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Bill Gates To Give Away All Of His Wealth And End The Gates Foundation In The Next 20 Years 

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Bill Gates announced this week that he plans to distribute “virtually all” of his wealth within the next 20 years through The Gates Foundation, and will then close the foundation on December 31st, 2045. 

Initially, when Bill and Melinda Gates created the foundation in 2000, they intended for the organization to continue its work using their remaining fortune for several decades after they died. 

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Gates, the founder of Microsoft who’s worth about $200 billion, stated he decided to make the change because he didn’t want to wait that long to give away most of his wealth.

The Gates Foundation typically provides funding for health, foreign aid, and other public assistance programs, all of which the Trump Administration is planning on removing funding for, which helped lead Gates to his decision. 

According to CNN, Gates wants to accelerate the foundation’s work on global health and equity initiatives. He’s also hoping that his work will inspire other billionaires to use their wealth in a similar way. 

Gates, his ex-wife, and Warren Buffett have long been a figure in philanthropy. In 2010, they created the Giving Pledge to motivate wealthy people to donate a majority of their fortunes to charitable causes during, and after, their life. The pledge now has over 240 signatories. 

“People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that ‘he died rich’ will not be one of them,” Gates wrote in a blog post. 

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“There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people.”  

The Gates Foundation has already given away more than $100 billion in various funding since its founding 25-years-ago. The organization is known as one of the world’s largest philanthropies, and has helped aid the development of new vaccines, diagnostic tools, and treatment deliveries to fight various diseases around the world. 

Following the pandemic, Gates has accelerated the work they do through the foundation, which called this move the “largest philanthropic commitment in modern history.”

The Gates Foundation specifically will be focusing on three major goals within the next 20 years. They want to end preventable deaths of mothers and their babies, eradicate deadly infectious diseases, and bring the hundreds of millions of people around the world living in poverty out of their situations.

Gates also wrote that the development and advancements in artificial intelligence will help with his accelerated plan. Following the 50 year anniversary of Microsoft’s founding, Gates said this is the perfect way to celebrate the success and advancement of technology. 

“It feels right that I celebrate the milestone by committing to give away the resources I earned through the company.”

eye

YouTuber MrBeast Helps 1,000 Blind People See Again by Funding Cataract Surgeries

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Viral YouTuber MrBeast paid for 1,000 people, who were blind or almost blind but could not otherwise afford cataract surgery, to have their vision restored. The 24-year-old is known for his large donations and philanthropic stunts.

MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, runs the fourth-most-subscribed channel on YouTube. Donaldson told viewers in a video posted on Saturday, “We’re curing a thousand people’s blindness.” The video, titled “1,000 Blind People See For The First Time,” showed a montage of before and after footage of patients seeing with clear vision post-surgery.

Donaldson also gifted some patients money up to $50,000 and gave another patient a Tesla.

Dr. Jeff Levenson, an ophthalmologist and surgeon, performed the initial procedures in Jacksonville, Florida. For over 20 years, Dr. Levenson has coordinated the “Gift of Sight” program, which offers uninsured people who are legally blind due to cataracts access to free cataract surgery.

In the video posted on Saturday, Dr. Levenson emphatically stated, “Half of all blindness in the world is people who need a 10-minute surgery.”

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Donaldson’s team reached out to local homeless shelters and free clinics to compile a list of people in the Jacksonville region who required cataract surgery but could not afford the procedure. Forty people made it into the final roster. Dr. Levenson spent 11 consecutive hours performing all their surgeries on the same day.

Dr. Levenson said that the patients were grateful and were in “disbelief that somebody would actually seek them out to rescue them from blindness and then have the kindness and generosity of spirit to offer the surgery.”

After having cataract correction surgery himself, he felt compelled to help others access the same procedure.

“In the days and weeks after my own cataract surgery, I was stunned by how bright and beautiful and vivid the world was. But I was shocked by the idea that there are hundreds of millions, probably 200 million people around the world, who are blind or nearly blind from cataracts and who don’t have access to the surgery.”

Donaldson explained in his video how this procedure could be performed so quickly.

“If you’re wondering how the surgery allows people to see again, it’s because the lens in their eyes got so cloudy that they can’t see through it. So, the surgeon uses a tiny vacuum to suck up the clouded lens and replace it with an artificial one. This surgery is that simple. They can see again.”

When Dr. Levenson initially got a phone call from Donaldson’s team in September, he was hesitant about the initiative.

“I had never heard of MrBeast, so I almost hung up. But I gratefully did not hang up.”

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Dr. Levenson eventually connected Donaldson’s team with SEE International, an organization for which he serves as the chief medical officer.

SEE International works to help patients in need get free eye care around the world. With the organization’s reach, the team could do corrective surgeries on a thousand patients, spanning Jamaica, Honduras, Namibia, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, Vietnam and Kenya, in three weeks.

Dr. Levenson said he hopes the video, coupled with Donaldson’s popularity and generosity, will inspire “a concerted effort to end needless blindness.”

“If MrBeast can light a fire, and if we can get governmental and private support behind it, we can end half of all the blindness in the world without all that much cost and with incredible gains in human productivity and human potential.”

Donaldson shared the same sentiment in a tweet posted on Monday.

“I don’t understand why curable blindness is a thing. Why don’t governments step in and help? Even if you’re thinking purely from a financial standpoint it’s hard to see how they don’t roi on taxes from people being able to work again.”

MacKenzie Scott Donates $10 Million To National Latino Educational Nonprofit

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Excelencia in Education is a prominent national nonprofit in America that measures how successful colleges and universities are in accepting, educating, and graduating Latino students. Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has made a historic donation to the nonprofit, giving them a $10 million grant. 

This grant marks the largest sum the organization has received since its founding 17 years ago. Deborah Santiago, the co-founder and CEO of Excelencia, spoke on this historic donation to the media this week. 

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“It was very powerful, after years of hard work, to see this validation in our community. That was powerful.” 

In the US, college enrollment among Latino students has actually been on the rise within the past decade. However, the issue lies in systemic issues that prevent this particular demographic from actually completing their education and receiving a college degree. 22% of all Latino adults have earned an associate degree or higher, compared to 39% of the general population. 

Some of the specific barriers that Excelencia works to combat in the US’s educational system include high tuition costs, limited knowledge of college in general, and trying to balance work, family, and education all at once. 

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A number of colleges that Excelencia has worked closely with in the past have also received some funding from Scott, including  El Paso Community College, Florida International University, Long Beach City College, University of Texas at San Antonio and University of Illinois at Chicago.

Santiago said she was “not expecting a $10 million grant when I got an email on a late Friday afternoon asking when I was available to speak over the phone about something important. The donation is invigorating, we’re a small nonprofit and it is not easy to get resources, much less unrestricted resources,” Santiago said.

“To say, here’s $10 million, you pick what you want to do with it, no strings attached, no reports required, allows us to do many things we see our community wants and needs to be able to do that.”

Santiago said she hopes the $10 million “will bring attention to other potential funders — we really want to get the kind of investment that’s going to serve our community.”

Scott has recently made around $2.7 billion worth of charitable donations as a part of her philanthropic journey that she’s been on since divorcing the world’s richest man. Her current net worth is valued at $53 billion; $8 billion of which she’s already donated this year alone.

Hurricane

An Oyster Bar In Florida Pulls $14,000 Off Their Walls For Hurricane Dorian Relief

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It’s been about a month since Hurricane Dorian devastated the Bahamas, Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Florida, and more southern states. These parts of the world are still recovering and have been left in complete disarray by the hurricane that only grew bigger and bigger before touching land. The storm reached a category 5 level, the highest it could be, making it one of 5 hurricanes to reach that level of severity within the past four hurricane seasons. Climate change and rising ocean temperatures are only further fueling the hurricanes; warm water temperatures add energy to the storms causing them to grow at substantial rates. 

Wind speeds reached up to 225 miles per hour, and sustained that intensity for 24 hours in the Bahamas, making it the most powerful and prolonged hurricane to hit the Atlantic, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists in the USA (USCUSA). A majority of the Bahama Islands is 15 feet above sea level, Dorian was a storm that reached up to 23 feet above sea level, leaving a majority of the island completely submerged and destroyed, 60% of the island, to be more specific, was left underwater after the hurricane finally passed, also according to the USCUSA. 

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Now, four weeks after the tragic hurricane, the Bahamas are recovering, but at an extremely slow rate. Hundreds of people are still missing, most are presumed dead. Most of the island is still left without electricity or running water of any kind, and heavy machinery used to clear debris in only just arriving. Many parts of the island remain abandoned from the people who were able to flee the island before the storm and while aid teams and clean up crews are starting to work on the island more heavily, the recovery process is reminding many of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, a storm their still recovering from.

An oyster bar in Florida, surprisingly, saw the devastation in their state first hand, and when they heard about the lack of financial backing for recovery teams all throughout the areas affected by Dorian, they knew something had to be done. The Oyster Bar is located in Siesta Keys, and over the years the bar has kept a novelty tradition alive that just might help the recovery process for the storm speed up. 

The Siesta Key Oyster Bar has become a huge tourist attraction for its very creative decorating style. The staff encourages every customer who comes in to write or draw on a dollar bill and attach it to the walls and/or ceiling. In fact, the bar has been open for about 16 years, making its entire design aesthetic at this point nothing but colorful dollar bills hanging from every angle, at least that was the aesthetic. 

After the owners saw the devastation that its state, and more importantly the Bahamas, has endured they knew they had to do something to help move the recovery process along. So the entire staff spent the whole past month removing all the beautifully decorated bills, which were heavily secured using a staple gun, so removal had to be a delicate process to avoid ripping. 

Once word got out to Siesta Key locals on what the bar was doing, hundreds of patrons began coming into the bar and giving in $5’s, $20’s, even $100 bills. This week, the owner finally went to the bank to count up what they’ve collected, and to their surprise the total reached $14,000. According to ABC News, “Jill Pedigo, Beth Owen-Cipielewski and their husbands would take money off the walls and donate some of it to local charities. Hale said they once gave it to a safe house for battered women.” This time, they wrapped up the bills, placed them in a bin, and went straight to the Red Cross Foundation, most likely one of the most unique donations they’ve ever received. 

“After we saw the videos and everything that came out of the Bahamas, it was unreal, and we all thought, what better reason to pay it forward? Honestly, I’m shocked, and I think the staff is shocked, I don’t think we ever expected it to amount [to] that much. Knowing it was such a lump sum of that magnitude is overwhelming.” Siesta Key Oyster Bar’s general manager Kristin Hale told ABC News.