Fast Foundation

The outside walls of their Pristina headquarters were pocked with artillery-shell craters. Inside the building, Paul Meyer and his two young colleagues listened to the sputters of a cheap diesel generator. They knew that those sounds held the key to whether the Internet could return to Kosovo. Power surges had fried their last satellite transmitter, and this Turkish-made generator was the last best hope on that long day back in September 1999. Morale had already been low. Meyer, 30, a former speechwriter for President Clinton, and his two beleaguered partners, Akan Ismaili and Teresa Crawford, had been working nonstop in terrible conditions. "We had announced that we were going to do this system," says Meyer. "It almost got to the point where we didn't want to show our faces." Out of frustration, Ismaili, a native Kosovar and the technical brains behind the project, defiantly typed in "www.yahoo.com" into his computer. Then he gasped. The page appeared on his screen. The Internet Projekti Kosova (IPKO) was up and running.

"All of us were screaming and dancing around the room," says Crawford, 25, the technical and advocacy director for the Advocacy Project, an organization that uses technology to foster grassroots, civil-society initiatives. The troika had achieved something that no international-relief agency, no high-tech software company, no bent-for-leather military group had accomplished. With a little money and a lot of grit, they had found a way for the war-weary people of Kosovo to reconnect with one another as well as with the world.

Ordinarily, recent graduates of Yale Law School spend more time tinkering with contracts in corporate boardrooms than messing with faulty diesel generators in one of the world's most dangerous places. But Meyer is nothing if not unusual. He has spent the past two years using digital technology to bring together people in desperate straits, getting things done while others were pontificating. Yet Meyer would be the first to admit that his technical creativity would have been impossible without financial support from the suites of New York -- namely, from the Markle Foundation. "Markle funded me when I had crazy ideas," says Meyer. "Without that support, I wouldn't have been able to do any of this stuff."

Look closely at the most exciting efforts to link digital technology, public policy, and vexing social problems, and you'll likely see the fingerprints of the Markle Foundation and its president, Zoë Baird. Baird, 48, is the former AETNA senior VP and general counsel who got her first 15 minutes of fame when she was nominated for U.S. attorney general and then unnominated when she disclosed that she hadn't paid taxes on the salaries of her child's nannies. Markle, a medium-sized foundation (it was established in 1927 and has an endowment of about $200 million), has long been interested in communications. But Baird, who came on board in 1998, has led a decisive shift to the Internet and its implications.

Markle has defined four main areas of need: interactive media for children; technologies for better health; policies for a networked society; and public engagements through interactive technologies. Current Markle projects include a grant to the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to improve the accountability of its October Elections and a partnership with IBM and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), among others, to help developing countries participate in the information economy. But how Markle works is as interesting as the work that it funds. Baird spends serious money fast. She plans to hand out $100 million over the next two to four years -- far more than is typical for a foundation of Markle's size. "This is a critical time," says Baird. "If we don't build a public voice into technology now, attending to human needs will be much, much harder later. It's the right moment."

"Zoë is as tough as tacks," says Jerry Berman, executive director of the Washington, DC-based Center for Democracy and Technology, which has worked with Markle. "She is looking at the hard issues at a time when a lot of foundations are doing the squishy stuff."

Indeed, Baird and her colleagues think more like venture capitalists than like traditional foundation executives. Invest just the right amount of money, with just the right people, and big things can happen. "I look at Markle as a place that has intellectual capital and financial capital," says Baird. "We can use money strategically. But don't come to us if you just want money. We're an active partner."