Rocky writes about Warren Buffet giving most of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

What I find most interesting about the actions of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet is this:

What will it reveal about the short-comings of both philanthropy and the concept of “running charity as if it were a business”.

Most of the commentary I’ve seen about how public concerns like charity or government being run as businesses focus on the managerial models (how managers are compensated, how the power structure is organized, how workers are treated/compensated/cared for.

What the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has a chance to do is to come up with a focused, coherent, organized plan of action, instantly marshal all of the resources for concerted, orchestrated, organized, and focused foundation to build from.

Where most charities seem to be primarily concerned with getting more money (and have to be in order to keep the wheels turning), and then with meeting immediate short-term (emergency) needs, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation have the opportunity to actually work to get to the root of the problems.

So many of the truly effective solutions for the world’s problems are long-term, high-cost, and slow to take effect.  And the costs of those problems right now are so terrible, that charities cannot bring themselves to ignore the current desperate situations of those effected and focus on the long-term and more subtle efforts required to solve the root problem.

Take AIDS, for instance.  A lot of focus has been on education, but it is next to impossible to educate the world’s population about what causes the spread of HIV, and healthy ways to prevent that spread.  Just eradicating ignorance in a world population of 6 billion people alone is a daunting and expensive task.

Add to that the fact that those education efforts are actively resisted and sabotaged around the world by regressive governments, religious groups, and cultural organizations; and the effort becomes more difficult and more expensive as each regressive influence in each locality must be countered on an individual basis.

Add to that the fact that in many areas of the world; economic and social realities cause people to enter the sex trade, or cause women to be trapped in situations where they have little or no control over their sexuality, where children can be sold into slavery, or a woman cannot refuse to have unprotected sex with an infected husband, where lawlessness makes rape a daily fear, and there is another bag of bricks atop a seemingly insurmountable pile of obstacles to actually solving the problem of AIDS.

Many charities work to chip away at one aspect of the problem or another.  It’s a hodge-podge patchwork of efforts, and they do some good.  Education helps some, efforts to employ people with living wage jobs helps some.  Harm reduction such as condom and needle distributions help some, and charities that provide anti-retroviral drugs and other health care needs of infected persons help some…

…but none of them alone can do enough to stop the spread of HIV.  For every person who learns the truth about aids, it seems there are several who thinks that drinking a can of Mountain Dew every day will heal them.  For every person who uses a condom for every sexual encounter, there are several whose religious leader told them it was a sin…and due to being human, the sin of using a condom is easier to avoid than the sin of having casual sex.  For every child of a parent employed by a charity in a humane, self-supporting job (or cared for in an orphanage), there are several who really do need to prostitute themselves in order to eat today.

And lets not even start talking about the need for funding for medical advances such as a vaccine for HIV or some other preventive treatment that could prevent infection.

It is exciting to think what this foundation could do, given both it’s financial resources and founder’s ability to find a wide variety of people doing something successful and good…something they designed that works, and integrating them into a system, and then implement it on a large and ambitious scale.

I suspect that we will be hearing a lot in the future about the devils deal that is working with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.  I imagine that a lot of existing charities will “sell out” - tempted by loads and loads of cash and visibility.

There will likely be lots and lots of disgruntled people bailing from them, and complaining about the “draconian” changes, and how their charitable efforts are being “mechanized” and how the Gates foundation changed everything, and wouldn’t let them do their jobs even though they have a life-time of experience in the area.  They will likely declare it to be an “evil empire” gobbling up smaller charities, co-opting their techniques and agendas, dictating their terms and messing with their organization…and taking credit for their results, while still leaving large numbers of people out in the cold.  Many areas of effort will be seen as underserved, too inaccessible, and unreliable while others will be seen as unnecessary, confusing, and requiring too many resources considering what they accomplish. 

I would even bet that there might be numerous charges of systemic security failures in oversight to prevent theft, corruption, and  misuse of resources by unauthorized individuals.

Almost certainly, there will be other foundations that do just as good a job, but are constantly laboring under the burdon of being in the shadow of their more over-powered competition.

Very likely, the vast majority of people will have some complaints about the way things are done, and some inventive and creative types will yearn for the older, more free times when they could design their own programs to do what they wanted to the way they wanted to, but are willing to make the changes necessary to get along with the juggernaut that, say what you like, is the biggest game in town, and DOES get results.  Even if it can’t help everyone, and the system often fails some people (particularly those who can’t figure out how to work it).

And I would be willing to bet that there will be the “true believers” who honestly believe that the height of charitable effectiveness has been reached.  That this is the pinnacle, and that no more a perfect system could ever be designed.

At any rate, it will be interesting, and it will be (kinda) new, and it will, most likely be measurably better than the chaos that is the immediate alternative.