Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates teamed up in 2010 to form the Giving Pledge to encourage more of the super wealthy to publicly commit to donating the bulk of their fortunes to charity. Fifteen years later, Buffett is 94, the Gates couple is divorced and newcomers are dwindling. Still, it has its believers.
Marie Dageville, a former hospice nurse in the San Francisco Bay Area, freely admits that she knew nothing about charitable giving. Until 2020. That was the turning point: In September that year, software firm Snowflake–where her husband, Benoit Dageville, is a cofounder–went public. With the stock soaring, the couple instantly became billionaires. Not long afterward, Marie, now 58, decided to become a full-time philanthropist, working to give away their suddenly huge fortune to causes her family cares about. “The most important thing for me was to act quickly,” she tells Forbes. “For me, the urgency was now. It was not in ten years or even in two years,” explaining that she’s concerned about threats to the earth’s climate and the reduction of foreign aid to help HIV patients.
The Giving Pledge has been a welcoming forum for the kind of collaborative philanthropy that Dageville prioritizes. Her latest collaboration is an initiative announced on Monday called The Beginnings Fund, a $500 million, five-year commitment with the Gates Foundation, the UAE’s Mohamed bin Zayed Foundation for Humanity and several other donors to prevent 300,000 avoidable newborn and maternal deaths in sub-Saharan Africa, working in conjunction with countries’ ministries of health.
As the Giving Pledge turns 15 this year, Forbes spoke with Dageville and four other members of the pledge about why they joined, what they’ve learned and what more they’d like to see happen. Since the Giving Pledge launched in August 2010 with 40 members–including many couples–its ranks have grown to a current 245 pledgers. What started as a group of U.S. philanthropists now counts members from 30 countries, including China, India and Indonesia. It’s not for everyone. The 245 members account for just 8% of the world’s 3,028 billionaires on Forbes’ latest annual list.
In recent years, the appeal of joining the pledge looks to be waning, particularly against a backdrop of steady growth in the number of the world’s billionaires. After a handful of years when the Giving Pledge announced anywhere from 13 to 19 new members annually, just seven new pledgers joined in 2023, and four in 2024. This year’s new members will be announced in late May.
The Giving Pledge, an independent group operated as an affiliate of the Gates Foundation, walks a fine line between encouraging charitable giving while preserving the privacy of its ultrawealthy members to give when and how they want. There is no way to know, for example, the full dollar amount of the charitable giving to date by pledgers. Nor is it clear how many members–including more than 17 who have died–have actually fulfilled their promise to give away half their fortune during their lifetimes or in their will. Cara Bradley, deputy director of ultra high net worth philanthropy at the Gates Foundation, whose team supports the Giving Pledge, mentions three deceased donors who have met the pledge and suggests there are others: Chuck Feeney, a cofounder of airport chain Duty Free Shoppers, who inspired the Pledge and had achieved the goal before it was created; Utah chemicals entrepreneur Jon M. Huntsman and family; and Business Wire founder Lorry Lokey.
Since the Pledge was created, the relationship among the founding trio has changed dramatically. Melinda French Gates and Bill Gates divorced in 2021. French Gates stayed as co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation until June 2024 (since renamed Gates Foundation), and now she focuses on her own philanthropic and advocacy efforts, supporting women and girls in the U.S. and globally, while remaining engaged with the Giving Pledge. Buffett–who will turn 95 in August–has not attended the annual Giving Pledge meeting in recent years. That may be because he’s reportedly had a falling out with Bill or because of his advanced age.
Those with whom Forbes spoke for this article mentioned they were initially concerned about joining the Giving Pledge. “We’d known Bill [Gates] for a while and had been talking about it, but we were hesitating,” recalls Rohini Nilekani, a former journalist and the wife of Indian tech billionaire Nandan Nilekani. “To join is to say, ‘Look how big and wealthy I am, and I’m going to do this great thing.’” After giving it more thought, however, the Nilekanis decided there was value in the intent indicated by joining. “Wealth creation will work for India only if the wealthy behave responsibly and become trustees of their wealth,” Rohini Nikelani explains.
Giving Pledge members donate to a broad range of causes, everything from childhood immunizations and malaria treatments to Jewish causes and early childhood education. Below is a snapshot of the five pledgers who spoke with Forbes and their charitable giving.
Joyce and Bill Cummings visited with students in classroom at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village, created for orphans of the genocide and AIDS in Rwanda
The Cummings Foundation
Bill and Joyce Cummings
Citizenship: U.S.
Net worth: $1 billion
Year they joined the Giving Pledge: 2011
Areas of giving: Higher education, Boston area nonprofits
Bill, who built a fortune with his Boston-area commercial property firm Cummings Properties, worked with his wife Joyce to donate some of their buildings to their Cummings Foundation. The couple also created nonprofit senior housing centers in the Boston area. They’ve also supported several area colleges and universities, including the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University; the Cummings School of Nursing at Endicott College; and the Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology.
On why they joined the pledge: “We were doing things very quietly and decided, with some urging, that perhaps it would be better if we did go public with our giving—and that would encourage others to do the same,” Joyce explains.
On what they’ve learned: “We talked to Bill Gates and Warren about possible involvement in Rwanda. We didn’t really know much about the country and asked their advice as to whether that was a viable place to go.” Assured that it was, the Cummings went on to become major supporters of a health sciences university in Kigali, the University of Global Health Equity.
COURTESY Marie Dageville
Marie and Benoit Dageville
Citizenship: U.S. and France (dual citizenship)
Net worth: $1.1 billion
Year they joined the Pledge: 2023
Areas of giving: Global health, social equity, climate justice
Marie and Benoit grew up in France, met there and moved to the U.S. in the mid 1990s; Benoit worked at software giant Oracle for years before cofounding cloud-based data storage firm Snowflake in 2012. Marie is now a full-time philanthropist and runs the family’s charitable entity, called The Patchwork Collective, with their son Cedric and his wife Rachel. The family does their giving through a donor-advised fund and have been granting about $30 million annually.
Why collaborative giving: ”For me, it was absolutely essential to join other people who had knowledge of the philanthropic world and what needed to be done.”
What concerns her now: “The climate emergency is getting even more important with the decisions that have been made recently. And the cuts to foreign aid are having a tremendous, catastrophic effect on people.”
Badr Jafar (right) presents a sustainability award in 2016 to the Prince of Wales—now the U.K.’s King Charles III—in Abu Dhabi.
pool/getty images
Badr Jafar and Razan Al Mubarak
Citizenship: U.A.E.
Net worth: N/A
Year he joined the Pledge: 2019
Areas of giving: Philanthropic infrastructure
Jafar’s father Hamid Jafar founded Crescent Group in the U.A.E. in the 1970s, which began with oil and gas firm Crescent Petroleum. Badr Jafar is president of Crescent Enterprises, an infrastructure and investment arm of the family group. Badr’s wife Razan Al Mubarak is managing director of Environment Agency Abu Dhabi. Unlike most other pledgers, Jafar has promised to publish an update to his philanthropic activities every three years on the Giving Pledge website.
Among the initiatives Jafar and Al Mubarak have launched: HasanaH (“good deed” in Arabic), a community-driven digital platform aimed at maximizing the impact of Islamic charitable giving. Launched in 2020, it now hosts more than 4,600 vetted projects in more than 140 countries.
On the challenge of philanthropy in the Middle East: “Too much philanthropy in our region of the world is isolated and invisible, separated and secret. Which is why one of our broader objectives in making this pledge is to encourage more open discussion, knowledge-sharing and active cooperation between philanthropists, businesses and public sector institutions,” the couple wrote in their letter when they joined the Pledge.
On what he’s learned: “I have learned a great deal from other Pledge members, not just about how they structure their giving, but about the personal journeys behind it – what has worked, what has not, and why. These conversations have also helped me think about how to build something lasting that future generations might want to be part of.”
Rohini Nilekani, a former journalist, runs her charitable giving separately from her husband Nandan.
Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies
Rohini and Nandan Nilekani
Citizenship: India
Net worth: $3 billion
Year they joined the pledge: 2017
Areas of giving: Education, climate & environment, gender, mental health
Nandan Nilekani is cofounder and chairman of Indian IT services giant Infosys. His wife Rohini, a former journalist, runs her own philanthropic operation separate from Nandan’s. They both support their EkStep foundation, a platform dedicated to improving literacy and numeracy.
On responsibility: “Sooner rather than later I realized that wealth comes with both responsibility and opportunity. The responsibility of wealth. ….coming from a country like India, is to help make your society better,” says Rohini.
On failure: “Like every other philanthropist we learned by doing, we failed, and we learned from our failure, or at least tried to. …I wish we would look at failure seriously in the Giving Pledge, too. That we get to a safe space to share that ‘I tried this, it didn’t work, and I learned something.’ And to admit that we can fail and we do fail. How do you learn from it? How do you share it?”
What concerns her now: “I look at what is happening in society, which new problems are happening, especially with young people, what’s happening with mental health, especially of young people, especially in the digital age. How do we equip civil society organizations for operating in the digital age?”
Tahir during a visit to a refugee camp in Jordan.
Mayapada Group
Tahir
Citizenship: Indonesia
Net worth: $5.1 billion
Year he joined the Pledge: 2013
Areas of giving: Health, education, disaster relief
Tahir, who goes by one name, founded conglomerate Mayapada, which operates in banking, health care, real estate and media. He is the only Indonesian member of the Giving Pledge. Drawing from his Christian faith, he has supported refugees and victims of natural disasters, often collaborating with the United Nations High Commissioner For Refugees (UNHCR). Tahir also has been a supporter of The Global Fund to Fight AIDs, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
After the U.S. pulled troops out of Afghanistan: “The next day I called UNICEF. I asked UNICEF, ‘Can you give my money to the children and women in Afghanistan?’ ….Then I gave $1 million to UNICEF.”
On refugee camps: “I’ve been in the refugee [camps]—especially for the Syrians, where they have a very big refugee camp in Jordan–four times. One time, I even spent my birthday there.”
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