Gates Foundation announces plans to address poverty in the U.S.

Devex
By Catherine Cheney

Bill and Melinda Gates during their trip to Atlanta, Georgia in October 2017. Photo by: Gates Foundation

SAN FRANCISCO — Today, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will formally launch its work on mobility from poverty in the United States. The announcement is an answer to the highly anticipated question of whether the largest foundation in the world will fight poverty at home as well as abroad.

The Gates Foundation is committing $158 million over four years to develop new strategies, improve coordination, and mobilize additional resources.

The foundation’s CEO Sue Desmond-Hellmann will make the announcement at the culminating event of the US Partnership on Mobility from Poverty, an initiative of the Urban Institute launched with funding from the Gates Foundation, in southeast Washington, D.C.

“We’re known for our work in education. We continue to believe strongly that education is one of the most effective bridges to opportunity in the United States. So we’re continuing with the foundation’s investments in education,” Desmond-Hellmann said on a call with reporters ahead of the announcement. “But during a decade of working in U.S. education, we keep bumping into the barrier of persistent poverty.”

The Gates Foundation spends $4 billion a year internationally. While nearly all of the $500 million that goes in to U.S. programs focuses on education, the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line increased from 12.7 to 14.2 percent between 2010 and 2016, and wealth inequality is on the rise in the U.S. Roughly 43 percent of children who are born into the bottom income quintile in America will still be there as adults.

While education will remain the Gates Foundation’s primary focus in the U.S, this move acknowledges that it is not the only intervention needed. Given the scope, along with the cost and complexity of solving poverty, the Gates Foundation wants to play two catalytic roles: Investing in public goods and creating an enabling environment for stakeholders, Desmond-Hellmann said.

This new strategy on mobility from poverty will sit under Allan Golston, president of the United States program. There is a focus on educational opportunity and student achievement but the strategy expands beyond education. The goal is to provide groups already working on economic mobility across the U.S. with the information and tools they need to be more effective.

The Gates Foundation has outlined five areas it plans to focus on: Closing data gaps; empowering local actors; improving coordination and leverage; analyzing the new economy; and increasing public understanding.

The approach
The US Partnership on Mobility from Poverty convened 24 experts, who spent two years identifying solutions to boost upward mobility in America. They came up with five mutually reinforcing strategies to move Americans out of poverty: Changing the narrative around poverty; creating access to jobs; ensuring that zip code is not destiny; providing support that empowers; and transforming data systems to increase accountability and transparency.

“As the first principle of our definition [of mobility from poverty], we absolutely have economic success. Income and assets and wage gains are fundamental. But they’re not enough,” said Nisha Patel, executive director of the US Partnership on Mobility from Poverty.

“A second and equally important principle that we’ve put forward is this notion of power and autonomy. Which is really about having a sense of agency over one’s life, as well as a say, in the trajectory of what happens in your community.

“And the third principle that we put forward as part of this definition is about being valued in community.”

Ryan Rippel, the Gates Foundation’s strategy adviser for U.S. poverty and economic mobility initiatives, said the work so far has been to fill data gaps. He mentioned recent work on racism and inequality by Raj Chetty, a professor of economics at Stanford University and one of the 24 members of the partnership, as one example of related work the Gates Foundation has supported so far.