GivingTuesday is Gifted $10 Million from the Gates Foundation

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By JohnPosted In: Charity Activity, Charity in BusinessTagged: ,

In 2012, a simple idea turned into a global movement.

#GivingTuesday began in the 92nd Street Y in New York City as a proposal for people to perform good deeds for others on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. Eight years later, the concept transformed into an independent nonprofit and collaborative effort to encourage giving and celebrate kindness.

In honor of the upcoming tenth anniversary of the #GivingTuesday initiative, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has donated $10 million to the organization. This is in addition to previous support from the Gates Foundation, which has amounted to $10.5 million over the years. Co-founder Melinda French Gates noted the importance of philanthropy, explaining that it is “the right thing to do and that anybody can do it…Anyone can be a giver. Everyone has resources to share and make the world a better place – whether it’s through time, money, expertise, or your voice.”  She hopes that philanthropy, and giving back as a whole, becomes more of a societal norm.

Asha Curran, CEO of GivingTuesday, expressed her appreciation saying that “It’s a really wonderful thing to see the partnering of big philanthropy and grassroots generosity, that those things don’t have to live in separate worlds and be viewed as totally separate things.”

Just last year, the GivingTuesday organization reported that over $2.7 billion donations were made on the designated Tuesday.

With the new grant from the Gates Foundation, GivingTuesday hopes to facilitate more giving worldwide while expanding the movement to additional countries and establishing thousands of campaigns.

Bill Gates Donates $20 Billion to Foundation

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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the world’s largest and most impactful philanthropies. Even after the divorce of the couple in May 2021, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates agreed to continue to co-chair the foundation together for a two-year trial period. Both of them have also publicized their intentions to give over the majority of their wealth to the philanthropy.

On Wednesday, Bill Gates announced in a blog post that he is transferring $20 billion to the endowment of the foundation. He explained that the foundation will increase its spending from $6 billion per year prior to the pandemic to $9 billion by the end of 2026. The movement of funds and extra expenditure is due to increased needs in many areas, despite the worst of COVID being over. The foundation supports a wide range of causes, including global health, education, climate change, gender quality, and more.

According to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, Bill Gates currently ranks as the world’s fourth-richest person, with a net worth of about $114 billion. In his blog post, he wrote: “I have an obligation to return my resources to society in ways that have the greatest impact for improving lives.” He asserted that, with time, he will move down on the list of the world’s richest people until he is eventually off the list altogether.

The dedication of Bill Gates, and of the foundation he and his ex-wife started over 20 years ago, is encouraging and important in current times. As Gates concluded in his blog post, “I hope others in positions of great wealth and privilege will step up in this moment too.”

Gates Foundation Helps Eradicate TB

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Tuberculosis, or TB, infects an estimated 8.7 million people a year according to the World Health Organization’s statistics from the year 2011. Almost all TB cases occur in low and middle income countries and those who have HIV or most vulnerable because of their already weakened immune systems.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has made the eradication of TB as one of its goals. Dr. Peter Small, of the Foundation, is impressed by recent research developments. As he said, “There were probably forty years in which there was very little, arguably no, progress because there was no effort. What we’ve seen in the last decade is an acceleration. And it’s really changed what was a vicious cycle of neglect and despondency into one in which we’re starting to see exciting new products. We have now, for the first time, the capacity for untrained healthcare workers to definitively diagnose TB within two hours and know if it’s drug resistant. More than two and a half million of those tests run in the world.”

Dr. Small is the senior program officer for TB for the Foundation. He has researched the genetic variability of the disease and has seen the effects that TB can cause while he lived in India. As he said about treatment plans, “I think the Holy Grail remains a vaccine. We do need a vaccine to finish the job. The great thing is that we’ve completed a phase three trial. We’ve shown that we can get definitive answers and unfortunately that trial was ineffective. But I think that the vaccine pipeline is now something which we know we can test. The good news is, in the last fifteen years there have been massive improvements in understanding immunology.”

Bill Gates Will Be Featured Speaker

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It was just announced by the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT) that Bill Gates will be the featured speaker for the 44th Annual ACCT Leadership Congress. This congress will take place at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle on October 2, 2013.

As the co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates has helped to increase opportunities for the world’s most disadvantages populations while also focusing on educational opportunities for students in the United States.

The ACCT Leadership Congress brings together community college trustees, presidents and administrators and is the largest national gathering of its kind. More than 1500 people are expected to take part in the congress. This year’s theme is  “Society Demands, Community Colleges Deliver: Moving the Needle.”

Warren E. Buffet Offers Amazing Donation

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There are charitable donations – and then there is Warren E. Buffett’s charitable donation. Recently, Mr. Buffett distributed 17.5 million Class B shares of Berkshire Hathaway to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This is a gift valued at $2 billion based on the closing price recently.  The gift was part of Buffett’s annual charitable giving that included gifts to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. Buffett’s total donations this year were 22.9 million Class B shares.

Mr. Buffett committed, seven years ago, that he would give a total of $31 billion over time to the Gates Foundation. He planned to give the bulk of his massive fortune to the Gates Foundation and to four other philanthropies.

Together, Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates have actually tried to persuade other wealthy Americans to give away a large chunk of their fortunes. They have created something called the Giving Pledge for this purpose.

Knox Country Schools Receive Grant from Gates Foundation

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The Knox County Schools is able to feel like it just one the lottery. They just received news that they are getting $1.2 million from the “Smart Spending” grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. $850,000 will be coming from the foundation and a local match will cover the rest. Knox County is one of four school districts in the country to receive this grant.

The grant is not for school supplies or technology. Rather, it provides assistance to district leaders and offers expect advice for aligning financial resources with the schools’ educational mission.

As Superintendent Dr. Jim McIntyre said, “One of the challenges for any public education everywhere across the country is limited resources, and you have a certain pool of resources to work with. And so the challenge is to make sure you’re using every dollar and every dime that you have, effectively and efficiently, to support great instruction and high level learning for our kids.”

Dr. McIntyre said that the district plans to focus much of their attention on the 2015 school budget and on building financial capacity for the future. As he said, “We’re really excited about, not just the short-term impact this will have on the budget process coming up, but also the long-term impact on making sure we are getting the best possible return on our educational investment in our community.”

Bill Gates Lets His Hair Down

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In a recent interview on ABC’s Q&A program, Bill Gates gave viewers a glimpse of what makes him tick. He said that his main mission is to rid the world of polio and he believes he has only three countries to go. While in Australia recently for 14 hours, he managed to convince Prime Minister Julia Gillard to spend another $80 million on his polio crusade.

When asked about how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invests in companies like oil companies, Gates said, “I don’t endorse every action of those we have invested in – we are not the court of justice.” But he did mention that the Foundation doesn’t invest in tobacco or weapons companies.

For anyone who was wondering, Bill Gates doesn’t plan to clone himself or use cryogenics. As he said, “Life is great but you have to make room for people who come after you.”

He explained that the next major focus for the Foundation will be the cervical cancer vaccine that has been pioneered by Australian scientist Ian Frazer.

Gates Foundation Puts Birth Control at Top of Its Priority List

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Bill and Melinda Gates are able to put significant sums of money towards causes of their choosing. For the last 15 years, they have been working to create and distribute vaccines in under privileged areas of the world through their Gates Foundation.

Now, Melinda Gates has recently announced that they plan to put birth control on their international agenda by making it her signature issue. This week, the Gates Foundation and the British government plan to convene a summit of world leaders in London. Their goal is to raise $4 billion to offer contraceptives to another 120 million women in the poorest of countries.

A Catholic, Melinda understands that her efforts are going to pit her against the Catholic Church. She is trying to explain her goals and diffuse that controversy. When she kicked off her initiative at the Berlin TEDxChange talk, she explained that,

“We’re not talking about abortion. We’re not talking about population control. What I’m talking about is giving women the power to save their lives, to save their children’s lives and to give their families the best possible future.”

The Catholic world has accused Belinda of mounting a “blatant attack on Catholic sexual morality.” The Gates Foundation has created a website where they are asking people to share their personal stories about birth control and offer their support to the effort.