Giving Compass' Take:

• Andrew Serazin gives three key criteria's that can help philanthropic leaders ensure their organizations follow through on ambitious goals. 

• What do you think your role is as a donor to tackle problems and keep up morale?

• Here are upcoming trends in philanthropy for 2020. 

When Melinda Gates addressed a packed Seattle conference hall on October 17, 2007, few in the audience were expecting a radical proposal. I was a senior program officer in the Gates Foundation’s global health program and deeply familiar the foundation’s objectives, yet what she said that day took even me by surprise. Indeed, Gates’ message was shocking:

“Advances in science and medicine, promising research, and the rising concern of people around the world represent an historic opportunity not just to treat malaria or to control it — but to chart a long-term course to eradicate it.”

With a doctorate in biology, specializing in malaria, I understood the true meaning of these words. I had published a first-author article in Science magazine several years earlier on the exquisite adaptations that mosquitoes use to transmit malaria. Eradication means zero disease transmission, even where conflict breaks down supply chains and the rule of law, and even in places where current transmission rates are a hundred times higher than what is needed to sustain disease. Zero means zero.

After Gates’ announcement, initial shock turned to skepticism from many outside observers and academic experts: Didn’t they know how difficult eradication would be? Didn’t they know that the World Health Organization attempted eradication in the 1970s and abandoned the project? The conventional thinking was that eradicating malaria was practically impossible.

Read the full article about keeping your philanthropic goals by Andrew Serazin at Medium.