Why the Gates Foundation isn't shifting to trust-based grantmaking

While the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supports the idea of trust-based grantmaking and donors who have embraced that model, such as billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, the organization is not planning to broadly adopt the approach itself, CEO Mark Suzman said Friday. It doesn’t fit the foundation’s outcome-driven work in health and other areas, he said, which refers to a giving approach that seeks defined and measurable goals such as delivering a certain number of mosquito nets per year. Trust-based philanthropy is an approach to giving in which donors give unrestricted funding to nonprofits and allow them to spend the grant money how they choose, with few to no reporting requirements. While it didn’t start with Scott, she has brought the most attention to the trust-based movement. Scott, who has a net worth of $33.2 billion, has donated more than $16 billion to charity mostly since 2020. Scott has teamed up with Gates Foundation co-chair Melinda French Gates for some domestic causes. Both women are based in Seattle, Washington. The two recently gave a $23 million gift to a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit that serves low-income students nationwide, for example. Generally, leaders at the Gates Foundation applaud the efforts of Scott and other trust-based funders, Suzman said. “We think that’s a very valuable approach as part of the broader philanthropic ecosystem that, you know, has a lot to recommend it,” he said during a virtual briefing Friday in response to a comment about the foundation’s reporting requirements being “over the top.” However, the model doesn’t align with Gates’s mission, particularly when it comes to supporting the development of research on vaccines and treatments for infectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis, Suzman said. The more than $67 billion foundation is one of the biggest global health funders in the world. The Gates Foundation will soon launch a multimillion-dollar tuberculosis vaccine trial in partnership with U.K.-based foundation Wellcome. “You can’t do an investment like a vaccine trial that’s a general operating grant,” he said. “You have to have clear outcomes and metrics and objectives about what you expect and hope the vaccine will do.” The foundation recently announced plans to spend $8.6 billion, a 4% increase from 2023, and has been pushing other wealthy funders to give more and faster. Still, Gates does not see unrestricted grants as part of its effort to get money out the door quickly, Suzman said. The foundation sees its outcome-focused model as “complementary” to trust-based giving done by others, he said. And it also is looking at how it can be applied in a more trust-based way moving forward. “That’s something that we’ve been working on and I think improving,” Suzman said. “We do … do an external grantee perception survey on a regular basis. And I’m sure some of our requirements for grantees are sometimes a little burdensome on the reporting and we’re constantly working on ways we can improve those and lighten the burden or make things more effective.”