For Some Top Nonprofits, Changing the World Begins in Their Own Backyards Kirk Johnson - The New York Times
go to original April 9, 2016

The visitor center at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The founders of Microsoft took some of the billions of dollars they made and set out in the early 2000s to work on global health. (Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)

Inside the factory buildings at Cascade Designs, just south of downtown Seattle, camping and hiking gear for the rugged outdoor life of the Pacific Northwest has been manufactured since the early 1970s. But turn a corner and something new is coming off the shop floor: a compact, no-frills water purifier designed to bring clean water to struggling populations in rural Africa.

The device, able to chlorinate water by the 55-gallon drum, was designed with help from several big nonprofits, including one funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private philanthropy, and the United States military. And it is an example, in its mix of altruistic and profit-seeking motives, of how fortunes earned a generation ago at Microsoft, the computer software giant, are still shaping economic life here.

“It’s a new frontier for us,” said David Burroughs, the vice chairman of Cascade Designs, which was co-founded by his father, a former engineer at Boeing. Though the company’s old style lives on — buildings are named for well-known mountains, employees show up for work in hiking boots — 20 percent of the research and development budget, thanks to the grants, is now going to global health-related products.

Microsoft, co-founded by Mr. Gates and Paul G. Allen, put Seattle on the map as a tech-rich city before the boom of dot-coms. Mr. Gates and Mr. Allen then took some of the billions they made and, starting in the early to mid-2000s, set out to work on global health at the Gates Foundation, and fundamental science in cell and brain research at the Allen Institute.

The result: In trying to change the world, they are also changing their backyard. Their causes, such as clean water, sanitation and health, are spawning a new ecosystem of global health care companies, research institutes and academic expertise at places like the University of Washington.

Read the rest at The New York Times

Related: Bill and Melinda Gates: Two Superpowers We Wish We Had (GatesNotes.com)

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