Happy 60th Birthday Melinda French Gates!

For as long as I can remember, I have collected quotes. I have a “fav quotes” document saved on my computer that is almost 100 pages long, which I access frequently, especially when writing or preparing for talks. And I typically don’t just capture the quote. I also record where I heard or read it, the date, and why I chose to include it among my “favs”. Over the years, it has become almost like a diary of my activities, interests, and dreams, and in 2019, I added a quote from Melinda French Gates: "If you don’t set your own agenda, someone else will." They were words of wisdom given to her by her mom when she was a little girl, and she has been very open about how much these words have guided her ever since.?

So how did these words show up for me in 2024? On May 28th, Ms. French Gates wrote similar words as the lead line in a bold and powerful Op Ed published in The New York Times following the May 13th announcement that she would be stepping out of her leadership role at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, set to be renamed the Gates Foundation, and taking $12.5 billion with her. The philanthropic sector, and gals like me, had been waiting to hear what was next for Ms. French Gates, and on that day, we got our answer. She would be starting a new chapter in her philanthropy, with a focus on “women and families around the world, including on reproductive rights in the United States.” Of course, my first thought was HECK YES! My second thought was that I love the tone of this piece. In one word? Powerful. Since that date, we have been seeing a lot more of her, including a new series on YouTube called The Moments That Make Us, which is a series of interviews with amazing women including Michelle Obama, Billie Jean King, Ava DuVernay, just to name a few. To pull another quote from my favs list, this time by Alicia Keys, “This girl is on fire!” For all these reasons, and in honor of her upcoming 60th birthday, I am dedicating the August SheMoney Newsletter to Melinda French Gates.?

I should note that throughout this piece, I am going to respectfully take the liberty of calling Ms. French Gates, Melinda, as she invited me to do so when we met in 2018. That year, Melinda and the Gates Foundation hosted the Women Moving Millions (WMM) Member Day: The Power of Courage in Seattle ahead of our annual summit. Prior to me introducing her onstage for an interview, I was taken to the green room for us to meet. Usually, I am not intimidated when meeting someone prominent, but I was with her. In the world of gender-lens philanthropy, Melinda was, and still is, the equivalent of Taylor Swift. At least in my books. By that I mean she is authentic, powerful, well-known, has a huge platform, vast financial resources, and I am a big fan. However, any feelings of unease I may have had quickly dissipated with her warm greeting and words of gratitude for WMM’s work to accelerate funding for women and girls. What I felt in that meeting, pretty much immediately, was a sisterhood. A sisterhood built around a shared understanding of the urgency of the work, and a shared commitment to mobilizing resources and movement building.?

It was about a year after meeting Melinda that I came across the agenda quote, and it was at a pivotal time in my life. I had just transitioned out of my leadership role at Women Moving Millions, an organization I co-founded, and I was taking a gap year of sorts to figure out what I wanted to do next. At that point, I had spent nearly 15 years focussing on women’s advancement from a philanthropic perspective, primarily anchored in Women Moving Millions, and while I knew I wanted to broaden the financial aperture of my work, I had not figured out what that meant.?For the first time in a long time, I did not have a clear agenda.

I had also left WMM because I felt burnt out. For almost 10 years I lived and breathed WMM, being their lead fundraiser and spokesperson for “Why fund women and girls?”, and while for so many of those years my more personal agenda aligned almost completely with WMM, that was no longer the case. I knew that while it was critically important to mobilize as much philanthropic capital as possible (ie. giving), I also knew what could truly accelerate change was two other financial categories: spending and investing. And to take it a step higher, it was about how to encourage women to have greater levels of financial education, engagement and agency. While I loved being a part, a big part, of building a community of women philanthropists, I craved the freedom of not creating and working in a non-profit structure. That was what was going on with me when I came across the quote “Set Your Own Agenda, or Someone Will Set it For You”.?

Back in 2019, underneath the agenda quote, I wrote, ”What now, Jacki? What’s on your agenda?” I continued, “Follow the money? No! Lead with money. Mobilize the money.” And still further, “See quote by Noel Tichy, 2000-ish?” That left me curious, so I searched the doc for “Noel” and found the quote: “Control your destiny or someone else will.” This was the title of one of his books and one of the first books I ever read about leadership in the late 1990s. At the time, I was part of a group working to create Goldman Sachs’ leadership development academy, which came to be called. Noel was one of the many experts we consulted with, most of whom were white men. While I loved the leadership development work I did at Goldman, there was always this feeling that we were designing for the majority by harvesting the wisdom of the majority. I had an agenda for my work at Goldman, which was to help advance women into leadership roles at the firm, and when I no longer felt that I was moving forward on this agenda, I left. Two different but similar quotes, two pivotal times in my life. What strikes me as interesting, and is why I took you down this tangent before diving into writing about Melinda, is the fact that her quote jumped out of my screen and grabbed me just as we were about to host the inaugural SheMoney Summit (June 6th and 7th), the most robust expression of my ‘agenda’ to date. The universe was sending me a message. Melinda’s words in her May 28th oped were music to my ears. Eight years after our one time meeting, I felt that sisterhood all over again.? But enough about me. This article is about Melinda. Read on.?

A graduate of Duke University, Melinda earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s in business before going on to join a then small software company called Microsoft. She worked there for nine years in various positions, and in 1994, she married Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. She left Microsoft in 1996 and joined the Board of Trustees at Duke University, a position she held until 2003. She also had three children with Bill, their eldest being born in 1996, and she has often spoken about her decision, at that time, to leave Microsoft to focus on her family.?

In 2000, the couple made their philanthropic intentions known when they founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the world. According to its website, the foundation has already distributed over $77 billion to charitable causes since its inception, and has over 2,000 employees. The foundation has historically focused on healthcare initiatives and reducing poverty, but under Melinda’s leadership, it also embraced programs and initiatives that directly target the advancement of women and girls. Program areas include family planning, maternal health, women’s leadership, women’s economic empowerment, and much more.

In 2015, Melinda founded Pivotal Ventures (now called Pivotal), a company (LLC) whose mission it is to accelerate the pace of social progress. In 2019, Melinda committed $1 billion towards expanding women’s power and influence in the United States, and as it turns out, that was just a harbinger of things to come. Pivotal achieves their mission through a combination of investments, philanthropy, partnerships, and advocacy—all outlined on their website as part of their theory of change. I absolutely love this framework and it could not be more aligned with how I think about what I do as well.? Though I had heard for years that Pivotal has an investment strategy that includes direct and fund investments, it is only more recently that they have become much more public around both their strategy and their investments. On their website, you can find a list of the funds they are in, as well as their direct investments. (I share my list of funds and directs, too, and I highly encourage other people—especially women—to do the same.) In addition, there are also so many articles and other resources that you can find on the Pivotal site, including this two page downloadable brief on their investment strategy. I highly encourage you to follow Erin Harkless Moore, right here on LinkedIn, who is a Managing Director of Investments at Pivotal, if you are interested in following Pivotal’s investment strategy.?

Melinda’s public presence also extends to the literary world, where in 2019, she published The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World. In it, she shares lessons she learned while traveling the world, primarily in a philanthropic capacity. This book is on my permanent rec list. If you are someone who is skeptical about why gender matters, read this book. If you are looking for insights and data to help you make the case on why it matters, read this book. If you are on a mission to advance your philanthropic mindset and approach, read this book. If you just want to learn more about Melinda and why she is so passionate around this mission, read this book. In other words, read this book. It truly does “make the case” for why eliminating all forms of gender bias and discrimination is not only the right thing to do, but the absolutely necessary thing to do.?

My favorite story from the book is when Melinda talks about visiting the country of Senegal with Molly Melching, the founder of a non-profit organization, Tostan. Melinda met Molly in 2012, as did I. She described this meeting as a game-changer for her, as it was for me. I had heard Molly speak at a Women Moving Millions’ event about her approach to cultural change, and her remarks took my breath away. I distinctly remember bustling around the back of the room making sure our members were tended too as she started to speak. I was half listening. Within minutes I stopped what I was doing an hung on her every word. Not only is Molly brilliant, but one of the most genuine and accessible leaders I have ever had the honor of knowing, and now, calling a friend. Much of her work was anchored around ending the practice of female genital cutting, and it was in how they did this work that so significantly shaped my views on the role of philanthropy.? The core of “Tostan’s approach is not to judge from the outside, but to discuss from the inside.”? I highly recommend the book However Long the Night to read more about Molly’s life and Tostan’s work.

My own journey to Senegal happened in 2013, and I was so fortunate to be able to take my then 12-year-old daughter with me. Much like Melinda’s visit, we traveled the country with Molly, spent time in their headquarters to learn about their methodology, and most importantly, spent time with the villagers and listened to their stories about how they, with the support of Tostan, made their lives better.? The fact that Melinda respects and values Molly Melching as much as I do is another reason why I respect and value Melinda. She learned, as I have, to trust people closet to the problem to find the solution. She seems to know, as I do, that our job as allocators of capital is to fund them.

More generally, I love the book because it is when Melinda decided to tell the world, in her own words, who she is/was and what she stands for. She also shares her struggle with coming to terms with simply being a public, and wealthy, person, writing:

I’m a private person, which I guess is another way of saying I’d rather keep things to myself so I won’t be judged. There are times when I decided to include something in the book and then was alarmed when I printed it out and reread it. But I’ve left everything in for two reasons. First, I believe that women gain equality not couple by couple but by changing the culture, and we can change the culture by sharing our stories. That’s why I am sharing mine. Second, I’m sharing my stories because it seems false to me to work on issues in the world while pretending I have them solved in my own life. I need to be open about my flaws or I may fall into the conceit of thinking I’m here on earth to solve other people’s problems.” - Melinda French Gates

That is brave. Just because someone has a lot of privilege does not mean everything is easy, and it took a lot of courage for her to take on this topic in her book. All of us who have a lot of privilege, whether due to money, gender, race, or other reasons, have a responsibility to first, acknowledge it. She does that and more.? Furthermore, she writes a lot about her relationship with Bill and her quest to have an equal partnership in their marriage. She writes about “trying to find [her] voice”, and from what I have witnessed she not only has done so, but with such has done so with grace. Through my work at Women Moving Millions I became close with many extremely wealthy women who were married to extremely wealthy and privileged men. Like Melinda, many of them opted to leave full-time work to be the primary parent, while their husbands continued to work full time outside the home. Often, their work extended into the philanthropic sphere, and many of these women led their family foundations. I witnessed so many women flourishing in these roles, in large part because it was their primary domain. As one woman liked to say, “My husband makes the money and I get to give it away.” And you know what? Awesome! What was interesting in Melinda’s case is that she shared the title of co-founder of the foundation with Bill. And while Bill was certainly extremely active with the work of the foundation, he also maintained his affiliation with Microsoft, serving on its board until as recently as 2020. He had both, while she had the foundation, and later, Pivotal.

In 2021, Bill and Melinda Gates announced that they would be divorcing. Around that time? I wrote a piece about The Big Three (Melinda French Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs and MacKenzie Scott). In my article I speculated on what Melinda would do with her money post-divorce and whether the most powerful woman in gender-lens philanthropy would also become the most powerful woman in gender-lens investing. It turns out, the answer might be, yes! While the details of Melinda’s divorce settlement are of course private, what was made public in May of this year is the the movement of $12.5 billion of philanthropic assets. Let me take a moment to actually write that out, because that is a lot of zeros. $12,500,000,000. That is not just a lot of money. That is change-the-status-quo money that is now in the hands (and control) of one woman. So the question immediately became, what will Melinda do with change-the-status-quo money? Thankfully, she quickly gave us an answer.

For starters, over the next two years, she will be distributing $1 billion in grants to organizations dedicated to improving the lives of women and girls. This money will be distributed through? “grants aimed at supercharging the work of organizations that are fighting in the U.S. to advance women’s power and protect their rights, including reproductive freedom. These grants will be structured to provide flexible funding to spend as organizations see fit”. The vehicle for these distributions is the Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation, a 501C3 created in 2022. Additionally, $250 million to be distributed through an open call for submissions from organizations working worldwide to improve women and girl’s mental and physical health. The third piece in her funding plan is my favorite, as it involves giving distribution decisions to a diverse group of 12 global leaders: “‘Each leader will be provided with a $20 million fund to distribute to charitable organizations they consider to be doing urgent, impactful, and innovative work to improve women’s health and well-being in the U.S. and around the world.” Click here for a list of these individuals, which includes two men, Gary Barker and Richard V. Reeves, whose focus is on men and boys. In so doing she is expanding on what it truly means to do gender-lens philanthropy and I dig it. For me, this overall strategy is an incredible example of a term that is being used in a lot of philanthropic circles these days: “trust-based philanthropy”.?

“At its core, trust-based philanthropy is about redistributing power—systemically, organizationally, and interpersonally—in service of a healthier and more equitable nonprofit sector.” - Trust Based Philanthropy Project

I truly love that all of this information is publicly available, and I can’t wait to, hopefully, see the list of organizations that receive the funding. It was not surprising to me that many of the organizations that are receiving grants in the first category are ones that we have also supported through our own family foundation. One of my hopes and dreams for SheMoney, under the money move GIVE, is to have an easily searchable list of non-profit organizations that have a gender lens, and be able to see what foundations support them. Hopefully more philanthropic organizations will be as open as Pivotal going forward about where their money is going so that this database can become a reality.

While these are huge numbers in terms of charitable giving, what gets me even more excited is what Melinda might be able to accomplish with her investment capital. As mentioned above, the Pivotal website shares some of the funds she is invested in, but it is unclear whether those investments are being made personally, or on behalf of the Pivotal Foundation.? That said, it really does not matter what bucket it comes from, as there is likely billions of capacity in both, but I am very curious about how much of it is already aligned around the same agenda as her philanthropic capital. Of course, I am merely speculating here, but I have a feeling there is a lot of unused capacity. I am so looking forward to hearing Melinda talk about her investing portfolio with the same passion she talks about her philanthropic one. The world of gender-lens investing has been waiting for someone like Melinda to show up, and my hope is that she jumps into that leadership role with both feet.?

To be clear, Melinda is certainly not the first person, nor the only person, to publicly commit to supporting women and girls in her philanthropy and investing. I personally know hundreds of women who have stepped into their financial power and publicly committed grants of a million dollars or more to organizations supporting women and girls. That is the whole community of Women Moving Millions.? Quite recently WMM expanded their membership criteria to include political contributions and investments, recognizing the important role of these forms of money moves. Furthermore, let me make it very clear that there are countless people who support these causes at levels well below a million, and have been doing so for a very long time, and each and every one of them matter and all those dollars add up to a lot. However, the fact remains that big money matters, and Melinda is now in a greater level of control of major funds. She has publicly gone all in on accelerating that progress for women and girls, and the invitation is out for other people of means, and especially women of ultra high net worth, to join her. For the why and the how, follow the links that run all throughout this article.? Count me in Melinda. In sisterhood.?And P.S., I am turning 60 this fall as well.

In closing, I went searching for another amazing quote by Melinda to end this article, and it was not at all surprising for me to discover that there were many to choose from in my 100-page? favorite quotes doc. Ultimately, I went with this one, and in this particular moment, I think you are likely to understand why.

“It's the mark of a backward society - or a society moving backward - when decisions are made for women by men.”? Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World.

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