Melinda French Gates Charts a Course for a “New Chapter.” Here Are Some Takeaways
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It didn’t take her long. Just two weeks after the news broke that Melinda French Gates was leaving the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, she made another big announcement: She is committing $1 billion through 2026 “for people and organizations working on behalf of women and families around the world, including on reproductive rights in the United States.”
French Gates outlined what that’ll look like in a New York Times op-ed. In the piece, she expressed frustration at the glacial pace of progress when it comes to women’s issues — from violence against women and high rates of maternal mortality to the erosion of reproductive rights. Women and girls, she said, are too often overlooked or superseded by other issues considered more important.
“The second the global agenda gets crowded, women and girls fall off,” she wrote, zeroing in on philanthropy’s role. “Despite the pressing need, only about 2% of charitable giving in the United States goes to organizations focused on women and girls, and only about half a percentage point goes to organizations focused on women of color specifically. When we allow this cause to go so chronically underfunded, we all pay the cost.”
It’s exciting to see French Gates opening what she called “a new chapter” in her philanthropy — which will now take place entirely separately from the work of Bill Gates. With an additional $12.5 billion that came as part of her departure from the Gates Foundation, she has tremendous resources to work with.
Of course, she already set out on her own philanthropy path in recent years with Pivotal Ventures, making a $1 billion commitment in 2019 to fund an array of causes focused on women and girls, including efforts to promote women in technology and government, and paid family leave. Pivotal has also supported youth mental health, including a new research center at Harvard that is exploring the impact of technology, and increased access to healthcare for students. In addition, French Gates has worked to persuade other funders to give by providing match donations to women's causes. Last year, for example, Pivotal Ventures committed up to $20 million in matching funds to nonprofits seeking to move more women into positions of authority.
But with this recent announcement, French Gates makes a stronger statement than we’re used to hearing from many in the rarified world of philanthropy — including from the organization that will soon no longer be called the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
French Gates is clearly angry about the many threats women face around the globe — particularly in the U.S. — and the language in her op-ed was blunt. She wrote that while in the past she has supported contraceptive access in other parts of the world, “in the post-Dobbs era, I now feel compelled to support reproductive rights here at home. For too long, a lack of money has forced organizations fighting for women's rights into a defensive posture while the enemies of progress play offense. I want to help even the match.”
Flexible funding, global leaders, and an open call
French Gates’ $1 billion commitment will include three main sub-commitments, adding up to $690 million in total. (The remainder, it seems, is yet to be allocated.) Each one of them reflects trends and strategies that have currency in philanthropy today, and show up in the giving of some of French Gates’ peer megadonors.
The first is $200 million in grants to organizations working to support women’s rights, including reproductive rights. According to the announcement, this is “flexible funding” to be spent as the recipients see fit. The grantees include the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Collaborative for Gender + Reproductive Equity, the Ms. Foundation for Women and the National Women’s Law Center. The 19th, a nonprofit news organization that provides authoritative reporting on gender, politics and policy, is another grantee, demonstrating that French Gates understands the importance of getting the word out and educating the public. (This isn’t the first time French Gates has supported the publication: Pivotal Ventures was one of The 19th’s earliest supporters).
Other grantees include a number that are taking the lead in promoting progressive change in the key arenas of economic and political power. Some examples: the Roosevelt Institute and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth; both have actively critiqued the neoliberal status quo and seek to create a more equal economy and a democracy that works for a far larger swath of the population. Other grantees are major players in progressive organizing, including Community Change and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
Writing in 2022, IP’s founder David Callahan urged MacKenzie Scott to “dramatically ramp up giving to groups that are directly challenging the key drivers of economic inequality,” and “give more to help people build political power.” It’s interesting to see that French Gates appears willing to do just that with these commitments to organizations that, if relatively large and well-established, are nonetheless advancing critiques of a lopsided political-economic order — one that French Gates herself has criticized. “I recognize the absurdity of so much wealth being concentrated in the hands of one person, and I believe the only responsible thing to do with a fortune this size is give it away — as thoughtfully and impactfully as possible,” she wrote in her updated Giving Pledge letter.
As she moves into this new chapter, French Gates also appears unafraid to place funding power in the hands of leaders and experts who don’t work for her. Her second big sub-commitment is $240 million to support “partnerships with a diverse group of 12 global leaders.” Each of the leaders will receive $20 million that they can in turn give to organizations they believe are engaged in “urgent, impactful, and innovative work to improve women’s health and wellbeing in the U.S. and around the world.” The goal, French Gates said in her op-ed, is “to bring a wider range of perspectives into philanthropy.”
Recipients include psychologist Alfiee Breland-Noble, the founder of the AAKOMA Project; Crystal Echo Hawk, founder and CEO of IllumiNative; Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister of New Zealand; and Shabana Basij-Rasikh, cofounder of the School of Leadership Afghanistan and an advocate of girls’ education there. (See the complete list of global leaders).
As an overall approach, relying on outsiders to regrant philanthropic funding is having a bit of a moment right now. And in the world of top megadonors, French Gates’ specific strategy – giving individual leaders funding to regrant as they see fit – bears a resemblance to Jeff Bezos’ Courage and Civility Awards, established in 2021. In the inaugural round of awards, Bezos gave two people — Van Jones and José Andres — $100 million each to distribute to nonprofits of their choice. This past March, Bezos and fiance Lauren Sánchez announced this year’s winners, Eva Longoria and Admiral Bill McRaven; each received $50 million to distribute.
The third pillar of French Gates’ commitment is also immediately evocative of another leading billionaire philanthropist: an open call that will award $250 million to organizations “working to improve women’s mental and physical health worldwide.” Set to launch this fall, the open call is a strategy that MacKenzie Scott employed recently through her funding vehicle, Yield Giving. The results of Scott’s open call were announced in March — $640 million was distributed to 361 organizations. As Scott did for her open call, French Gates is working with Lever for Change, which has deep experience conducting philanthropic competitions — including Equality Can’t Wait, a $40 million competition focused on gender equality that French Gates and Scott co-funded several years ago.
What’s next?
Like MacKenzie Scott, French Gates is clearly charting an independent course for herself — independent not only from her former husband, but from many of the norms of traditional philanthropy itself. She appears, like Scott, to be adopting trust-based practices, including providing unrestricted funding to grantees and giving outside leaders and experts big infusions of cash to pursue their own visions of change. The resemblance makes some sense: French Gates reportedly advised MacKenzie Scott when her philanthropy was getting off the ground, and the two have collaborated on several funding projects over the years.
But there are also differences in the way the two billionaires operate. In an interview with IP, Robert Boyd, president and CEO of the School-Based Health Alliance, whose organization has received funding from both Yield Giving and Pivotal Ventures, contrasted Scott’s hands-off, one-and-done approach with French Gates’ more methodical funding style. Unlike Scott’s team, which generally drops in with a big gift from out of the blue, the Pivotal Ventures team tends to work closely with grantees, sometimes over a number of years, and stays involved throughout the process.
Of course, this and much more could change as French Gates steps into this new philanthropic chapter; in fact, there are many unknowns when it comes to the future of the massive fortune that Melinda French Gates now oversees. IP’s Philip Rojc posed some of those questions recently, including asking to what extent French Gates will engage in political funding alongside philanthropic commitments in her fight to defend women’s rights. We also wonder if French Gates will be open to suggestions IP’s Dawn Wolfe made for how MacKenzie Scott – or any other megadonor, for that matter – can improve philanthropy’s damaged status quo.
Whether it’s Melinda French Gates, MacKenzie Scott or any megadonor engaged in grantmaking practices we like, it’s also still worth asking whether these projects in big, progressive giving are, in themselves, actually enough to seed long-term structural change.
What is clear for now is that Melinda French Gates, like countless women in the U.S. and around the world, is appalled by the many ongoing attacks on women’s rights and what they mean for the future. As she observed in her op-ed, “As shocking as it is to contemplate, my one-year-old granddaughter may grow up with fewer rights than I had.”
