It isn’t often that developments in nonprofit governance become front-page news, but this week’s long-awaited announcement of the composition of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s expanded board might be the exception. (Full disclosure: I am a grantee.)
For more than a decade, the board was entirely a family affair (Bill and Melinda and Bill’s father, William Sr.), plus Warren Buffett. On Wednesday, the foundation announced the appointment of four new members, including its chief executive, Mark Suzman. He will be joined by Strive Masiyiwa, a Zimbabwean telecom billionaire; Baroness Nemat (Minouche) Shafik, director of the London School of Economics; and Tom Tierney, co-founder of the Bridgespan philanthropic consulting organization.
To understand why the news was worth paying attention to, you need to go back to when the public got wind that it was in the works.
On one hand, the July 2021 announcement of the foundation’s commitment to expand the board could be understood as a response to internal dynamics: to the death of Bill Gates Sr. in December 2020 and the divorce of Bill and Melinda French Gates in May 2021, followed by Buffett’s decision to step down last July. Commentators had long pointed to the inadequacies of the foundation’s insular governance structure, but the prospect of a board composed entirely of a recently divorced couple likely provided plenty of inducements to Bill and Melinda to appoint additional members.
But the pressure toward board expansion was not merely internal; it was external as well. The spring and summer of last year, when these initial governance decisions were made, also marked the high tide of public attacks on the foundation, and on Bill Gates in particular.
The conspiracy theories that clustered around Gates and his support for a Covid vaccine — that, for instance, his efforts were really a cover for a plot to implant microchips in the vaccinated — attracted much of the attention. But the same moment also saw some of the highest-profile substantive attacks on the Gates Foundation in its two-decade history, as well as on Bill Gates’s status as a venerated public figure.
Even as he was celebrated in the early days of the pandemic for his foundation’s support for research that helped lead to a Covid vaccine, Gates became the face of the failure of a “charitable model,” relying on voluntary contributions from Western governments, corporations, and philanthropies, to ensure a vaccine’s equitable distribution. Gates’s opposition to waiving intellectual property rights held by pharmaceutical companies that granted them monopolies on the manufacture of those vaccines came under withering attack. An April 2021 New Republic article, titled “How Bill Gates Impeded Global Access to Covid Vaccines,” did not hold back; it was accompanied by a demonic rendering of Gates with devil’s horns.
The 2021 announcement that the board would be expanded sometime in January of the next year must be understood in this context: It raised questions about how the Gates Foundation would respond to mounting public critique. We had received a hint of an answer that May when Suzman announced the foundation’s support for a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights surrounding Covid vaccines, a modest course correction.
Constructive Feedback
Now we’ve received a further elaboration in the naming of the new trustees. In the 2022 foundation letter that accompanied the announcement, Suzman called the board expansion an “important milestone” in the foundation’s efforts to “hold ourselves accountable,” which highlighted the ways in which the foundation was “actively seeking out and being open to constructive criticism from diverse voices.”
The modifier “constructive” is key. It doesn’t just indicate the sidelining of the conspiratorialists. It’s a way to both signal the foundation’s commitment to change and place some boundaries around that commitment. It represents the efforts of the world’s most important, controversial foundation to arrive at an accommodation with a climate of public opinion defined as much by suspicion as by commendation.
“In a context where partners and grantees are rarely incentivized to give critical feedback, it is all too easy for a mission-driven foundation like ours to inadvertently create a self-reinforcing echo chamber that rationalizes our failures and oversells our successes,” Suzman writes in the annual letter. “That in turn contributes to suspicion about the role of philanthropy and whether it really does make a difference.”
Recognizing Mistakes
The importance of openness to “critical feedback” in securing the legitimacy of the Gates Foundation against “unconstructive” criticism emerges as a prominent theme in the letter.
Parts of it are strikingly and candidly critical of the foundation, echoing some of the foundation’s earlier mea culpas acknowledging mistakes made in its U.S. education programs.
“We often let our enthusiasm about a potential breakthrough innovation blind us to the reality of the complex set of relationships needed to achieve and sustain implementation and impact, including the vital role of government and community engagement at every level,” writes Suzman.
But the annual letter is also an effort at vindication, asserting the foundation’s worth by demonstrating its ability to recognize its mistakes and to evolve — to a point. It makes clear that the foundation will not eschew its grant-making priorities or its defining data-driven, technocratic philanthropic approach, or stop working with some of the most powerful global institutions and that it continues to take pride in its past accomplishments. It seeks to set limits to the definition of constructive criticism.
A Bigger Target
How will this play with those who are leading the surging criticism of the foundation? The expanded board will almost certainly do little to moderate their attacks; if anything, it will just give them a slightly larger target.
For one, as philanthropy scholar Beth Breeze has recently argued, for most of these critics, the Gates Foundation (and Bill Gates himself) embodies all the evils of megaphilanthropy, which in turn represents all the evils of exploitative capitalism. Many of these critics are not particularly interested in the actual work the foundation does or in attempts to improve its practices. Changes to the governance structure of an institution they consider to be inherently illegitimate will not impress them much.
Some of these critics, however, do focus on the work of the foundation, following it closely, calling out its various technocratic excesses, decrying the ways they believe it exacerbates inequities and power imbalances. For them, the foundation is not an abstract representation of the ills of capitalism but a real-world amplifier of them.
These critics also will unlikely be impressed by the selection of new board members; an expanded board might technically represent some dilution of the Gateses’ power, but the backgrounds of the new members do not portend a full-scale assault on that power or how it has been wielded in the past (plus, the Gateses, as co-chairs, will maintain effective veto power over board actions).
After all, a telecom billionaire (Masiyiwa), a billionaire whisperer (Tierney), and a former World Bank and IMF executive who is now president of the LSE (Shafik) hardly make up the crew you’d assemble A-Team style if you wanted to mount an overthrow of the philanthropic status quo.
In fact, Masiyiwa, Shafik, and Tierney are all, in their own way, establishment figures tied to some of the most powerful individuals, institutions, and interests in the world. And there is, as of yet, no figure on the Gates board that represents the grassroots activism that poses the most significant challenge to the foundation’s moral standing (the foundation announced that the board could be as large as nine members, so there’s room for additional appointments). In this sense, the new board members embody the narrowing of the bounds of what the foundation considers constructive criticism.
But that boundary setting should not obscure the broader significance of the board expansion: It confirms that the world’s leading philanthropic institution recognizes the need to respond to public scrutiny and criticism. The foundation, in announcing the new board members, has underscored the direction some of those responses could take, and if carried far enough, they could entail significant shifts of power: “deepening engagement with developing country agencies and governments, establishing offices and growing its staff outside of the United States, and expanding grants to institutions closer to affected communities.”
Shifts in Power
Although the public, generally speaking, has little sense of who serves on most foundation boards (quick: name a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation … besides Strive Masiyiwa), the high-profile nature of these appointments means that all three of the new external board members have staked their reputations to progress on those shifts.
They each bring to the position experiences and commitments that could help push the foundation along those lines.
Tierney has served as a leading adviser to MacKenzie Scott, who has developed an approach to her giving, through unrestricted, multiyear grants, including many directed to smaller, grassroots-oriented organizations, which is in many respects a standing rebuke to the Gates Foundation’s.
In his position as the African Union’s special envoy on Covid-19, Masiyiwa has labeled the global system of vaccine distribution, through Covax and other Gates Foundation-funded global institutions, as “deliberate global architectures of unfairness,” which resulted in deep inequities and left many African nations with woefully inadequate supplies. Given these failures, Masiyiwa has insisted on the necessity of Africa building up its own infrastructure of vaccine manufacture, defying the “charity model.”
Shafik has also written of the need for a more generous “social contract” in which government takes a leading role as provider of a safety net, with philanthropy serving in a subordinate, complementary role.
Bill and Melinda Gates have worked with all three of the new external board members in the past and are clearly comfortable with the “strong, independent voices” they bring to the task of governance. But this doesn’t mean that the bounds of how far the foundation is willing to go in response to critiques is absolutely settled. The appointment of new board members introduces an element of volatility and unpredictability into a foundation that has been famous for its control.
Nor does it mean that the bounds of constructive criticism are absolutely set. After all, although philanthropists (and any powerful interest) try to define those boundaries, they do not have complete control of them. They are also determined by presiding norms about the nature of philanthropy, its value and legitimacy, and its relationship to democracy, which critics can have a significant hand in shaping. And those norms are as fluid now as they have ever been. Which is all to say: The role of foundation governance might have gotten some rare public attention this last week, but it’s worth sustaining that attention as the Gates Foundation board moves ahead with its work.
