Global and National and Still Local: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Washington State

This October 20, 2020 webinar, a part of the CGLR Funder to Funder Conversations series, explored how Seattle-based funders are collaborating in support of the Road Map Project, a collective-impact effort advancing more equitable systems and policies to ensure children and young people in the South Seattle region have the opportunity to thrive. 

At the beginning of the webinar David Bley, who is stepping down after leading the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s efforts in the Pacific Northwest at the end of October, offered his reflections on his 14 years of leadership at the Gates Foundation. In a global foundation that invests billions annually, leveraging science, technology and evidence to save millions of lives every year through the eradication of polio and other major efforts, Bley’s budget aimed at Washington State is relatively modest, and his team’s efforts were often much more relationship-based and multidimensional that those of the larger foundation. Foundation leaders provided him with a great deal of autonomy to respond to the local challenges and opportunities and test out strategies that differed from the evidence-based approaches applied in the foundation’s global efforts. Over time, he also learned to apply scientific rigor and discipline in ways that balance relationship-based and evidence-based approaches to support community generated priorities. 

Bley then engaged in conversation with two of his local partners to discuss the Road Map Project — a cradle-to-career initiative that has been engaging numerous individuals, programs and funders in South Seattle and South King County to advance equitable systems changes to benefit children and families in the area’s seven school districts. Katherina Rosqueta of the Center for High Impact Philanthropy moderated this panel conversation that included Bley along with Sally Gillis of the Seattle Foundation and Lynda Petersen of the Community Center for Education Results. The panelists discussed the ways in which public and private funders participating in the project’s Aligned Funders Group have aligned their investments and the lessons learned during the first 10 years of this collaborative effort. 

Some of the key takeaways they shared include: 

• Systems-level changes that advance more equitable policies and practices are necessary to achieve and sustain improvements in child-level outcomes. In retrospect, the partners recognized that they should have been more intentional in addressing racial equity and enhancing the capacity of communities, organizations and leaders of color to drive this change. 
• The Road Map Project’s Aligned Funders Group enables a broad range of public and private funders to pool and/or align their funding, identifying and addressing funding gaps to support children, families and communities across the cradle-to-career continuum. 
• When it launched, Gates and other local foundations made a 10-year commitment to the project. Gates, the largest local funder in Seattle, was intentional about providing space for other local funders to invest in and feel ownership of the Road Map Project. This long-term commitment and diversification of funding helped signal the importance of the effort. 
• In addition to funding, foundations can help secure federal grants, build popular support for voter-approved public investment in human services and public education by the city and county, and encourage their philanthropic peers to invest in systemic change efforts in coordinated ways. 
• The current nationwide movement around civil rights, police violence and the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on people of color offers the opportunity for funders to think differently about who they fund, how they fund and the length of commitment for their investments. Changes could include increased investments in the people power, parent power and community power necessary to achieve systems change. Given current conditions, the community foundation has stepped up in new ways both locally and statewide to raise more private funding, aimed at priorities set by Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) organizations and leaders, and in coordinated ways that are likely to have lasting structural improvements for regional philanthropy. 
• The investments in the Road Map Project, in addition to supporting child- and system-level outcomes, have provided a platform for ongoing improvement and innovation that can enable partners to tackle other existing and future challenges. During the pandemic, funders were able to leverage that infrastructure to direct rapid-response funding to the community partners.