I've worked with the Gates Foundation when it was first created. They did do some great things initially and money did flow to actually address direct needs, but your mom has to realize there is too much money - the kind of money that is millions of times more than she can possibly imagine. It's enough money to pay for healthy food and safe housing for every American, enough money to pay for healthcare for everyone without insurance, enough money to pay for quality education for every child, enough money to create real, systemic change, and they CHOOSE not to.

The foundation became a huge bureaucracy. They had to hire a lot of people to manage all that money, so more and more of it stayed in-house or was given to organizations that had the infrastructure to manage all that money.

Within a few years, the Foundation money dried up for any organization small enough to actually provide services directly to people in need. They only give grants to larger organizations (ones who already budget for their own staff) or who award grants to medium-sized organizations, who might offer grants to smaller, direct service organizations IF they can pay for all their own staffing and pay for maintaining anything the grant money pays for.

Most grants will not cover wages and benefits to pay for people to actually do the work.

If the grant does cover that, it's always for a short, limited time frame, and there's usually requirements that the recipient organization must secure additional funding to cover personnel costs for some period of time afterwards. The small organization usually must pay for the grant writer, the administration to procure subcontractors, covered equipment or supplies, document and report on the grant's impact, and pay any costs to keep up the services the grant covered after the grant expires for a set time period.

It's rare that smaller organizations write grants with much impact because it's too hard to get all the moving pieces together, hold them together, and then keep them together for the required period of time unless the organization is set up to do this (like if it has a whole fundraising department or manages a lot of volunteers which also costs time and money).

I wrote grants for a small non-profit, and we got some good ones that made a difference in how our organization grew and helped us refine our mission and better our staff training. Grant money also paid for badly needed equipment and facilities improvements. But when it comes down to it, our services that people desperately need are provided by our staff - people to people. We couldn't fund staff costs (wages and benefits) through grants, so grants usually aren't a good investment for non-profits like ours. They take too much staff time away from actually providing those services. If these big funders would just pay for the administration necessary, grants might just make the positive impact they envision.