Melinda French Gates Pledges $250 Million to Support Women’s Health

Philanthropist Melinda French Gates pledged $250 million on Wednesday to support women’s health.

Donations to organizations that serve women and girls have historically represented less than 2 percent of all charitable gifts in the United States. In 2021, these organizations received $10.2 billion in philanthropic support, according to the Women & Girls Index, which tracks charitable giving to organizations that support women and girls in the U.S.

French Gates, who has some 20 years of experience funding global health through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, made a $1 billion commitment in May to support women and families around the world. The recent $250 million pledge is part of that commitment.

French Gates left the Gates Foundation, which she founded with her then-husband billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in the 1990s, earlier this year. In 2015, French Gates founded Pivotal Ventures, which uses different kinds of funding like venture capital investments, philanthropic grant-making and advocacy funding to “advance social progress in areas where it has stalled.”

The $250 million will be given through an open call for nonprofits to apply for funding. At least 100 nonprofit organizations globally will receive between $1 million and $5 million in unrestricted funding. While the grant competition, called Action for Women’s Health, will prioritize giving to organizations for whom the funding will make a big difference, there is no organization size requirement to be eligible for the competition.

Haven Ley, chief strategy officer at Pivotal Ventures, told The Associated Press (AP) that the grant competition was a “curtain raiser” to a likely new focus on funding women’s health around the world. Pivotal Ventures has previously primarily funded organizations aimed at advancing women’s power in the U.S.

“By focusing on women’s health, she’s expanded her definition of women’s power to include a precondition that women must have their health to be powerful,” Ley said of French Gates.

Lever for Change, a nonprofit affiliate of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, is running the grant competition. The nonprofit previously worked with French Gates and MacKenzie Scott, a billionaire author and philanthropist previously married to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to give $40 million in 2019 to support nonprofits building women’s power in the U.S.

The deadline for nonprofits to register for the French Gates’ open call is December 3, and the process of picking the recipients of the grant competition will run into the end of 2025.

“Most of philanthropy remains invitation-only decision making behind closed doors,” Cecilia Conrad, CEO of Lever for Change, told the AP. “And what we have developed is a way to do an open call, a way to broaden access to philanthropic opportunities, that is also a process that is humane and equitable.”

In May, French Gates wrote about the grant competition in an opinion piece for The New York Times.

“I hope to lift up groups with personal connections to the issues they work on,” she wrote at the time. “People on the front lines should get the attention and investment they deserve, including from me.”

This article includes reporting from The Associated Press.