A Message From Patty Stonesifer

Last month, Bill and Melinda Gates announced that they’ve hired Jeff Raikes to be the next chief executive officer of the foundation. I’ve had an amazing decade with the foundation, and I’m excited about new challenges to come. It’s an honor to be handing the reins to someone as talented as Jeff. (You can read more about him elsewhere on our Web site.) And Jeff will be in good company, as both Bill and Melinda will spend more time with the foundation starting this year.

This transition is a natural time to be thinking about the two most important lessons I’ve learned with the foundation. (It’s no accident that “lessons learned” is the theme of this annual report—they run throughout every story here.) In fact, this is the best advice I can offer to Jeff, or to anyone else who’s involved with philanthropy.

First: Listen to your partners. That means your employees and advisers, of course, but also your grantees and the people who will ultimately benefit from your work. Years ago I heard an African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Stopping diseases like AIDS, restoring America’s high schools, helping small farmers in Africa lift themselves out of poverty and hunger—these are goals that entail going very far. So you’ll have to go with many partners, ranging from nonprofits and governments to businesses and individuals. And working with partners requires, more than anything, listening hard to what they have to say.

While you’re listening, make sure you’re hearing the full story. The danger isn’t in what people do tell you—it’s in what they don’t. It’s amazing what people won’t tell you when you have billions of dollars to give away. This is one of the main differences between working in technology, as I did for 20 years, and working in philanthropy. I still wear the same clothes that I had back then, but these days I get a lot more compliments!

Second: As my friend Judith Rodin of the Rockefeller Foundation says, at the end of the day, those of us in philanthropy won’t be judged by how smart we were, how much we cared, or how much money we gave away. We’re going to be judged by the impact we had. So don’t take your eye off the ball.

Impact isn’t simply paying out as much money as the government requires us to each year. It’s not even helping to open new schools, develop new vaccines, create hardier varieties of crops, or build new housing.

Bill and Melinda created this foundation because they believe that all people, wherever they live, deserve the chance to live healthy and productive lives. That gives you a pretty great yardstick for impact: Did our work really advance health or opportunity? Did more high school students graduate ready for college, did fewer children get sick with malaria, did more African farmers lift themselves out of poverty, were fewer families homeless?

That’s impact. We can’t ever forget that. Getting there is unbelievably difficult. But for 11 years, it made for the most rewarding work of my life. My thanks to everyone who made it possible.

June 2008