October 15, 2014

Our Giving Pledge
Gordon and Lulie Gund

Dear Warren,

We applaud you, Bill and Melinda Gates, and all others involved with the development of the Giving Pledge concept and rationale. Thanks to our family’s fortunate business success and because of a variety of compelling charitable interests, particularly the passionate focus we have for achieving the mission of the Foundation Fighting Blindness, we have been on track to accomplish the Giving Pledge goal of investing the majority of our net worth philanthropically for many years now, although we never considered it in that way.

We each had parents who highly valued and lived the importance of providing the same opportunities that they had to those who were less fortunate. Their generosity with their treasure and their time has inspired us in our philanthropic involvements. Over the years we have provided meaningful financial support and, in some cases, significant volunteer time to organizations involved in healthcare, education, the environment and the arts. We have made our philanthropic investments — just as we have made our for-profit investments — in capable people who have a dedicated commitment to a sensible and compelling vision. Also, as with many of our business investments, we have invested a significant amount of our time, experience, and energy into the leadership and oversight of our most important philanthropic endeavors.

The focus on our principal charitable interest began in 1971 when we co-founded, with other families, the Foundation Fighting Blindness (FFB). Since its inception, the mission of FFB has been to drive the research to find preventions, treatments, and cures for people affected with inherited retinal degenerative diseases. These diseases include retinitis pigmentosa (RP) which I have; age-related macular degeneration (AMD — the leading cause of blindness for people over age 50 in the U.S. and other developed countries); Usher syndrome (the leading cause of deafness and blindness together); Stargardt’s disease and many others. In total these blinding diseases affect more than 10 million people in America alone and many times that number worldwide.

We became dedicated to the cure for blindness because shortly before we were married in 1966 and for five years or so thereafter, during which we were building a family and I was beginning a career in venture capital, long-term investing and later professional sports, I began to lose my eyesight at night. My vision started shutting down from the periphery inward due to my RP. We looked for a way to stop the progress of this disease, and we became even more frantic in this search in 1970 when my day vision started to close in rapidly. During this frustrating time, we found there was very little understood scientifically about the retina, the visual process and the causes of these diseases. At that time there was almost no research going on.

In late 1970, when all of my eyesight was gone and I had turned over every stone, we committed to each other to do all we could to ensure that someday when people were diagnosed with a retinal degenerative disease, they wouldn’t have to face the same frustrating search that we did that ended in total blindness; instead these diseases would not exist anymore.

The Foundation Fighting Blindness is in business to go out of business when it eradicates these diseases from the face of the world once and for all. We have a passionate commitment to this mission. Fortunately all of us volunteer leaders over the intervening 43 years have had the passion, entrepreneurial ability and persistence required to build any successful enterprise over the long term. Now 43 years later, the Foundation has 50 chapters around the country, has raised more than $600 million for research, has more than 150,000 active volunteers and donors, and has funded thousands of research projects at hundreds of research institutions all over the world.

The Foundation has a highly capable and dedicated professional staff and a scientific advisory board made up of world class clinical researchers and relevant basic scientists. The thousands of committed researchers the Foundation has helped bring into this field over the years are continuing to build on the now robust base of scientific knowledge and are identifying new treatments and cures for these diseases on an accelerating basis. In the past few years, FFB-sponsored research has generated some amazing breakthroughs and extraordinary advances. The Argus II (a bionic eye) and treatments like Lucentis for the wet form of AMD, are now in the marketplace saving and restoring sight. Many more promising therapies are in clinical trials or in the pre-clinical pipeline. These include gene therapies, stem cell therapies, pharmaceutical therapies and on and on. A clinical trial for a miraculous gene therapy treatment that should soon receive FDA approval has already restored significant sight to more than 50 children and young adults who were born blind or went blind soon thereafter from a severe form of a retinal degenerative disease. More than 20 clinical trials are underway. The Foundation has now advanced over the threshold and into the era of achieving its mission.

Pre-clinical or translational work and clinical trials require far more financial support than laboratory science. That is why the Foundation has embarked on a major gifts campaign, Envision 20/20. To jumpstart Envision 20/20, Lulie and I have announced a challenge to match all major gifts to the Foundation made or pledged on a dollar-for-dollar basis. We want to ensure that these diseases are eradicated once and for all and the time for this is at hand. That is why we are pleased to join the Giving Pledge. We hope that anyone reading this will challenge us to match their gift to FFB thereby helping to ensure that we fulfill the Giving Pledge but, most of all, helping to ensure that FFB achieves its mission. When it does, it will be forever.