Sep. 24, 2000

SKETCHING THE FUTURE OF PHILANTHROPY

The latest Forbes list of America's richest people testifies to the importance of the question: What's going to happen to all that money when its owners die?

Chances are, a lot of it will end up in charitable foundations, and not only because of the estate tax. Bill Gates, No. 1 on the Forbes list, comes from a Seattle family with a strong tradition of philanthropy and civic service. Long before the Microsoft trial, he was saying that he plans to give away most of his fortune during his lifetime, and has made an impressive start by endowing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations with $28.1 billion. And he still has $63 billion left.

Yet the assets of the extremely rich are only a small part of this picture. The total net worth of the Forbes 400 is $1.2 trillion. Estimates of the total accumulated wealth that will pass to a new generation over the next several decades run as high as $40 trillion.

What can donors do to ensure that the foundations they establish stay true to the goals they set?

John Goodwin, a consultant to philanthropists, has an answer. He calls it 'living blueprints.''

Start early, he advises, while you're still young enough to take an active role in your foundation's activities. Get involved. The example of the decisions you have made over many years will continue to influence your colleagues and their successors long after you're gone, much more so than a few paragraphs in your will.

Goodwin spoke about what's being called 'The New Philanthropy,'' during the national convention of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, meeting in Seattle Sept. 13-16.

It's hands-on, results-oriented, and typically undertaken by people still in mid-career who contribute time and expertise as well as money.

Last year, Goodwin said, Americans gave $190 billion in cash, but the value of donated time was more than $200 billion.

''It takes confidence to give,'' Goodwin said, ''and volunteering builds confidence.''

Another panel member, Paul Brainerd, switched to philanthropy after selling the software company Aldus to Adobe in 1994. He runs Social Venture Partners, which asks its members to pledge a minimum of $5,400 a year and then teaches them how to use it effectively in the areas they support. He has 267 members.

Patty Stonesifer, formerly a Microsoft executive, is president and co-chair (with Gates' father, Bill Gates Sr.) of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

''Bill is as involved with the foundation as with the division I ran,'' she said. ''They approve every grant.''

They decide Sunday afternoons as part of the family debrief, she said.

She described it as ''kitchen-table philanthropy with an outsize checkbook.''

The Gates Foundation focuses primarily on health issues overseas, and education in the United States. Those are very broad issues, and even all those billions scarcely register on a global scale. So they've targeted areas where they can hope to make a difference. ''We want to make the biggest changes we can,'' she said. So in health, they focus on disease prevention -- polio vaccination in India's Andhra Pradesh province, for instance. In this country, the emphasis is on equity of access to information, and one large program awards 4,000 scholarships to high-achieving, low-income minority students.

Now, I believe that it is deplorable that someone in Bill Gates' position to do good has chosen racially exclusionary scholarships as his vehicle. If it were any racial group except whites that were excluded, everybody else would deplore it too.

But he has a right to make that decision. And because he is directly and immediately involved, there is no doubt whatsoever about his intentions. He's 44 now; it is very likely that he will sustain that involvement for another 40 or 50 years. Long before that there will be an established corporate culture, so when people in 2050 or later ask, ''What would Bill want?'' everybody will know.

That's a legacy.

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