The Giving Pledge
The Giving Pledge is a campaign to encourage the wealthiest people in the world to make a commitment to give most of their wealth to philanthropic causes. The campaign specifically focuses on billionaires and was made public in 2010 by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. The Huffington Post reported in April 2012 that "81 billionaires committed to giving at least half of their fortunes to charity".
As of July 2013, 113 billionaire individuals, couples and one family group have signed the pledge
The Giving Pledge is a commitment by the world's wealthiest individuals and families to dedicate the majority of their wealth to philanthropy.
LIST OF CURRENT PLEDGERS: http://givingpledge.org/
The Global Force
Called the Gates Foundation
By Carol J. Loomis, FORTUNE Magazine June 2006
The foundation works heavily through partners (nongovernmental organizations, usually) and has focused on big causes. Its original giving was directed at providing U.S. libraries free online access - and today more than 99% are hooked up.
The foundation then broadened its efforts to global health, on which it now spends around 60% of its funds. Much of that is beamed at what Bill Gates calls "the Big Three diseases": malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis. The foundation is both pushing to discover a preventive AIDS vaccine and to deliver antiretrovirals to people already afflicted with the disease.
In other areas, spending is focused on making medical "leaps" - the discovery, say, of a chemical that would block malaria-transmitting mosquitoes from smelling humans.
The national drive, meanwhile, is riveted on improving high schools, which Bill Gates has called "obsolete."
The foundation and its partners have started 900 new schools and "redesigned" 700 others.
The Giving Pledge
40 Billionaires
Pledge to Give Away Half
Created on August 2010 12:36
Remember the Buffett challenge to get billionaires to give away half of their wealth? The investment genius from Omaha along with that computer-oriented piker from Seattle, Bill Gates, now have 40 billionaires who have signed onto this campaign, with letters expressing their charitable intent posted at givingpledge.org.
Buffett and Gates started buttonholing their rich and famous (or not so famous) peers from the Forbes 400 and ended up calling 70 to get 40, though they don’t plan to stop. The list, however, seems heavily weighted to billionaires who have already established big foundations and seemed well on their way to pledging billions to philanthropic institutions that they controlled. Some of the names on the list are well known in foundation circles, though billionaire philanthropy need not end up buried in foundation endowments.
LIST OF CURRENT PLEDGERS: http://givingpledge.org/
Pledge to Give Away Half
Gains Billionaire Adherents
By STEPHANIE STROMPublished: August 4, 2010
More than three dozen billionaires, including well-known philanthropists like David Rockefeller and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg
of New York and less familiar big donors like Lorry I. Lokey, founder
of Business Wire, have promised at least half of their fortunes to
charity, joining a program that Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett started in June to encourage other wealthy people to give.
Billionaire Spanx Founder
Sara Blakely
Will Donate Half of her Fortune
The First Woman to join The Giving Pledge
Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, became the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world through her successful shapewear line. Now, she is also the first female to join Warren Buffett and Bill Gates’ Giving Pledge.
Ms Blakely, 42, worth $1billion according to Forbes, has committed to giving at least of half of her wealth to charity.
Ms Blakely, who owns 100per cent of her privately held company and recently topped a list of America's 50 Most Powerful Mothers, recalled to Forbes how after she appeared on the magazine's cover, she was invited to dine with Bill and Melinda Gates in Miami.
The duo proposed the Giving Pledge to her (current pledgers include Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, and New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg), and she spent a few months mulling it over.
Deciding to join The Giving Pledge, she told CNN Money that she told her three-year-old son, Lazer, she was going to give away at least half of her money - and that she hoped one day he think she had done the right thing. 'Okay, Mommy,' he said, 'can we do a puzzle now?'
Warren E. Buffett distributed 17.5 million Class B
shares of Berkshire Hathaway on Monday to the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, a gift valued at about $2 billion, based on Friday’s closing
price.
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