Jeff Bezos Launches $2 Billion Day 1 Fund for Philanthropic Activities

In September, 2018, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie Bezos announced philanthropic fund of $2 billion to carry out both the initiatives which he calls Bezos Day 1 Fund. Behind this fund will be two groups - the Day 1 Family Fund and the Day 1 Academies Fund. Jeff Bezos plans to help homeless families and create preschools education in low-income areas.

“MacKenzie and I share a belief in the potential for hard work from anyone to serve others. We all have that capacity,” Jeff Bezos wrote on Twitter.

The world’s richest man with an estimated wealth of over $150 billion, Jeff Bezos plans to create a network of non-profit preschools for students who belong to low-income communities. Additionally, Bezos hopes to help the existing non-profit organizations to tackle the homeless crisis by making food and shelter accessible to the homeless destitute.

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The Day1 Family Fund will cater to homeless households by providing the existing organizations, performing the “needle-moving work”, with a yearly allowance.
The Day1 Academies Fund will administer the launching and operating of a network of top quality, Montessori-inspired preschools offering full scholarships to the student.

“We’ll use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession. The child will be the customer," wrote the tech mogul on a notice posted on his Twitter handle.

This development unveiled after a year the Amazon founder posted on Twitter urging his 222,000 followers for suggestions on philanthropic offering that would address urgent needs and also have a lasting impact on the society. In less than six hours after his request on the networking site, there were more than 3,600 replies, suggesting for contributions in affordable housing, improvement in healthcare facilities, veterans’ organizations and LGBT causes, etc.

Until now, Jeff Bezos has taken modest steps in philanthropic activities. Earlier he and his family have donated $15 million to his alma mater, Princeton University and contributed $35 million to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

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Similarly, SpaceX and Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk and the co-founders of Airbnb, had signed the campaign “The Giving Pledge”, a commitment started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in June 2010, to contribute a majority of their wealth to charitable causes either during their lifetime or upon their death.