What Comes After the Foundation

A Letter to Melinda French Gates

Dear Ms. French Gates,

You spent decades building one of the largest philanthropic organizations in history. Then you left, started Pivotal Ventures, and began doing things differently — faster, more focused, less institutional.

I’m writing because you’ve seen what works and what doesn’t at scale. And because the thing I’ve built needs someone who understands that helping women often means helping everyone, and that infrastructure beats charity every time.

The Problem You Know

Healthcare access in America is rationed by ability to pay. One in five insulin users ration their doses. Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy. And the system isn’t broken — it’s working exactly as designed, extracting maximum profit from maximum desperation.

Philanthropy can fill gaps. But gaps keep appearing because the underlying structure creates them. What if the structure itself was different?

What We Built

Liana Banyan is a platform where community needs get met through community coordination — not charity, not government, not corporations extracting fees.

LifeLine Medications: Community demand pooling to negotiate prescription prices. Transparent pricing. Workers paid in ownership, not wages — so their incentive is to help more people, not deny claims.

Let’s Make Dinner: Neighbors feeding neighbors, coordinated so nothing is wasted and no one is tracked by a system that might judge them later.

Medical Savings Accounts: Owned by members, not insurance companies.

Six initiatives total. Three commercial portals funding the charitable work through margin economics. Every participant earns ownership in what they help build.

Why Women Specifically

You know this better than I do: when systems fail, women absorb the failure. They ration their own medications to afford their children’s. They skip meals. They take on the unpaid labor of navigating broken systems.

Infrastructure that works for the most burdened works for everyone. That’s not charity logic — it’s engineering logic. Design for the hardest case.

What I’m Asking

I’m not asking for funding. I’m asking for guidance.

Who in your network understands community health infrastructure? Who has scaled something like cooperative healthcare without it collapsing into bureaucracy? Who can tell me which of my assumptions will break first?

I’m prepared to hand these initiatives to operators you trust. The platform is built. The patents are filed. What’s missing is wisdom from people who’ve seen what I haven’t seen yet.

One introduction could change the trajectory of this entirely.

With respect for the path you’ve chosen,

Jonathan Jones Founding Manager, Liana Banyan Corporation November 2025

P.S. — Pivotal means “of crucial importance.” That’s not subtle, and I don’t think you meant it to be.

406-578-1232 Support@LianaBanyan.org