As the Gates Foundation today announced that the 25-year-old global philanthropy will sunset in another two decades, co-founder Melinda French Gates weighed in on the influential organization’s legacy.
“I like to think that right now, the foundation’s work is contributing to a child getting a vaccine or a woman opening her first bank account — and that decades from now, their families and communities are going to continue to look different,” she told the Associated Press, “because of what that child and that woman unlocked for the people around them.”
French Gates resigned as co-chair of the foundation in June, roughly three years after announcing her divorce from Bill Gates. The organization has granted more than $100 billion to global health, women’s initiatives, agriculture, education and other causes.
“It’s easy for people to forget — or maybe they didn’t ever know — how hopeless the situation seemed around the year 2000, when malaria, tuberculosis and HIV were totally out of control,” she told the AP. “Since then, efforts funded, in large part, by development aid have saved more than 65 million lives from those diseases alone.”
Also today, Bill Gates shared that he will give 99% of his fortune — roughly $200 billion — to the philanthropy to disperse by 2045, when it will cease operations. The organization currently has a $77 billion endowment.
French Gates is now focused on Pivotal Ventures, a company that she founded in 2015, and recently published her second book, “The Next Day.” Pivotal works to support nonprofits, leaders, policies and startups striving to promote social progress.
“I’m speaking my truth in society fully. I’m using every tool in my toolbox — investments, advocacy, philanthropic dollars — in ways that I think will advance society and make it better for all of us as families, and so that feels good,” French Gates recently told GeekWire. “It’s refreshing.”
French Gates’ own net worth is roughly $30 billion. Along with Gates and Warren Buffett, the trio created the Giving Pledge in 2010 in which they agreed to donate the bulk of their fortunes before their deaths, and encouraged others to do the same.
As the leader of Pivotal, French Gates has autonomy in deciding how to approach philanthropy — a freedom she lacked at the foundation.
“As a co-founder of the Gates Foundation, I couldn’t be more proud of what the Gates Foundation does, continues to do, the way it does its work,” she told GeekWire. “But for me, for this phase of life, I am doing it a bit differently. I’m not going to build a large organization. I am going to trust more of the partners on the ground.”
French Gates acknowledged that the foundation did incorporate some of those ideas, “but I just believe that there are many ways you can do philanthropy, like I’m doing far more investing also than I thought I would do in these spaces. And then I take those ideas back to the Giving Pledge, and I also look to see what other philanthropists are doing.”
Foundation CEO Mark Suzman said on Thursday that French Gates and Buffett had known of the plans to sunset the organization in 2045 and were “supportive and excited.” Buffett, who this month announced he will retire as CEO of Berskshire Hathaway, has given the foundation $43.3 billion over the years and was a trustee until 2021.
Suzman said he treasured “the example that they have set over the past quarter century of really contributing to everything that we have been able to achieve, which could not have been done without the two of them.”
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