Helping Children Gain An Education Starts With Helping The Home

While exploring the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s blog, Impatient Optimists, I learned about a great program that has met with so much success, that it has caught the attention of our U.S. Deputy Secretary of HUD.

The program, called the McCarver Elementary Special Housing Program started in Tacoma, Washington where for children of the Hilltop neighborhood, maintaining a stable education is difficult. Because of family financial difficulties, it is frequent for kids to enroll in school and soon have to leave. It has been recognized that these kids cannot gain the proper education they need if they must come and go often.

Now here comes the great idea that I admire: two sectors, the Tacoma Housing Authority and Tacoma Public Schools have joined forces to combat this inconsistency in children’s education. Families who join the program are required to keep their kids enrolled in the school and work towards gaining financial stability. In return the families will be given five years of housing support.

I think this is great philanthropy. Sometimes I feel like the relationship between school and home goes unrecognized. It’s nice to see the two sectors collaborating to work towards this because school and home are inevitably intertwined. I feel like for some families to gain financial stability, all they need is to be given an opportunity and recourses to lift themselves up. A little help can go a long way.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: A Cost-Effective Approach to Philanthropy

Learn and grow: measuring and altering our tactics in philanthropy can lead to positive change.

Bill Gates puts his money where is mouth is. His approach to philanthropy is one that is met with disapproval by some nonprofit leaders. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has built itself upon the idea of analyzing the efficiency of its tactics and its outcomes. The foundation learns from their mistakes and successes and uses them to improve current methods in creating positive world change. The Gates foundation is also known for taking risks, often putting time, money, and effort into new ideas.

Bill Gates’ thoughts on university productivity in the article Bill Gates Says He’ll Stick to Giving Priorities Until “Something Dramatic” Is Achieved, are certainly a reflection of the values of the foundation. I was astonished to learn from the article that there are some universities in America with a 7 percent completion rate. With this fact in mind, he made an astute observation about higher education, one that I myself had overlooked.

He presented the notion that the prestige and value of a college is frequently judged by the competitiveness of admissions.  I agree with Gates when he says universities are evaluated on the wrong criteria. I think U.S colleges should be judged by not only their completion rate, but the employment rate of its graduates. Gates has made a very important point—it’s the individual that emerges from college rather than the one that enters that matters most. The point of college is to create and nurture intelligent, well-rounded individuals. In other words, one’s skills should improve and be refined over the course of college—if not, then perhaps the college is not doing its job.

So how can we judge whether colleges are doing their job? This is where the foundation’s methods of measuring and analyzing have great value. In my opinion, the concept is logical and cost-effective. If the goal of higher education is to produce intelligent, well-rounded individuals, we must discover the factors that support and bring us closer to those goals, and the ones that hinder progress. By means of measuring, we can identify these factors and strategically plan where our time, money, and effort should go. And walla, more bang for our buck.

I think the foundation’s approach is important, not just for improvement in America’s education, but also to our pursuit in ending hunger, lifting people out of poverty, and improving health. This approach is also a wise one; with limited funds, it makes sense to put careful thought and analysis into where money is allocated. What do you think of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s approach to making positive global change?