Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Bill and Melinda Gates believe every life has equal value. In 2000, they created the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help reduce inequities in the United States and around the world.

Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, the foundation is led by co-chairs Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, and William H. Gates Sr., and by CEO Patty Stonesifer.

Our work begins with Bill and Melinda Gates’s belief that all lives have equal value. We think all people deserve the chance to have healthy, productive lives. We have been developing a process that helps us decide how to spend our time, effort, and money so we can accomplish that goal for as many people as possible. This process helps us choose the issues we will work on and the groups to which we will make grants.

Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett set our overarching priorities such as improving health and reducing extreme poverty in the developing world and improving high school education in the U.S. and they establish high-level goals for our grantmaking programs. Then our three program teams devise a strategy for meeting these goals.