February 21, 2008 | Read Time: 3 minutes
The chief executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Patty Stonesifer, has
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announced that after running the prominent grant maker for 11 years she is stepping down.
Given the role she played in helping to form the fund and as charitable adviser to the Gateses, former employees and charity leaders said the couple will have a hard time finding her successor, who as the head of the nation’s largest philanthropy will have great influence in the nonprofit world.
Ms. Stonesifer, 51, will continue to work at the organization, overseeing an as-yet-undefined grant-making project.
She will officially leave her current position at the beginning of 2009 and will help the fund find a replacement, who could be appointed as early as September.
Bill Gates’s Role
In an interview, Ms. Stonesifer said that, with Mr. Gates joining the fund full time in July and a grant-making plan established for the next few years, 2008 presented a good window to make a change.
“It was an obvious timeline in which I either needed to step up to go through this next decade or be ready to pass the baton,” she said.
She said the foundation has hired an executive-search company, Russell Reynolds Associates, and will look at candidates from around the world with a mix of corporate, government, and nonprofit experience.
Ms. Stonesifer said she first began thinking about stepping down three years ago, but postponed her decision when Warren Buffett pledged to give the fund the majority of his massive fortune.
The donation, which is expected to be worth more than $30-billion, will increase the foundation’s annual grant making to about $3.2-billion next year.
‘Big Shoes to Fill’
Given the foundation’s growing wealth and influence, nonprofit leaders said that her successor will have a challenging job in which any decisions made will affect other philanthropies.
“To say this is an incredibly important and intense job is an understatement,” said Seth Berkley, president of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, a medical charity in New York that has received money from the Gates foundation. “Patty has done an extraordinary job over the first decade of the foundation’s existence and her replacement has some big shoes to fill.”
While observers say the next Gates chief executive will need experience and a variety of skills — intimacy with the developing world, good management capabilities, the ability to process reams of data — some have said that perhaps the most important quality will be humility.
The new person should be “humble enough not to confuse him- or herself with the checkbook,” said Tom Vander Ark, president of the X Prize Foundation and former director of the Gates foundation’s education program.
Building a Philanthropy
A former Microsoft executive, Ms. Stonesifer began helping the Gateses with their giving in 1997. With one employee and a rented office above a pizza parlor, she directed their nascent charitable effort to help libraries in the United States gain access to the Internet.
Since then, the foundation has greatly expanded in size and scope: Today it has 535 employees and $38.7-billion in assets. It awards grants to fight poverty worldwide, support global health, and improve American education.
As a close friend of the Gateses, Ms. Stonesifer has been the couple’s counselor on all matters philanthropic. “Patty made our vision a reality, and I am deeply grateful to her,” said Mr. Gates in a statement.
Ms. Stonesifer, who receives no salary for her work with the foundation, said she continues to be passionate about the group’s mission to end social and health inequities and looks forward to figuring out her next project.
“As soon as we get to find some time to plan it, I’m going to find a new category of giving and build something new and different from what the rest of the foundation is doing,” she said.
While the position will be full time, she said it would be a lighter workload than her current job and allow her to play a more “hands on” role. “This is a tune-up, not a radical change,” she said.
