BEING called “incredibly disingenuous” by the Huffington Post, an influential blog, cannot have been how Patty Stonesifer expected to mark her tenth anniversary in charge of Bill Gates's efforts to make the world a better place. But these are strange times for the chief executive of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a charitable institution accustomed to being showered with praise. Two recent articles in the Los Angeles Times accused the foundation—the world's wealthiest, with assets of $32 billion—of profiting from investments in companies whose activities contribute to the very problems the foundation is trying to solve (poverty, debt, disease and so on). This prompted an avalanche of media comment along the lines of “giving with one hand, taking with the other”.
Meeting the straight-talking Ms Stonesifer, it is hard to imagine anyone less disingenuous. This is easily the most hostile press coverage of the foundation in the decade since Mr Gates asked her to take over the day-to-day running of his foundation, shortly after her departure from a senior post at Microsoft, his giant software firm. But, she says, this is the price—a “small price”—that the foundation has to pay for having come so far during that time. “We have become the reference point for all the interesting questions in philanthropy,” she says. And whether a charitable foundation should use its portfolio of assets to reinforce the thrust of its giving—or “mission-related investing”—is, she says, “certainly an interesting debate”.
Many American foundations are jumping on this particular bandwagon, either by screening nasty firms out of their share portfolios, trying to improve bad firms through shareholder activism, or accepting lower financial returns in pursuit of a double or triple bottom line that takes non-financial results into account.
It will be interesting to see how the rest of this plays out.
No comments:
Post a Comment