Bill Gates and wife, Melinda have been talking about why giving out charity is the topmost priority of the Bills and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In Melinda's words, "We've been asked that question more than a few times in the 18 years since we started our foundation. Our answer? No. It's not fair that we have so much wealth when billions of others have so little. And it's not fair that our wealth opens doors that are closed to most people.
"However, we do this work, and use whatever influence we have, to help as many people as possible and to advance equity around the world.
"And we are committed to being open about what we fund and what the results have been. (It's not always clear what's been successful and what hasn't, but our foundation team works hard to assess our impact, course correct and share lessons.) Although we've had some success in getting the world to pay more attention to health and extreme poverty, it would be hard to argue at this point that we made the world focus too much on them.
Having influence does make it harder to get honest feedback, though. In business, your customers will tell you in an instant when you've made a mistake. It's not the same in philanthropy. Some of our critics don't speak up because they don't want to risk losing their funding from us. That's why hearing and answering tough questions is important. And it means we need to hire well, consult experts, learn constantly and seek out different viewpoints.
Even though our foundation is the biggest in the world, businesses and governments spend much more than we do.
California, for example, spends more than our entire endowment just to run its public school system for one year.
And we use our resources in a very specific way: to test out promising innovations, collect and analyze the data and let businesses and governments scale up and sustain what works. We want to incubate lots of different ideas, and then help the best ones get out there as quickly as possible.
Read full story here by clicking this link: http://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/13/opinions/influence-wealth-foundation-opinion-gates/index.html?sr=twCNN021318influence-wealth-foundation-opinion-gates1021AMStory
Source: CNN
In Melinda's words, "We've been asked that question more than a few times in the 18 years since we started our foundation. Our answer? No. It's not fair that we have so much wealth when billions of others have so little. And it's not fair that our wealth opens doors that are closed to most people.
"However, we do this work, and use whatever influence we have, to help as many people as possible and to advance equity around the world.
"And we are committed to being open about what we fund and what the results have been. (It's not always clear what's been successful and what hasn't, but our foundation team works hard to assess our impact, course correct and share lessons.) Although we've had some success in getting the world to pay more attention to health and extreme poverty, it would be hard to argue at this point that we made the world focus too much on them.
Having influence does make it harder to get honest feedback, though. In business, your customers will tell you in an instant when you've made a mistake. It's not the same in philanthropy. Some of our critics don't speak up because they don't want to risk losing their funding from us. That's why hearing and answering tough questions is important. And it means we need to hire well, consult experts, learn constantly and seek out different viewpoints.
Even though our foundation is the biggest in the world, businesses and governments spend much more than we do.
California, for example, spends more than our entire endowment just to run its public school system for one year.
And we use our resources in a very specific way: to test out promising innovations, collect and analyze the data and let businesses and governments scale up and sustain what works. We want to incubate lots of different ideas, and then help the best ones get out there as quickly as possible.
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| Bill Gates, second richest man in the world |
Read full story here by clicking this link: http://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/13/opinions/influence-wealth-foundation-opinion-gates/index.html?sr=twCNN021318influence-wealth-foundation-opinion-gates1021AMStory
Source: CNN
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