On a late sunny morning, I went to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation discovery center, which sits just next to the Space Needle in Seattle. There, I learned about the many different kinds of philanthropic endeavors the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is currently undertaking. These endeavors include work in foreign countries, mainly Africa, but also many helping out organizations in the Pacific Northwest.

When I first stepped into the Bill and Melinda Gates Discovery Center from the cold outside, I was immediately greeted by one of the employees with an unusual level of warmth, similar to that of the room. The level of friendliness was almost unusual, even for an employee, making the place immediately seem almost… Too comfortable. For what seemed like little incentive, the employee seemed overly enthusiastic in making me feel invited, asking “have you been here before?” to which I answered no, and she immediately followed up with suggesting I start by watching an introduction video, and then explore the exhibits. The way she spoke seemed like she had a script ingrained in her head, and what was probably intended to make me feel welcome actually made me feel uncomfortable and disbelieving of the philanthropic vibe the place was trying to give me. As if the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was using their supposed acts of philanthropy as an act of Tokenism, or making only a symbolic effort to do a particular thing, which in this case were two things: helping those in need and innovating for the future.

Despite the shaky start to my visit to the Bill and Melinda Gates Discovery Center that gave me a pretentious vibe about the place, as I explored the exhibits, I felt like there was some truth to the work the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation was doing. Sure, it is good for publicity and a positive public image to help those in need and openly encouraging innovation with your own money, but some of the organizations the foundation was donating to seemed to offer little benefit in promoting a good public image. There were hundreds of small charities and organizations of the like the foundation is donating to that seem to offer little publicity.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation actually has a database for all the smaller organizations they help. Most people do not care at all about this, so I cannot see much reason why the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation would donate to these small organizations unless they genuinely want to be philanthropic. Sure, they mention their largest donations like the ones shown above in this picture, with $100 million going to combating HIV and about $1.5 million going to college education for young workers who cannot afford it, but the overwhelming majority of their funding probably is and will probably continue to be ignored by the public sphere.

Some of the largest contributions to local organizations the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation displays. The amounts are not too large and are diverse, which makes me think that the work they are doing here is less for impressing the public and improving the Foundation’s public image and more for genuinely helping society. You could argue that having lots of small donations displayed here is meant to convey that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is contributing more than it is actually contributing, but if you were the them, do you not think it would be better for publicity to focus in one area with more impressive numbers? I think it is important to keep in mind that this is only the physical site of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation here, and the vast majority of people who are curious about the Foundation are more likely to try to find more information online where they cannot see the physical representations depicted above.

Besides their donations and other contributions to local organizations looking to help those in need in the Pacific Northwest, the much larger endeavor the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is much more well known for by the public are their humanitarian acts in Africa. I took several pictures as examples of the many different fields the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is helping in in Africa, ranging from food and water to education. I will explain more in the captions:

So at first this only made the pretentious vibe of the place more pronounced to me when I saw this first exhibit, because although I am sure anyone would be grateful for some miracle organization swooping in to their poverty stricken communities and giving fulfilling everyone’s food and water needs, the testimonials from “real people” this exhibit displays seem to suck up to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation so much that it does not seem like it was said by real people.

A close-up of a cooking pot one of the people who were helped by the Foundation used. The pot’s modern look, cleanliness, and the fact that it is a pot by an American company in the middle of a dirt poor village in Africa makes it seem very fake, which definitely made the claim of philanthropy a lot more pretentious in my eyes.

Okay we had a bad start with the overly complementing “real testimonials” from the people the Foundation helped, but here is where I started to feel as if the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation might really care about actually helping the needy in Africa when they presented one of the vaccines they are helping to distribute. This exhibit had no fake testimonials or large amounts of money that were meant to impress the public, and instead contained a simple sample of one of the vaccines the Foundation is helping to distribute, along with information on how it helps. This definitely seems more philanthropic.

Similar thoughts as the vaccine exhibit. No high and mighty statistics about how much money the Foundation is donating to Africans or fake testimonials. Genuine work.

This answers the why question about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation doing the work they are doing in Africa.

Now this is a “testimonial” that I think was not faked. There is an actual baby and the hospital looks legit.

Although there were a few other exhibits, they are not as urgent to address in the eyes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, at least in terms of the organization’s actual involvement. This exhibit urges audience members to get involved with the issues addressed in the earlier exhibits does not request anything that would seem to privately benefit the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which pushes me into believing that they really do want to make good change. The Foundation encourages everyone to be “impatient optimists” and describes everyone “global citizens,” claiming it is all of our responsibilities to contribute to their philanthropic efforts.

Final thoughts on the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

I believe this form of public communication the Foundation is taking part in is a genuine act of humanitarianism. Rather than focusing on depicting itself as philanthropist organization to Seattle’s public, it is certainly what is indirectly communicated towards the public. Though the start of my visit did not look good because of the pretentious vibe of the building upon first entering, I believe what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is doing for humankind is truly in the interest of bettering people.