SEATTLE – As the Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation prepares to double the amount of money it gives away each year, making the right decisions about how to do that wisely falls to a very small group of people, including one woman whose name seldom makes the news.
And that’s the way foundation CEO Patty Stonesifer would like to keep it.
In an interview with The Associated Press last week, Stonesifer compared herself to the director of a play, with Bill and Melinda Gates writing a script and being the lead actors. Stonesifer finds the best “players” to do the rest of the work. Working behind the scenes and directing the players is her job.
Hard work is what attracted her to the foundation during its early years a decade ago, and the fact that her friend and colleague Bill Gates asked the former Microsoft Corp. manager to take on a new challenge: putting the Internet within reach of every person in the United States by connecting the nation’s libraries.
“I love to work. I love to get things done,” said the energetic redhead who enthusiastically shares the contents of a large three-ring binder full of the foundation’s current goals and strategies.
In 1997, at age 40, Stonesifer left her job as senior vice president of the Interactive Media Division at Microsoft, where she led the team that developed consumer software such as the Encarta Encyclopedia and the Magic School Bus Series, for an early retirement.
At the time, she said she wanted to spend more time with her teenage children. She did work less for a few years until the foundation started growing and so did her new job.
“We didn’t start with $32 billion and Warren Buffett,” Stonesifer said, referring to the foundation’s current assets and the billionaire investor’s announcement this past summer that he would be giving most of his money to the Gates Foundation to give away.
Already the world’s largest foundation before the Buffett announcement, the Gates Foundation has spent $11 billion over the past seven years.
The foundation puts most of its money into global health, global development and U.S. education and is carefully assessing where more money is needed, she said.
Buffett said in June he would be giving money to the foundation in annual installments worth about $1.5 billion – totaling more than $30 billion at 2006 stock prices. His first gift was made in August.
Buffett has given the foundation a few years to ramp up before requiring that it distribute his entire donation each year, which will effectively double the dollar amount of grants the foundation makes. Those grants currently add up to about $1.5 billion annually.
The foundation plans to use 80 percent to 90 percent of the additional money to deepen its work, not delve into new areas, per Buffett’s wishes.
“He suggested we go deeper rather than broader,” Stonesifer said.
Another team is exploring where to spend other 10 percent to 20 percent of the new dollars and make the most difference in the world, Stonesifer said.
“It’s going to take focus to do it right,” she said of giving away twice as much money, but laughed a little when asked if it would be hard. “Hard is not having enough money. I don’t want to whine.”
Stonesifer said the foundation has added 100 employees this past year, bringing its staff up to about 350. The foundation’s Web site lists about 40 more openings.
The foundation is already growing out of its rented space, she said, but it won’t move into new headquarters – to be built across from Seattle Center – until about 2010.
She said she is inspired by the work she is able to do and said her accomplishments in the corporate world do not compare to the way she feels about saving people’s lives and giving young people the tools they need to succeed.
“This is an astonishing opportunity for me,” Stonesifer said. “Personally, I can’t imagine an opportunity that is better.”
When she started with the foundation 10 years ago, she predicted she would last five years at most in the job – but her perspective has changed.
“I hope to die with my employee badge in my purse,” she said Thursday.
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