Bloomberg, September 17, 2018: Amazon’s Bezos launches $2 billion fund to help the homeless
Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, launched a $2 billion fund to help homeless families and create a network of nonprofit preschools in low-income communities.
The Bezos Day One Fund will focus on two initiatives, the billionaire announced in an online post Thursday. The first will fund existing nonprofits and issue annual awards to organizations doing “compassionate, needle-moving work” to shelter and support the immediate needs of young families. The second will operate a network of high-quality, full-scholarship Montessori-inspired preschools. The fund’s vision statement comes from nonprofit Mary’s Place in Seattle: no child sleeps outside.
With a personal fortune of $163.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the Amazon chief executive officer had been largely invisible in the world of philanthropy. His net worth has risen by $64.7 billion this year alone as Amazon’s shares surged. Bezos’ relative silence was a stark contrast to peers like Bill Gates, whose foundation is the world’s largest, and Warren Buffett, who has vowed to give away the majority of his wealth.
Until now, Bezos, 54, had only taken small steps into philanthropy. The Bezos Family Foundation, best known for supporting children’s education, has been largely funded by his parents from Amazon holdings they acquired as early investors in their son’s enterprise. Outside of that, Bezos and his family’s known donations have included gifts to Princeton University and Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
It’s not surprising that the world’s richest person “is finally getting serious about philanthropy,” said David Callahan, founder of website Inside Philanthropy. “With big fortunes like that, the only thing you can really do is give it away — unless you want the government to take half of it through estate tax.”
The Bezos gift is one of the biggest single donations ever announced for preschools, if not the biggest, said Avo Makdessian, director of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s Center for Early Learning. As with most investment decisions by the Amazon founder, this one was likely grounded in data and science. Research shows 90 percent of a child’s brain development occurs before the age of 5, yet most charitable gifts pegged for education target older children, according to Makdessian.
While Bezos was thinking about where best to put his own money, Amazon stepped up its corporate giving, focused on growing inequality in its hometown of Seattle. Some activists and politicians have partly blamed the city’s problems on Amazon.
In 2016, Amazon renovated a vacant hotel on land designated for its new headquarters so it could be used temporarily by the nonprofit Mary’s Place to shelter 200 homeless families. Amazon is designating 47,000 square feet of space at its new corporate office for a permanent Mary’s Place shelter.
Earlier this year, under pressure from Amazon and other large employers, Seattle’s City Council repealed an employee head tax that would have funded housing and services for the homeless. Even so, Amazon insisted it was “deeply committed” to tackling homelessness in Seattle and said it would continue to invest in local nonprofits that work with the homeless.
