For some non-profits, changing the world begins in Seattle

Seattle

INSIDE the factory buildings at Cascade Designs, just south of downtown Seattle, camping and hiking gear for the rugged outdoor life of the Pacific Northwest has been manufactured since the early 1970s. But turn a corner and something new is coming off the shop floor: a compact, no-frills water purifier designed to bring clean water to struggling populations in rural Africa.

The device, able to chlorinate water by the 55-gallon drum, was designed with help from several big nonprofits, including one funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest private philanthropy, and the US military. And it is an example, in its mix of altruistic and profit-seeking motives, of how fortunes earned a generation ago at Microsoft, the computer software giant, are still shaping economic life here.