Education, Housing, and a Hawaiian Island Are Top Chan Zuckerberg Priorities

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is keenly focused on education, housing policy, and the Hawaiian island of Kauai, according to a Chronicle analysis of the organization’s data.

This past week, CZI officials released a database detailing every grant that began in 2018 the organization, which was founded by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician.

CZI donated the most money — $70.7 million — under its family-giving program, which supports the couple’s personal charitable priorities, with a focus on health and on organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Kauai, Hawaii, where they own land. That’s 18.5 percent of the total $381.3 million CZI gave in 2018.

The majority of that is a single $60 million grant to Gates Philanthropy Partners to support the Resolve to Save Lives Cardiovascular Health Initiative, which funds scientific research and policy programs to reduce heart disease and strokes around the world. The remaining $10.6 million is split among 43 grants made to a wide variety of nonprofits.

A $3.2 million grant — the second-largest issued under the family-giving program — went to the Primary School, a tuition-free school founded by Chan that emphasizes health education in its academic programs. A $3 million grant went to the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, which gives awards to researchers who make big advances in key science and tech fields.

CZI’s family-giving program gave a total of $1.2 million, split across 14 grants to organizations in Kauai, particularly to fund disaster-relief and social programs after the island suffered flooding in April 2018. In Kauai, Zuckerberg is also involved in a controversial attempt to buy hereditary lands collectively owned by Native Hawaiians.

Housing and Politics

The second most active area for CZI is housing, where it issued nearly $61.7 million, which accounts for slightly more than 16 percent of CZI’s total grant making begun in 2018. That money is spread across 30 grants.

The biggest grant in this category was a $40 million, five-year grant awarded to San Francisco-based Local Initiatives Support Corporation’s Partnership for the Bay’s Future policy fund. This group and others funded under this category of CZI giving focus on housing policy, with an emphasis on building support for transit-oriented development and affordable housing.

While many of these grant recipients are national in scope, some are focused on advocating for such policies in local governments in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, areas with the highest average housing costs in the nation. That’s a business issue for tech titans such as Zuckerberg, whose efforts to recruit workers to Silicon Valley have been hampered by high housing costs.

The database also reveals CZI’s move into local politics. A $100,000 grant made to the group Yes on Measure V supported campaign efforts on an affordable-housing funding referendum in San Jose, Calif. The measure failed at the ballot box. Similarly, it provided a $200,000 grant to the Million Voter Proje, which aims to change California’s electorate by registering new and infrequent voters. The grant went to “encourage an equity policy agenda” for California.

Officials from CZI said it has been focused on hyperlocal politics and housing advocacy since its founding in 2015. It also supported efforts to pass a statewide referendum granting $4 billion for affordable housing in California and has supported advocacy efforts on other local issues.

“Our advocacy work is hyperlocal, with support for community-driven measures at the county and state level around improving housing affordability, and reforming the criminal justice system in areas with high incarceration,” said Jessica Santillo, communications director for policy & advocacy at CZI. “This early giving is also an opportunity for CZI to learn how to help resource groups that are doing impactful work on the frontlines of these issues but may not have the support they really need.”

Chan and Zuckerberg are among a small but growing group of philanthropists who have created LLCs to give to social programs. Advocates of this structure say it allows them to engage in a wider variety of activities aimed at promoting the public good, including political advocacy.

Opponents worry that LLCs are less transparent than traditional philanthropy. The CZI database appears aimed at allaying such concerns.

Education and Personalized Learning

The third most active area for CZI is grants to K-12 education programs, where it has donated $60.3 million across 22 grants since 2018. The largest was a $23.8 million award to Summit Public Schools, a network of charter schools, to support the expansion of its educational programs. CZI’s grant making in this area emphasizes the “personalization” of primary education. Seven of the grant recipients here were noted for their efforts to create individualized learning plans for students.

Separately from education, CZI lists learning science as a distinct category focusing on scientific research into education, childhood development, and education policy. In this category, it made $26.7 million in grants.

In addition, CZI made a number of smaller grants to schools and education programs in the San Francisco and Silicon Valley areas within its separate Bay Area category. The database lists 106 grants totaling $9.5 million, with an average of $90,000 per grant, the smallest average of any category.

Over all, the most frequent recipient of CZI grants is the University of California at San Francisco, which has received a total of $7.3 million from seven grants.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly said that the grants in the database are those made since the start of 2018. They are all of the grants started during 2018; it doesn’t include grants started in 2019.