Bill Gates had a question to the employees of his non -profit foundation, the He recently announced will spend 200 billion US dollars to reduce illness and death among the poorest in the world.
“How do you get people to take care of it?” The Microsoft Founder asked this month at the annual conference of the Gates Foundation. “We have to increase our game a lot.”
Hundreds of Gates Foundation employees from the Stiftung’s Office in India, China, China, South Africa and other people filled with an amphitheater compared to the world’s largest private philanthropy center in Seattle, Wash, from the world’s largest private philanthropy.
This year’s event came at a remarkable moment: the employees had just learned that the operation for which they work will no longer exist in 20 years. At its 25th anniversary, the Gates Foundation announced that it will be in the next 20 years after doubling its expenses Locking. The 200 billion US dollars that will spend is the greatest philanthropic engagement in modern history.
In the weakly illuminated auditorium, the gates from the mezzanine went into the front row. “We have an amazing milestone,” said the foundation’s co -founder. Gates first celebrated the progress in the foundation in the first quarter of a century, including the Reduction of half of the deaths in childrenAnd successes against malaria, polio and other infectious diseases. He came up when he mentioned the people, his father, his father, the Philanthropin Warren Buffett and the co-founder of the ex-wife and the co-founder of Foundation, Melinda French Gates, who had most influenced him in his philanthropy.
However, the sound was anything but triumphed. Even when the Gates set up the great ambitions of the foundation – including the extermination of Polio and Malaria and the reduction of deaths from tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS by 90%, he warned how far it should be. Defendant the fragility of the sectorand said the youngest drastically Roads for foreign help The progress of the past two decades has already threatened from the United States and other top donor countries.
“It will take our best work to get this reversal and our legal profession to restore resources,” Gates told the foundation’s employees. And he said he was looking for “amazing, inexpensive innovation so that we can take what is left and actually go in the right direction.”
The CEO Mark Suzman spoke for many when it expressed anger about the cuts in the wealthy countries. Gates and his foundation had made the decision to pursue these ambitious goals for public health before the Trump administration expanded the U.S.ID’s main assistant agency – and several other countries also lower their international aid budgets.
“Don’t make a mistake, we enter into a new era in which the poorest people in the world, as they have heard, can no longer rely on strong, steady support for the richest nations in the world,” said Suzman. “It’s okay to be frustrated … We never thought that we would have to fight so hard to justify the importance of our work.” But he continued: “This is a fight for which we are ready.”
After the meeting, an employee of the foundation achieved that the mood of the colleagues after the announcement of 200 billion US dollars was “quite optimistic and enthusiastic”. “We are super big and think about what the Legacy building looks like and how we can work out of the job by building up local capacities and enabling our partners to continue the mission” Assets.
Suzman said the goals of the foundation had not changed. “If critical coalitions seem to crumble before our eyes, we cannot simply reduce our ambitions,” he said. “If the idea of hope for a better future sounds naive or outdated, we have to remind people that our optimism is not easy. It was deservedly deserved. It is not based on blind beliefs, but on concrete, measurable results.”
Gates asked his employees to revive their drive to reach the foundation’s core mission, take new partners with them and invest in the potential of AI to relieve poverty and play a key role in the discovery of drugs. “I really think, and I hope it is not a naive belief that we can achieve more in the next 20 years – despite the headwind – more than in the first 25,” he said.
This story was originally on Fortune.com