PNW Global Donors Conference

March 20, 2010

Prepared remarks by William H. Gates Sr, Co-chair

Thank you, Ian, for your kind introduction. And thank you all for that warm welcome. You’re especially gracious, because you know I’m the last thing keeping you from seeing how you did today on your March Madness brackets.

A couple of years ago, a good friend of mine came to me because she wanted to get involved in global philanthropy. Given my current line of work, she thought I could help.

We talked through some of the most urgent challenges facing poor people in poor countries, and two in particular grabbed her attention: clean water and sanitation. Now, those two issues constitute a major fraction of her life’s interest.

She gives a significant amount of money to international water and sanitation projects, she travels to see them in action, she meets with key players in the field, and she takes great joy in her newfound connection to her fellow human beings half a world away.

The story I just told is heartwarming, and it provides exactly the sentiment and the precedent for our purpose here. Our objective is systematically to increase philanthropists’ engagement with global problems.

And that’s where you come in. This inaugural conference is happening because you want to join a room full of donors to have a conversation about global giving. You are ready to get serious about learning to be a global donor.

That’s inspiring to me.

It’s also inspiring that you’re paying tribute to the strong connection between the Pacific Northwest and the spirit of philanthropy.

I was born in Bremerton, Washington. Bill’s mother and I raised him and his sisters in Seattle, in the house I still live in. Melinda has lived here her entire adult life. We have always believed that everything the Gates Foundation does starts with the values we learned in this community. And your attendance here makes it clear that you feel the same way about your philanthropy.

Having just explained some of the reasons I am so honored to accept your invitation to speak here today, I must confess that I might not be the right person to give this speech.

I worry that the sheer size of our foundation gives the wrong impression to aspiring global donors. The Gates Foundation is very big, and it is a fact that we can do some things that many other donors cannot. But the worst thing you could conclude from our experience is that the bar to entry in this field is higher than it really is.

The truth is, the large grants, the ones you’re likely to hear about, are the exception, not the rule. Last month, my son and daughter-in-law attended the World Economic Forum, in Davos, where they announced “the decade of vaccines.” They pledged $10 billion to childhood vaccines in poor countries. We’re proud of that work. But we are also proud of the 649 grants of less than $1 million that we have in the areas of global development and health.

The important point is that there is an incredibly wide variety of activities you can undertake as a global donor. You can fund an organization that’s already doing excellent work on the ground. You can start your own project from scratch. You can select the very best intermediary to dispose of your money in a way that’s consistent with your interests. You can consult one of the many excellent organizations that advise folks like you.

In short, there is no one right way to do this. You have to find a way to do philanthropy that captures your particular interests or that makes use of your particular experience.

I would like to tell you my story of the Gates Foundation. It begins in the late-1990s, before the foundation formally existed, when we were in a position very similar to the one you’re in right now.

Like many of you, Bill and Melinda received lots of mail asking them to support worthy causes. Back then, they were focused on their work at Microsoft, and they didn’t have time to give those requests the attention they deserved. Since I was winding down my law practice, I offered to help. I set up shop in the office I kept in the basement of my house, right next to where Bill’s bedroom had been when he was growing up.

Around the same time, Bill and Melinda came across a newspaper article that said 500,000 children were dying every year from something called rotavirus. Rotavirus is one of the primary causes of diarrhea. What shocked them was not just the appalling number of deaths, but the fact that they had never even heard of rotavirus. How, they wondered, could something be killing 500,000 children year in and year out, and get so little attention?

What moved them, much like what you are seeing here, is the egregious disparity between health care in the poor world and health care in the developed world.

As part of my new job helping them with their philanthropic activities, I discussed Bill and Melinda’s new interest in global health with my friend Suzanne Cluett. She lived a few doors down—we affectionately called her “the neighbor lady”—and I knew she worked at a local organization called PATH that was involved in global health issues.

Suzanne introduced me to the founder of PATH, a man named Gordon Perkin, who had more than 30 years of experience in global health. Not too long after that first meeting, Gordon and Suzanne were engaged to start teaching me—and Bill and Melinda—about the field.

I also sent out a bunch of faxes—that’ll tell you how long ago this was—to some leading organizations around the country, letting them know that we were interested in learning about what they did. Gradually, word got around that we were looking for good ideas, and proposals started coming in. Every so often, I’d stack them up, put them in a box, and take them over to Bill and Melinda’s house for their review. The nuances of cutting-edge statistics like “DALY” -- Disability Adjusted Life Years -- became our standard Sunday afternoon conversation.

Pretty soon, we recruited another expert, Bill Foege, to advise us. Bill Foege developed the ingenious surveillance strategy that led to the eradication of smallpox in 1977. After that, he ran the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. He had just returned home to Seattle, and he agreed to assist with our education. He gave us our first reading list, which he said would be enough to get us started. It had 81 books on it!

One of our tasks was to learn the content of global health. What diseases did the most damage? Why? What was hard about stopping them? Our other task was developing our strategy for intervening. What interests and skills did we have? How could we use them to have the greatest possible impact on the greatest number of lives?

Since Bill and Melinda had gotten into this work partly in response to the revelation that they had never heard of rotavirus, they decided to focus on issues that had been neglected. Morally, it seemed like the right approach. And it also made sense strategically. Progress on many of these issues had stalled due to chronic under-investment, so infusions of grant money had the potential to yield results quickly.

Bill and Melinda also believed in the power of innovation to change people’s lives. That had been their experience in the software industry, and they were confident it could be their experience in philanthropy as well. They decided to emphasize investments bringing innovation to bear on the field of global health—and on the lives of people who hadn’t gotten their fair share of the return on the world’s investment in innovation. New vaccines are a big part of the innovations I am referring to.

Eventually, Bill and Melinda hired Patty Stonesifer to run the foundation and brought Gordon and Bill Foege in to help lead the global health work. Gordon was a genius for details. Bill was a big thinker. We used to joke that Gordon worked 30 feet underground, and Bill worked 30,000 feet in the air. Our challenge was to tether the two of them together so we could actually make some grants!

Another step was that Suzanne and I started to travel. As much as possible, we wanted to see what life was really like in the places where we were going to make our investments. We went to India, to Nepal, to several countries in Africa. When we’d come home, I’d go over to Bill and Melinda’s house and tell them what we’d seen. During those discussions, we’d create an agenda for what to learn next.

The reason I am recounting this learning process at some length is this: there is nothing we did over the course of those exciting early years that every single one of you cannot also do, if you so choose.

We read. Trust me, you can never run out of reading.

We talked to experts. We have yet to discover the limit of their generosity.

We traveled. That’s the really fun part—and the most touching part.

Finally, we thought a lot about how our expertise could dovetail with the most pressing needs in global health.

Once again we continued to be appalled at the egregious disparity in health care for the poor world and that for the rich world.

The barriers to progress differ from country to country and issue to issue, which is why this can’t be a one-size-fits-all enterprise. Sometimes change requires just a little bit of venture capital. Other times, the primary obstacle is a sheer lack of knowledge. Whatever the case, your money, your ideas, and your activism can play a critical role—you will want to be thoughtful about how to deploy them.

Sometimes people ask me why I am so optimistic about the future. I tell them I am optimistic because knowledge is not a finite resource, and neither is compassion.

I think often about a friend of mine named Margrit Elliot.  Margrit is a nurse from La Conner, Washington. Twice a year, she organizes a team with doctors to travel to Bhutan, where they train local doctors, treat burn victims, and perform operations to repair cleft palates.  The team has included members from as far away as Italy and Holland.

Her group is called the Global Burn Care and Reconstructive Institute, and it exists not because Margrit had access to money or connections or proprietary secrets. It exists because she has some medical knowledge, bottomless compassion, and vast stores of energy. 

With limited funds, Margrit has fundamentally changed burn care in Bhutan, helped catalyze the development of a new hospital with a burn care ward, and met with the King!

But you don’t have to spend time with Bhutanese royalty to call yourself a global donor. There are plenty of people who write a check every year to World Vision, to take a local example, and thereby become global donors. There are broad-based groups like CARE. There are regionally focused organizations like TrustAfrica and Give2Asia. There are issue-specific intermediaries like the Global Fund for Women, which Kavita Ramdas told you about so eloquently last night. And there are an increasing number of donor-advised funds like the Tides Foundation and Internet-based philanthropies like GlobalGiving.

So do your research. Work with some of the great organizations that have sponsored this conference to understand the landscape of global giving. Pick the issue that really moves you.

Then consider more research. Go see your issue on the ground. Ask for help from experts. Once you start, I am positive you’ll find it to be one of the most rewarding experiences of your life.