Bill Gates: The Most Gratifying Job on Earth

Anyone who wants to seriously engage in giving faces two important questions: where can you make the biggest impact, and how do you structure your giving so it’s effective.

I grew up in a family where giving back to society—whether through volunteer time or financial resources—was just part of what you did. At the dinner table, both of my parents talked frequently about their volunteer work with non-profits and their advocacy work for children and the less fortunate in our community.

Community service was also an important part of Melinda’s upbringing; so even when we were still just engaged to be married, we talked about our responsibility to give back the great majority of our wealth—even though at that point we didn’t know exactly how or when we’d do it.

Anyone who wants to seriously engage in giving faces two important questions: where can you make the biggest impact, and how do you structure your giving so it’s effective.

Our viewpoint evolved over time, but there was a real turning point when we read an article about rotavirus, a disease that was pretty much a non-event in the United States, but which still killed a half-million children a year in the developing world. It seemed impossible to us that it was receiving so little worldwide attention. And so we dug in, learnt a lot more about the problem, and eventually began a serious effort to reduce childhood mortality worldwide.

Today, the framework that guides our giving is based on the simple premise that everyone deserves the chance to live a healthy, productive life. Given the resources at our disposal, we believed we could make the biggest difference by concentrating in three areas: global health, global development, and in the US, education.

Half our foundation’s funds are spent addressing global health problems, with a focus on malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, diarrheal and respiratory diseases.

Twenty-five per cent of the foundation’s funds assist the poorest people in the world in ways other than healthcare through development projects. And the other 25% is devoted to improving public education in the US, where, in spite of our nation’s great wealth, our education system continues to fail too many of our children.

A few basic principles guide the way in which we give. Our approach emphasizes partnerships, and looks to foster innovation, often pursuing new technologies or delivery schemes.

We try to apply new thinking and approaches to solving big problems, which sometimes means taking calculated risks on promising ideas. We set goals and are quite serious about measuring our results. Often, this means attempting to be a catalyst by investing in areas where governments can’t or won’t invest, or where there is a vacuum or failure in the marketplace.

Diseases that affect the poor are a great case in point. Rich-world diseases attract research investments that dwarf the money going to problems like rotavirus. (Think of how much more money goes to curing male pattern baldness than malaria!) As a foundation, we have the chance to help address that inequality.

The question of risk is something we think about a lot. Warren Buffett, our good friend and the third trustee of our foundation, reminds us that failure will be part of any bold approach. “You can have a perfect batting average by not doing anything too important. Or you’ll bat something less than that if you take on the really tough problems.”

We’re willing to accept failure at times in the name of trying new things to solve old and difficult problems.

At the end of the day, what draws people to philanthropy is something universal—the connection to other human beings and the desire to make a difference. This is what tugs at people and that makes them want to get involved, to imagine how they can help create a better world.

For me, philanthropy is a responsibility, a passion, and an honor. And so far as I can tell—after being a parent—it’s the most gratifying job on earth.

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Warren Buffett's Stock Donations to Gates Foundation Top $10 Billion

Warren Buffett has made his scheduled annual donation of Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

After six years, Buffett has donated a total of 132.4 million Berkshire Class B shares, worth $10.3 billion at today's closing price of $77.77 .. or $9.5 billion if you use the stock price on the date of each donation.

The Foundation reports it still holds just under 101 million shares, now worth more than $7.8 billion.

This year's installment is just over 19 million shares of Baby Berkshires. worth $1,504,423,593 at the close.

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Yu Pengnian: Chinese philanthropist donates it all

Yu Pengnian’s journey from poor street hawker to Hong Kong real-estate magnate was already a remarkable one. Then the 88-year-old did something even rarer that shocked many in increasingly materialistic China: He gave it all away.

Saying he hoped to set an example for other wealthy Chinese, Mr. Yu called a press conference in April to announce he was donating his last 3.2 billion yuan (about $500-million) to a foundation he established five years earlier to aid his pet causes – student scholarships, reconstruction after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and paying for operations for those like him who suffer from cataracts.

“This will be my last donation,” he announced. “I have nothing more to give away.”

With that endowment, Mr. Yu became the first Chinese national to give more than $1-billion to charity, now having contributed almost $1.3-billion in cash and real estate to the Yu Pengnian Foundation.

In a stunned China, the question came quickly: Wouldn’t his children be angry that he had given their inheritance away? “They didn’t oppose this idea, at least not in public,” the eccentric Mr. Yu says, laughing, when asked the question again during an interview at his foundation’s office atop the 57-storey Penglin Hotel in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.

“If my children are competent, they don’t need my money,” Mr. Yu explained. “If they’re not, leaving them a lot of money is only doing them harm.”

To make sure that didn’t happen, he appointed HSBC as his foundation’s trustee and stipulated that none of its holdings could be inherited, sold or invested.

In a society where capitalism is just 30 years old, and charitable giving an even younger concept, Mr. Yu says one of his primary goals in making a show out of giving his money away was to set an example to other rich Chinese. “Everybody has a different view of money. Some do good things with it, some rich people do nothing with it. …My goal is to be a leader, a pioneer who encourages rich people, inside and outside of China, to do something charitable.”

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Chris Hohn profile: Britain's biggest charity donor

Before his latest £466m donation, he had already given away more than £230 million, dwarfing his estimated fortune of £110m.

Mr Hohn, 41, is a controversial figure in the business world because of his aggresive money-making tactics, but his private life remains largely secret and he very rarely gives interviews or talks about his philanthropy.

The father of four is the son a of a white Jamaican car mechanic who emigrated to Britain in 1960 and moved to Sussex after marrying a secretary called Winifred.

Mr Hohn went to Southampton University before attending Harvard Business School, in Massachusetts, USA, where he studied the Master of Business Administration course.

He was an excellent student and became a Baker Scholar – an award given to the best five per cent of the graduates.

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Melinda Gates goes public

Years before Melinda French met and married Bill Gates, she had a love affair - with an Apple computer. ¶ She was growing up in Dallas in a hard-working middle-class family. Ray French, Melinda's dad, stretched their budget to pay for all four children to go to college. An engineer, he started a family business on the side, operating rental properties. "That meant scrubbing floors and cleaning ovens and mowing the lawns," Melinda recalls. The whole family pitched in every weekend. When Ray brought home an Apple III computer one day when she was 16, she was captivated. "We would help him run the business and keep the books," she says. "We saw money coming in and money going out."

Of all the tricks that life can play, it's hard to imagine any stranger than what befell Melinda French. Today she is living in a gargantuan high-tech mansion on the shores of Lake Washington, married to the richest man in America - and giving billions of dollars away. When she married Bill Gates 14 years ago, she bought into a complex bargain. On the one hand, she became half of what has turned out to be the world's premier philanthropic partnership. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has assets of $37.6 billion, making it the world's largest. In that total is $3.4 billion that Warren Buffett has already given, and still to come are nine million Berkshire Hathaway B shares, currently worth $41 billion, that he has pledged to contribute in coming years. Assuming that Berkshire (BRKA, Fortune 500) shares continue to rise and that the Gateses continue to bestow their own wealth on their foundation, Melinda and Bill will very likely give away more than $100 billion in their lifetimes. Already the foundation has disbursed $14.4 billion - more than the Rockefeller Foundation has distributed since its creation in 1913 (even adjusted for inflation).

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Chris Hohn: TCI chief donates £230m to his charity

Chris Hohn gave £230m ($460m) to his charitable foundation last year, making the activist hedge fund manager one of Britain’s most generous philanthropists, with even more expected to be given this year.

Mr Hohn, founder of The Children’s Investment Fund, told investors in New York two weeks ago that the foundation – run by his wife Jamie Cooper-Hohn – had passed $1bn, less than five years after it was set up.

The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation is understood to be worth about $1.4bn. CIFF finances projects for children in the developing world, with a focus on HIV.

The size of the donations is a result of the phenomenal returns Mr Hohn has generated for investors in TCI, which has more than $10bn under management. Last year he made more than 40 per cent, while in 2005 TCI returned more than 50
per cent.

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Source: Thanks, Whitney Tilson

Warren Buffett: Buffett Says All of His Berkshire Shares Will Go to Charity

June 25 (Bloomberg) -- Warren Buffett, chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., talks with Bloomberg's Brian Sullivan in Omaha, Nebraska, about philanthropy, the EBay Inc. auction for lunch with the Oracle of Omaha and plans to donate all of his Berkshire shares to charity. All proceeds of the auction benefit the Glide Foundation in San Francisco. Last year Buffett's lunch auction raised more than $600,000.

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BID FOR THE POWER LUNCH OF A LIFETIME WITH WARREN BUFFETT

This year's auction opens Sunday, June 24th at 7:00 p.m. PDT and closes Friday, June 29 at 7:00 p.m. PDT.

Each year, Mr. Buffett generously offers one "power lunch" - and only one - as a charity item, and for the last eight years, the beneficiary has been the Glide Foundation, of which Buffett has remarked "is a remarkable organization that gives help and hope to those society has forgotten."

Located in the Tenderloin, one of San Francisco's harshest urban environments, Glide Foundation is an oasis that has served the poor and disenfranchised for over 40 years. From serving one million meals a year, to operating a medical clinic, to youth job training, to offering weekly spiritual celebrations at Glide Church, and more - Glide is many things to many people.

For information about the Buffett Lunch, call 415.674.6072 or email
tthorpe@glide.org. For information about Glide visit http://www.glide.org/.

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UK Philanthropy: 2007 Sunday Times

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