November 11, 2004 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation receives about 300 unsolicited requests for money a day, but it strongly
prefers to do its own research and then invite proposals from charities it believes fit its grant-making criteria.
The foundation doesn’t accept unsolicited proposals for its education and libraries programs, and expects to provide fewer unsolicited grants in global health as well.
“More and more frequently we are reaching out directly to potential partners that have a strong track record in carrying out these activities rather than waiting for inquiries to come to us,” Lowell Weiss, a foundation spokesman, wrote in an e-mail message. “Across all our programs we are gaining greater clarity on the outcomes we want to help achieve and the activities we believe are most likely to achieve these outcomes.”
Even so, the foundation continues to read unsolicited proposals for global health and its program of providing support to charities in the Pacific Northwest.
And occasionally, such a proposal makes it through the rigorous grant review.
VillageReach, in Seattle, is one such lucky grantee. The Gates Foundation awarded the charity almost $3.3-million over five years to develop ways to deliver vaccines in Africa. For example, in Mozambique, VillageReach has developed a “cold chain” — a network of refrigerators and cold boxes — at warehouses and local health clinics to prevent medicines for measles and other diseases from spoiling.
Its founder and president, Blaise Judja-Sato, a former telecommunications executive who had no prior experience in nonprofit work or health care, says he applied to Gates after other foundations rejected his proposal.
“When someone comes up with a really neat idea or new product, generally traditional investors will not support you,” he says. “So you have to look for a risk taker, someone who is capable of seeing beyond the traditional spectrum. We thought that’s what the foundation was, and it proved to be the case.”
Mr. Judja-Sato continues: “The foundation was willing to take the risk when we were really — I hate to say it — nobodies.”
Melinda F. Gates, co-founder of the Gates Foundation and a former Microsoft Corporation executive, says she is committed to ensuring that the foundation’s tradition of supporting small, relatively unproven groups like Mr. Judja-Sato’s will continue.
“Probably the most powerful thing I’ve learned over the past five or so years,” she wrote in an e-mail message, “is the truth behind Margaret Mead’s famous quotation: ‘Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed individuals to change the world.’”
