Philanthropy Is Shaping Our World

Introducing the inaugural TIME100 Philanthropy list

If you subscribed to this newsletter for AI stuff, you can skip this edition. Talk soon.

Philanthropy is quietly shaping the future. How do I know? I’ve spent the past few months reporting for TIME’s first-ever list of the 100 most influential people in philanthropy, examining the sector’s immense potential for good and its inherent complexities.

Philanthropy, however, played a role in my career long before this assignment. I got a leg up in journalism when I was awarded the Tarbell Fellowship, which is supported by Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna’s grantmaking organisation, Open Philanthropy, and other generous donors (who have no editorial control over the work of Tarbell, our fellows, or our grantees).

For the TIME100 Philanthropy, I profiled the CEO of the Gates Foundation, Mark Suzman, who will lead the organisation through a pivotal new chapter. The week I spoke with Suzman, the Gates Foundation announced its intention to give $200 billion over the next 20 years—double its total giving to date—exhausting its endowment and virtually all of Bill Gates’ Microsoft fortune, before closing its doors for good. Suzman believes this empty-the-tank strategy offers a real shot at a legacy that would long outlive the organisation: driving a handful of the world’s deadliest diseases to extinction. “We hope there are some things we will have literally solved,” he said.

I also profiled Nicole Taylor, CEO and president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which helps shape the giving of a network of over 1,000 donors, including Mark Zuckerberg and Reed Hastings; Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, who, as CEO and president of the Knight Foundation, is supporting local journalism in a time of crisis; and Badr Jafar, who’s striving to formalize philanthropy in much of the Global South.

For all its potential for good, one question casts a shadow over the world of large-scale philanthropy: Should the power to reshape society be so heavily concentrated in a few hands? To explore a compelling alternative approach, I spoke with Marlene Engelhorn, an Austrian heiress who let a group of 50 fellow citizens democratically decide how to give away the bulk of her wealth.

Anyway, that’s just a tiny snapshot of the list, which I hope you’ll read. Check it out.

---