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The founder of Amazon, the richest person in the world, offered only a few general principles for the Bezos Day One fund, which will start with $ 2 billion.
The richest man in the world has announced his intention to donate about 1.2% of his current wealth to combat family homelessness and preschool education, praising Jeff Bezos and how a new and powerful funder will influence the beneficiaries. his largesse.
More than a year after publicly soliciting suggestions for a short-term philanthropic strategy, Amazon's founder said Thursday that his wife MacKenzie would commit $ 2 billion to fund existing non-profit organizations and create a network of non-profit nursery schools. low-income communities.
The initiative, of national stature but already influenced by Seattle's efforts, will be called Bezos Day One Fund, a name that transposes the business philosophy that allowed Amazon to devote itself to entirely to Bezos' greatest philanthropic endeavor.
The Day Day Families Fund will offer annual awards to organizations "showing compassion, needlework to provide shelter and support to hunger to meet the immediate needs of young families." Scholarship, Montessori-inspired kindergartens in underserved communities, "Bezos said on Twitter.
He described an organization responsible for running the preschool network along the lines of Amazon's principles, and more importantly, "a real and intense obsession with customers," he said. "The child will be the client."
An Amazon spokesperson did not have details on who would lead the new Bezos initiative, or on the basis of the group. The $ 2 billion, he said, is a starting point, but no timetable has been announced to spend that money.
The structure of Bezos' new philanthropic initiative continues to emerge.
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The name "Bezos Day 1 Foundation" was booked Wednesday as a non-profit corporation at the office of Washington's secretary of state, suggesting it will be based here. Another entity, the Bezos Foundation, was registered with the state on January 23 as a non-profit corporation. These are in addition to the Bezos Family Foundation, led by Jackie and Mike Bezos – the parents of Jeff Bezos – a non-profit educational organization formed in 2000.
Bezos has a value of $ 164 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index, a sum mainly from the approximately 16% stake in Amazon it owns.
Public donations from 54 years and his family included $ 65 million at the Seattle-based Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and $ 33 million early in the year to fund TheDream.us, a scholarships for children. United States illegally.
Give to the scale
But Bezos' donation to date has been on a much smaller scale than the two men behind him in wealth rankings, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was officially incorporated in 2000 with a focus on global health and education reform in the United States. It was not Gates' first foray into the gift. He and his wife Melinda had previously established the William H. Gates Foundation (named in honor of his father), which focused on local and global health programs. This fund merged with the Gates Learning Foundation, which expanded Internet access to public libraries to form the current organization. Buffett pledged more than $ 30 billion to the Gates Foundation in 2006.
The foundation had granted $ 46 billion in grants until 2017 and is the largest in the world with an endowment of more than $ 50 billion.
The Gateses and Buffett in 2010 created the Giving Pledge, a commitment of the richest in the world to "publicly dedicate the majority of their wealth to philanthropy". It has since been signed by 184 people. Bezos, until now, is not among them.
Philanthropy on this scale is not lacking in criticism.
Rob Reich, co-director of Stanford University's Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society, said billionaires often receive praise for big giveaways, but Americans should see them with skepticism.
"The great philanthropy, the kind of practice of Bezos, as well as Bill Gates, is a form of power," he said. "It is converting private wealth into public influence."
This has been especially true in public education. An Associated Press analysis earlier this year revealed that the Gates Foundation had donated some $ 44 million to outside groups to develop state education plans as part of a broader network that has leads the national conversation.
For Reich, the problem is that big donors are not accountable to the public as elected officials and are mostly unregulated. They are able to direct their money toward the cause they consider useful even after their death, he said, and may not have to reveal their philanthropic activity.
The legal structure of a philanthropy makes the difference.
For example, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerburg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, who pledged in 2015 to spend all of their wealth on charity, have interwoven their philanthropy into a corporation. limited liability. According to Reich, limited liability companies are not legally required to disclose as much as foundations, and they are not limited to giving political campaigns or investing in for-profit companies. He stated that there is virtually no way to track all philanthropic activities in an LLC, unless the company chooses to disclose this information. The money can also be withdrawn from an LLC, which can not happen when money is placed in a foundation, Reich said.
These different disclosure requirements partly explain why it is difficult to rank the most philanthropic individuals. The Bezoses' $ 2 billion pledge, if all had been given in 2017, would have placed them alongside Zuckerberg and Chan and behind the Gateses at the top of the Chronicle of Philanthropy's most generous list of Americans.
Priority to early education
Bezos's interest in early childhood education could have a huge impact.
A large body of educational research has shown that early learning programs, which serve children under the age of 4, can improve the social, academic and economic outcomes of students who are traditionally late when entering kindergarten .
Advocates praised Bezos' attention, approach and funds, noting the urgent need to expand access to pre-school education, particularly in the low-income areas it intends to target. Steve Barnett, founder and co-director of the National Institute for Early Education, says there has not been much research into whether Montessori programs, a schooling model that encourages children to run their own learning, improve the outcomes of low-income students. Research (NIEER).
"IIf they can bring what they have learned in the workplace to quality improvement, they may be able to bring real innovations, "said Barnett. I said.
According to Barnett's group, Washington receives high marks for its pre-school spending, but its eligibility criteria are so rigorous that enrollment growth is slower than the national average. A family of four whose annual income exceeds $ 27,600 is generally not eligible for the State Early Childhood Education Assistance Program. A general lack of funding means that only a fraction of poor families can enroll their children in government-subsidized programs.
Taxes, Philanthropy
More than a year ago, Bezos posted on Twitter a Ask for suggestions on philanthropic initiatives designed to make a difference in the short term. This contrasts with the idea that Bezos preached at Amazon and Blue Origin, the space travel technology company he funds with $ 1 billion a year through the sale of Amazon stocks. Another of his side projects is a 10,000 year old clock built under a mountain that he owns in Texas.
"Our lives are better than the lives of our great-grandparents and their lives were better than the lives of their great-grandparents before them," Bezos said in his Twitter message on Thursday. "If our great-grandchildren do not have a better life than ours, something is wrong."
His intensified philanthropy arises as modern capitalism is criticized in its historical context, with Amazon often cited as Exhibit A. The Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England, on Wednesday decried aspects of the economy concerts like the old evil "and criticized" companies like Amazon "for taking advantage of a tax system that allows them to pay too little.
Seattle City Councilman Kshama Sawant, a strident critic of the Amazon and the main defender of corporate tax deflation earlier this year, described Bezos' philanthropy as an attempt "to mitigate its picture".
Amazon, which was briefly the second largest company valued at more than $ 1 trillion, has been criticized for years for widely spreading the formal donation programs of many companies. The company's approach has evolved somewhat in recent years with the growth of its public relations and business group, and Amazon has decided to consolidate the scattered philanthropy initiatives underway and offer more official support.
But throughout its history, the company has strongly pushed back taxes.
Earlier this year, Amazon played a pivotal role in the reduction and final defeat of the Seattle business tax to fund homelessness and affordable housing services. The company halted the construction of a building and threatened not to occupy another one that it had rented, objecting to the prospect of a tax of $ 40,000. about $ 500 per employee in Seattle's large corporations.
The Seattle City Council has opted for a lower tax of $ 275 per employee, which would have earned $ 47 million a year, of which about 12.5 million Amazon. Amazon then paid $ 25,000 for an initiative campaign that prompted the board to reverse and repeal a month later the less important tax.
Target family homelessness
Amazon has not ignored the phenomenon of homelessness, making room in its growing headquarters for Fare Start restaurants that train workers for food jobs and for Mary's Place, a shelter for women and children without shelter. Amazon said in August that it planned to spend $ 40 million for these efforts.
Bezos' new contributions seem to be happening without the slightest contribution from Amazon's close partners. Mary's Place Executive Director Marty Hartman said Thursday's announcement was a surprise, even as Bezos quotes the "No Sleeping Child Outside" mission as a source of inspiration for the Day Fund. 1 Families.
Family homelessness "continues to be a challenge in getting everyone out of the street," Hartman said. "It's not just Seattle and Washington. We see this problem on the entire west coast. But I am so grateful for the vision and the idea. We can all escape.
The extent of Bezos' commitment has "the potential to reduce the number of family homeless", depending on how it is used, said Nan Roman, CEO of the National Alliance for the Fight Against the Child. homelessness.
As of January 2017, nearly 185,000 parents and children in the United States did not have permanent housing and almost 17,000 lived outside.
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development spent about $ 700 million in 2015 on family homelessness through competitive subsidies, she said.
"So, yes, it's a huge sum," said Roman. "But it should be used very strategically."
Seattle Times Journalists Dahlia Bazzaz, Vernal Coleman, Asia Fields and Rachel Lerman contributed to the report.
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