‘Forbes’ Spotlights Poverty Fighters; Bill Gates Is Guest Editor for ‘Wired’

Donors and charity leaders who are committed to alleviating the ravages of poverty in America and abroad share the spotlight in the second annual philanthropy issue of Forbes (December 2).

Among those featured: Paul Tudor Jones, the billionaire hedge-fund manager who 25 years ago started the Robin Hood Foundation, which focuses on helping New York’s most needy citizens by supporting social services. Mr. Jones, who has raised $1.5-billion—largely from his financial-world peers—since he started Robin Hood, talked to Forbes about his plans to focus the charity’s work on improving public schools.

He says he intends to bring his nonprofit’s methods for tracking results and holding nonprofits accountable to bear on Robin Hood’s new mission. So far, the nonprofit has provided money for a teacher-training school in New York where the participants oversee a classroom while studying for a master’s degree. The degree is withheld from teachers whose students don’t reach certain academic benchmarks.

On the eve of contract negotiations by a teachers union in the spring, Mr. Jones says, Robin Hood will be seeking greater influence in shaping policies that affect New York’s $22-billion school system. Those efforts, says Mr. Jones, will include bending the ear of the city’s mayor-elect, Bill de Blasio. “We’re not going to start a super-PAC or anything, but we will be deeply involved,” says Mr. Jones.

The issue also includes a list of 50 people who gave the most in 2012 and over their lifetimes. It is headed by Bill and Melinda Gates, followed closely by their fellow Gates foundation board member Warren Buffett. The list reveals the inroads the Gateses and Mr. Buffett have made in recruiting participants in their Giving Pledge: Twenty-nine of the 50 spots on the list are held by people who have signed the commitment to give away at least half of their fortunes.

To read the issue, go to: forbes.com.

Bill Gates also shows up in Wired magazine (December) as guest editor of a special issue on the power of big ideas and unconventional thinking needed to “fix the world.”

The articles highlight innovations that are improving conditions for people around the globe. Some approaches are high-tech, like a volcano-warning system being developed for Iceland, while others are designed for use in places where resources are scarce, such as a program that trains lay mental-health workers to provide much-needed care in India.

Despite very serious problems, society is enjoying the fruits of “history’s greatest era,” Mr. Gates writes in the magazine. Wars, he says, are becoming less frequent, more children are in school, and life expectancy has more than doubled in the last century.

Both government and business play an important role in the growing prosperity, but there are limits to what they can accomplish, writes Mr. Gates. He says that he and his wife, Melinda, chose to focus their philanthropy on causes that weren’t getting a lot of attention and offered the possibility of significant impact, in areas such as international poverty and health.

“The goal in much of what we do is to provide seed funding for various ideas,” he writes. “Some will fail. We fill a function that government cannot—making a lot of risky bets with the expectation that at least a few of them will succeed.”

Other articles in the issue include:

• A feature on the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which pioneered the use of the randomized controlled trial—a tool once used primarily in medicine—to evaluate the impact of social programs.
• An in-depth look at the fight to eradicate polio, a push that has received many millions of dollars in support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The battle, the magazine says, now boils down to “an all-out, very expensive effort to eliminate the last few problem areas in some of the most troubled and underdeveloped parts of the final three countries where polio is endemic: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria.”
• A joint interview with Mr. Gates and Bill Clinton about their second careers as philanthropists. The former president says that international aid has the potential to be an issue both Democrats and Republicans in Congress can agree on: “I think what we need to show people is that if we invest money wisely, we can actually save a lot of aid money and it won’t cost as much as you think.”

To read the issue, go to: wired.com.