Melinda French Gates has announced that she will donate $1 billion over the next two years to individuals and organizations working to support women and families around the world, including reproductive rights in the United States.
French Gates has made his second billion-dollar pledge in five years. In 2019, she announced a ten-year plan to increase women’s authority and influence.
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Earlier this month, French Gates announced her resignation from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, vowing to focus on women and children. As part of her departure from the Gates Foundation, French Gates received $12 billion from Bill Gates to support her future philanthropy.
In a guest piece for The New York Times on Tuesday, French Gates, one of the most well-known philanthropic champions of gender parity in the United States, expressed her discomfort over the years with those who contend that the time is not right for discussing gender equality.
“Decades of research on economics, well-being, and governance make it clear that investing in women and girls benefits everyone,” she stated.
French Gates announced in recent weeks that she has begun donating $200 million in new grants through her organization, Pivotal Ventures, to nonprofits working in the United States to safeguard women’s rights and expand their power and influence. The grants, not allocated to specific initiatives, are for general operating support. The organizations include the National Women’s Law Center, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and the Center for Reproductive Rights.
Teresa Younger, president and CEO of the Ms. Foundation for Women, which also got a donation, has long urged donors to provide unrestricted, multi-year financing to groups. She commended French Gates’ new pledge as part of a bigger trend of significant female contributors making generous contributions to organizations.
“If philanthropy took lessons from the way that women are moving money, we would see more money in the field having greater impact,” added Younger.
Her group learned about the funding, which was the first it had received from Pivotal Ventures in the previous week, and Younger stated that there was no application procedure. She declined to reveal the amount of the donation, but stated that it will help them expand their work with organizations in the South and Midwest.
The nonprofit MomsRising Education Fund also received a grant that will last until the end of 2026, with Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, its executive director and CEO, saying, “We’re deeply honored and enormously grateful that Melinda French Gates is stepping up for women and families in a time when our daughters’ rights may be significantly less than those of ourselves or our own mothers.”
French Gates also promised to provide $20 million to 12 individuals to distribute to their preferred nonprofit organizations by the end of 2026. The National Philanthropic Trust, one of the largest public charities offering donor-advised funds, would handle those funds, according to a Pivotal Ventures representative.
Out of the projected $1 billion, French Gates announced $690 million in commitments, including an “open call” for applications that the nonprofit Lever for Change will administer this fall. French Gates announced the donation of $250 million to organizations that promote women’s mental and physical health worldwide.
French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures is a limited liability business that also handles investments in for-profit ventures; thus, nothing is known about its grantmaking or the funds it administers. Pivotal Ventures has concentrated on a range of initiatives to boost women’s economic and political engagement and influence, including narrowing the wage gap, rewarding women for care labor, and encouraging women to run for political office.
Pivotal Ventures said it had invested $875 million of the $1 billion pledged by French Gates in 2019 in a mix of startup and charitable investments. Furthermore, the Gates Foundation has long supported research and treatments aimed at improving maternal mortality and women’s health in general. In 2020, it hired its first president for its gender quality section, and in 2021, the foundation pledged $2.1 billion to UN Women-led gender equity programs.
In her piece on Tuesday, French Gates mentioned the high maternal death rates in the United States, emphasizing that black and Native American moms are in the highest danger.
“Women in 14 states have lost their right to abort a pregnancy under nearly any condition. We are still the only advanced economy without any type of national-paid family leave. And the number of teenage females who have suicidal thoughts and chronic emotions of melancholy and hopelessness has risen by a decade,” she stated.
Next week, French Gates will leave the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She co-founded the group about 25 years ago.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to the Associated Press for news coverage in Africa, as does Pivotal Ventures for news coverage of women in the workforce and state governments.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will change its name to the Gates Foundation. It stands as one of the biggest charitable institutions globally. As of December 2023, its endowment was $75.2 billion, courtesy of contributions from Gates and billionaire businessman Warren Buffett. It works on a variety of issues, but its primary focus remains global health, and it directs the majority of its financing toward overseas challenges rather than those in the United States.
