I attended the June 4 open house to celebrate the opening of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation building opening across the street from the Seattle Center. This is a 500 million dollar building whose employees have the responsibility to manage the spending of 3 billion dollars a year to improve the human condition.
The building had a surprising layout in that almost every part of the building was a conference space. There were private conference rooms but besides that the lunch tables were designed to force people to sit in a circle in semi-private places, the hallways were lined with places for impromptu meetings, and hallways all emptied into large mixing rooms with booths in them.
The Gates Foundation itself arranged for no representatives to be on hand to discuss the foundation during the open house. There were people there to explain the architecture. There were also representatives from some local non-profits – these people were actually the key attraction, but I think most of the people attending did not appreciate this.
In addition to the big players who I already knew and expected, some of the players who I did not know were the following:
MercyCorps does “international relief”, which means lots of things. One project which they do which interests me is that they have a cell phone payment application for Haiti as a model for anywhere. The idea is that a person buys pseudo funds in an online bank then spends the money using a cell phone app. I wonder what their legal infrastucture is. I think lots of people want good banking services and cell phones could be ideal for making payments but the institutional barriers must be huge.
Thrive by Five encourages healthy children. The theory is that what a person will do tomorrow depends on what the person is doing today, and for many factors, this is backed up by research. This organization encourages children to get a good start in life by age five with the expectation that this will make them good students in first grade, which will make them good students in second grade, and so on.
The College Success Foundation is a system for encouraging high school students from demographics with high risk factors for low education to prepare for and complete college. Part of their model is to call back past program participants to mentor new program participants. Apparently they have met some success, but I know nothing about the value of programs like this. I would imagine that there is economic incentive for outside entities to pour money into this program, but the way they presented it to me, they wanted it to be self-sustaining by creating people who would later in life give back to the program. If they can do this, then great – but my guess, totally unfounded in any data, would be that it would be easier to solicit outside funds than to try to pull funds from people who are one generation away from escaping poverty.
Building Changes has a system for ending homelessness.
Landesa was the most interesting to me. They help poor people in developing countries to engage their legal system to secure certification of land rights. This is relevant to my interests because it is a problem which Nandan and I deal with with Lok Samiti in rural Varanasi. I really need to start a relationship with these people because Ravi already wants to get deeper into this kind of work, and of course this organization would love to have an activist lawyer like Ravi on the ground.
How am I going to find time to research all these groups?