PND (11/16/99) -- Patty Stonesifer, Gates Foundation Co-Chair, Profile

In 1997, at the age of forty, Patty Stonesifer left her executive position at Microsoft for early retirement as a multi-millionaire. While Stonesifer was looking forward to spending time with her two teenage sons and working as a part-time consultant for DreamWorks SKG, Bill and Melinda Gates were working on a project to provide donated computers to public libraries in poor neighborhoods. The Gateses invited Stonesifer to tour several libraries that would benefit from the initiative, and, feeling obliged, the former "Microsoftie" accepted. It took just one trip to a small town in South Dakota, where the local Rotary had pooled their money to buy the library a single computer, for Stonesifer to agree to head up the Gateses' library project.

With no previous professional philanthropic experience beyond her own million-dollar donation in 1998 to the Multi-Service Centers, a Redmond, Washington-based family crisis program to which she had volunteered a considerable amount of time, Stonesifer has become a central figure in the Gateses' philanthropic work.

Currently, Stonesifer serves with William H. Gates, Sr. as co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the $17.1 billion philanthropy formed by the recent merger of the William H. Gates and Gates Learning foundations. (See http://fdncenter.org/pnd/990824/002870.html for more on the merger.) In order to maximize the impact of the new foundation's giving, Stonesifer has helped narrow its focus to issues related to global health and education.

Stonesifer points out that although Gates's assets are vast, a gift of just $350 each to every American would extinguish his fortune. "You can do a lot with the money," Stonesifer says, "or you can dribble it away. One reason why Bill and Melinda are committed to giving it back is that it makes most sense when you divide it into what it can do. As a giant bucket, it's kind of an irrelevant number."

Brief biographies of the leaders of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are available here.

Trish Deitch Rohrer. "Meet MS. Moneybags." Elle Magazine, December 1999. (Volume XV Number 4 NO. 172.)

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