Melinda Gates Philanthropy Quotes

You can’t dedicate your life to the principle that all lives have equal value if you think you are better than others.

We’ve covered the time and work and responsibility a jackpot often entails, the isolation, trust and security issues, and the reluctance of the superwealthy to engage with outsiders. Well, all of the above was shaping up to be a hurdle for Bob Kenny, who was eager to learn about the inner lives of America’s wealthiest citizens. We met Kenny before. He’s a developmental psychologist and cofounder of North Bridge Advisory Group, which helps superwealthy parents and their children “manage the unique opportunities, dilemmas, and challenges that can accompany family money.” Back in 2007, though, he was the newly minted associate director of Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy. The center’s data guru, John Havens, had projected that the baby boomers and their successors would leave behind about $59 trillion in private wealth between 2007 and 2061. Some portion of that would go to charity, and so getting a handle on the mindset of America’s elite was of big interest to the philanthropic world. With a $250,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Kenny and Havens set out to survey ultra-high-net-worth families. “If you’ve got kids and you got more money then you’re going to spend in your lifetime, you’ve got a dilemma,” Kenny explains. “And if you don’t think about it and plan it out a little bit, you’re going to cause a problem.… You gonna give it to them now, give it to them later, not going to give it to them at all? How do you talk about it? How do you think about it?

By late 2010, forty-five states had adopted the Common Core, before the standards were even fully developed, with full implementation unfolding over subsequent years. This work was backed by a range of other foundations, such as Hewlett and Broad. But the lion’s share of the credit for the initiative’s adoption goes to Gates—a stunning victory for the foundation that, in a way, is hard to get one’s mind around. In effect, Bill and Melinda Gates, two private individuals, have helped determine what tens of millions of American children in public schools will learn every year—and also how they will learn, with changes in the teaching of math and other subjects.

Bill and Melinda Gates have said they will give away all the money in their foundation within twenty years of when the last one dies, at which point the foundation will close its doors. Right now, that sum—along with their private investments—amounts to around $120 billion. But if you add in the money Buffett has pledged to the Gates Foundation, we’re talking about an even higher figure—over $150 billion. At some point, moving money at this scale will likely require the world’s biggest foundation to get even larger, increasing an annual grantmaking level that already far exceeds that of any other funder by a large margin.