the finalists. For instance, the winners and finalists in the Equality Can’t Wait competition attracted a total of $11.6 million in addition to the $40 million given to the winners.
“Most foundations don’t have people who are focused on how to bring in other donors,” she said.
Applications for the competition will be reviewed by a panel of at least 50 experts in women’s health from academia, foundations, and nonprofits, said Conrad, who added that Lever for Change has been making a special effort to include people from outside the United States.
Moving the Needle
The $1 billion French Gates committed to women’s issues is enough to “move the needle” on total philanthropic gifts to support women, said Jacqueline Ackerman, interim director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
In 2021, giving to women’s and girls’ organizations totaled $10.2 billion, the last year for which data is available. That amounted to less than 2 percent of total charitable giving, a level it failed to surpass during the entire previous decade, according to the institute’s Women and Girls Index, which tabulated giving to more than 50,000 charitable organizations.
The Women and Girls Index has not yet registered an increase in giving, especially to groups focusing on reproductive health, following the 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade and subsequent limitations placed on abortion across many states, Ackerman said.
The need for more support for women’s health has been especially critical in the years since the onset of the pandemic, which affected women disproportionately as a result of gender-based violence during lockdowns and mental-health issues stemming from fatigue many women faced as primary caregivers, Ackerman said.
In 2021, reproductive health and family planning organizations attracted the most support, $1.8 billion, from philanthropy. Women’s health groups received $1.4 million, according to the index.
French Gates’s pledges will likely move those numbers up, Ackerman said.
“Her philanthropy as an individual will change things,” she said. “But it’s hard to say yet whether she is influencing other folks to give. To affect greater change, we need longer-term, sustained giving from folks at all levels of the income spectrum.”
