Melinda Gates, MacKenzie Scott, and Lynn Schusterman Will Donate $40 Million to gender Equality Projects

 

American philanthropist and the ex-wife of Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates along with MacKenzie Scott and Lynn Schusterman have donated $40 million on Thursday to four projects, promoting gender equality. The projects are in higher education, minority communities, tech, and caregiving.

The receivers of the awards are the winners of a funding competition named The Equality Can’t Wait for Challenge. The competition started in 2020 and its primary goal is to widen the spectrum of women’s power and influence in America. An affiliate of the MacArthur Foundation, Lever for Change announced on Thursday that the winners were chosen from over 500 candidates who come from all over the country. Each and every winner will be getting $10 million as an award.

Equality Can’t-Wait will be working towards giving an equal environment for women. It will be building a stronger Care Infrastructure. It is a project that is taken up by several organizations working on the perception of caregiving in society. It is also offering more changes in tech for women so that more women are given opportunities in the tech
industry. The Girls Inc.’s Project Accelerate is created to help women to go through education and career. And the last one is and The Future is Indigenous Women. It works with businesses owned by Native American women.

The three of the funders have also contributed to gender equality projects in the past. And it was French Gates’ company Pivotal Ventures that arranged the competition. The company has promised to spend $1 billion on such projects in the United States. The money will be spent by Pivotal that has been investing in high-risk and for-profit bodies and has become quite involved in politics. Also, it has the option to not reveal information about which
groups it funds.

French Gates has said that they have the power to break the patterns of history. They want to want to take gender equality to a higher level by continuing to support projects like the winners. The winners will be elevating the status of women and girls. MacKenzie Scott has donated $8 billion in funding so far since last year. She had only good things to say about the winners.

The additional $8 billion will be equally divided between the two finalists. One of them is helping women fight physical, sexual, and other types of violence caused by their spouse or partners. And the other one is working to make young women more active in the political field. The director of strategic partnerships and initiatives of Pivotal Ventures, Nicole Bates has refused to talk about how Scott and her new husband Dan Jewett got involved with the competition.

French Gates is still a co-chair at the biggest charitable foundation in the world, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She decided that she will resign after two years if she cannot continue working in the foundation with her ex-husband Bill Gates.