A Message From Patty Stonesifer

In 2005, there were more news stories than ever on the issues we care about: reforming U.S. high schools, closing the digital divide, helping vulnerable families in and around Washington state, reducing extreme poverty, and saving lives by improving health in poor countries. Many of these stories praised us and our grantees, but some of them raised important questions about our strategies. Questions like: Given our focus on preventing disease, are we doing enough to help people who are already sick? And, Does our Education program have the right approach for improving U.S. high schools?

These are good questions—and we're going to try to answer them.

As an organization, we will help people know not just what we do, but why we're doing it, how we're working, and what we're learning. This is one of the foundation's top goals for the coming year.

Why does it matter? Because to solve the problems we're all tackling, governments, non-governmental organizations, other foundations, and private industry need to work together. We've worked hard to help make that happen. But as we collaborate with public and private funders on a large scale, our partners, grantees, co-funders, and the public should know more. They should understand our values and the role we want to play in improving people's lives. They should know what we're learning from our grantmaking: what is working, and what isn't. And they should understand the impact we want our grantmaking to have and know whether it's actually making that impact.

I hope you'll find this year's annual report one step in the right direction. This year we've tried to be direct about what went well, what didn't, and what we learned. Included in this report is my first Management Discussion and Analysis, which covers some questions I'm often asked about the foundation's governance, finances, and other areas.

We'll also continue or expand some of the things we're already doing to publish information about our work. For instance, we post information about each of our grants in a searchable database on our Web site. Many of our programs have published evaluations of their work and made them available on the Web. And because it's important to keep our own community up to date on our plans, we've devoted a section of our site to the new campus we're building in Seattle. That campus will include a visitors learning center, which will be open to the public so they can learn more about our issues and how we work.

We're still in the early stages of this effort, and we will have more to say on the subject through our Web site and in next year's annual report. In the meantime, every one of us at the foundation is looking forward to making more progress on the issues we care about. And we're looking forward to sharing the results—whether it's good news or bad—with our partners and the public.

Patty Stonesifer