Over the past few years, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative — which is backstopped by a Meta fortune that stands at $220 billion — has been winding down its grantmaking focused on social inequities. That process now seems to be coming to a final end, according to an article this week by the San Francisco Standard. Eventually, it looks like nearly all of CZI’s giving will focus on scientific research.
I can’t recall another mega-donor couple backtracking so completely from their early ambition, which they once said was to “build a more inclusive, just and healthy future for everyone.” I’m fascinated by Priscilla Chan’s role in all this. Five years ago, she was on her way to being one of the most important philanthropists of our time, and one with a strong progressive bent. Now she seems to be receding from view — although I did see a photo of her at Trump’s inauguration.
It’s hard not to wonder if Chan has been waylaid by our post-woke times and a tech bro husband eager to keep the White House happy. Or maybe the story is quite different, one of pragmatic philanthropists winnowing down an expansive agenda to focus on the work they care about most. Another possibility is that Chan and Zuckerberg are among the many mainstream liberals who found themselves turned off by progressive advocates — so turned off they decided to stick to funding scientists. Whatever the explanation, they’re in the last stages of a dramatic philanthropic retreat, one with enormous consequences for multiple issue areas where the couple had become leading funders.
Eleven years ago, I published an article, “Four Things to Know About Priscilla Chan, and One Prediction,” that was filled with hope. I suggested that Chan was exactly the kind of person that you’d want to help give away a vast fortune.
She’s the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents who fled Vietnam as refugees and worked long hours to rise into the middle class, while Chan was mostly raised by her grandparents, who didn’t speak English. She’s a pediatrician who’s seen the challenges that low-income people face in our healthcare system. Beyond her empathy, she has the smarts of a high school valedictorian turned Harvard grad.
When the day came that Chan gave up practicing medicine to become a full-time philanthropist — as I predicted she would — I imagined that she’d be a powerful leader of what would eventually become one of the world’s largest foundations.
Those hopes burned strong over the next few years as Chan and Zuckerberg stepped up their giving. While Zuck had famously made a mess of his first big foray into K-12 philanthropy, with a top-down debacle in Newark, Chan helped chart a very different direction. CZI’s education giving in Silicon Valley involved deeply listening to local stakeholders and a nuanced understanding of how socioeconomic forces affect student outcomes. Chan even started her own tuition-free school for low-income children in distressed East Palo Alto, the Primary School, with a focus on engaging the “whole student.”
The couple’s K-12 grantmaking seemed to mark an inflection point in how billionaires approached education. By 2016, fewer of them were embracing a dogmatic ed reform movement that pinned nearly all the blame for student outcomes on failing schools. Chan and Zuckerberg were among the new top ed donors, along with Steve and Connie Ballmer, who understood the huge impact of systemic inequities on educational opportunity.
I interviewed Chan in 2016, around the time she took the helm of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, which was then ramping up quickly. Under Chan’s leadership, CZI began an ambitious push to cure and prevent diseases, but also became a major funder of criminal justice reform. She and Zuckerberg visited San Quentin prison and held a roundtable in Birmingham, Alabama, where they met with community leaders, including the anti-death penalty advocate Bryan Stevenson. Mark was said to have been influenced by Michelle Alexander’s book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness.”
CZI’s expanding equity agenda also included backing for immigration advocacy and funding for housing issues in the Bay Area, among other local priorities. All the while, CZI grew its education funding, becoming one of the largest funders in that space.
Today, nearly all of these grantmaking priorities have been discontinued. CZI has spun off its criminal justice reform work, it’s cutting support to Bay Area organizations, and its future as a climate grantmaker looks limited at best. While education remains a focus of CZI, that work centers mainly on technological innovation following a retreat over several years from its previously expansive agenda. Last month, the Primary School announced it would close its doors next year, after Zuckerberg and Chan pulled their financial support.
Much speculation around the school’s closing, which came two months after CZI eliminated its DEI team, centered on Zuckerberg’s desire to distance himself from social justice work to curry favor with Trump. Those same themes dominate the San Francisco Standard’s article, which quotes one grantee as saying, “They’re just trying to kiss up to Trump” and another commenting: “We’re saddened that CZI is moving toward censoring nonprofits, penalizing organizations that recommit to racial justice and social advocacy during these critical times.”
It’s important to stress that CZI began winding down its equity work several years ago. That retreat coincided with right-wing criticism of Zuckerberg and Chan for their massive donations to support voting administration during the 2020 election.
Still, the latest funding cuts, along with CZI’s shuttering of its DEI work, fit a pattern of fearful billionaires bowing to Trump. In addition, Zuckerberg has an acute bottom-line interest in trying to nix the federal antitrust case against Meta that recently went to trial.
Ultimately, we don’t know what’s really motivating Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, which is nearly always the case with highly guarded billionaire mega-donors. I often note that such donors are a work in progress, constantly evolving. They are also often a mystery, unknowable even to those of us who imagine we can get “inside” philanthropy.
All we know for sure in this case is that whatever ambitions Zuckerberg and Chan once had to “build a more inclusive, just” world are dead — at least for now.
That’s a shame. And, among other things, it means revising early assessments of the two mega-donors in command of the world’s second-largest fortune, 99% of which has been pledged to philanthropy. I’ll let a jilted grantee have the last word on how Zuckerberg and Chan’s giving has evolved: “It shows the kind of character that they have… It really reflects on who they are as people.”
What We’re Reading and Hearing
The big, ugly tax bill. We are, of course, watching the draft tax bill currently being debated in Congress, which would reshape the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors by increasing taxes on endowment income at large foundations and universities, while enabling the administration to politically target nonprofits’ tax status without due process. That’s in addition to sweeping cuts to social spending that will put sustained pressure on philanthropy to fill the gaps in almost every issue area. The Council on Foundations and the National Council of Nonprofits both issued briefs explaining what’s at stake.
An interesting moment for left critics of philanthropy. A time-honored critique of tax-preferenced charitable giving is that we shouldn’t look to private individuals to address public needs — that this is the job of a properly funded state. By that logic, hiking taxes on foundations to raise government revenue would be a good thing. So far, I’m not hearing anyone making that argument in the case of the GOP tax bill — but, as a reminder, IP is always open to guest opinion pieces. If you like the idea of diverting money from Gates’s global health work or Ford’s social justice grantmaking to help fund a $7 trillion federal budget, we’re all ears.
A stampede to donor-advised funds? Sometimes, unintended consequences lurk unseen in tax bills, springing unwelcome surprises later. Not in this case. The obvious effect of jacking taxes on foundations will be to accelerate the movement to DAFs, which would face no such taxes under proposed legislation. That means even more money piling up in funds with zero payout requirements, as John Arnold recently pointed out.
What’s next for nonprofits whose mission is equity and inclusion? While some organizations have tried to protect themselves from Trump’s backlash against social progress by scrubbing DEI language from their websites, what are organizations whose missions are to advance equity and inclusion supposed to do? Claire Savage and Alexandra Olson look at the efforts of Chicago Women in Trades and other nonprofits dedicated to bringing more women into the construction industry, as one front of this battle.
And “what’s next?” in general. If the “end of history,” the neoliberal world order, and “the boom years of global charity” are over, where are we heading now? After his feature interview with Bill Gates last week about the Gates Foundation’s 20-year spend-down, David Wallace-Wells reflects on the global era that’s ending and the gaping uncertainty about what happens next in his New York Times subscriber newsletter this week.
How the social sector can respond to systems collapse. Democracy Fund’s Liz Ruedy and Tom Glaisyer, along with Oceanic Partners founder Rachel Reichenbach, suggest in Stanford Social Innovation Review that we might be on the verge of systems collapse — and offer several models for how social change organizations can achieve positive impact in such a volatile time.
What We’re Covering
Have outspoken funders suffered under Trump? IP’s Michael Kavate reached out to more than a dozen funders who have been outspoken in pushing back against the Trump administration’s threats to civil society. While none of the ones who responded have experienced direct retaliation yet, philanthropy as a whole — and progressive philanthropy in particular — is still in the administration’s bullseye, threatened by investigations and efforts to revoke tax-exempt status, not to mention the right-wing social media mob. And, just to be clear, the majority of grantmakers are still not speaking up.
Intermediaries explain what’s going on in climate philanthropy. Kavate also reached out to the environmental grantmakers who have been most willing to talk while larger funders remain quiet: small and midsized intermediaries. The regrantors shared how climate funding strategies are shifting in response to Trump.
Reproductive rights and healthcare still need funding. It’s been overshadowed by other Trump 2.0 news, but abortion access and reproductive rights remain under attack. IP’s Connie Matthiessen reports on the rollercoaster ups-and-downs of funding for abortion care nonprofits over the last few years — even while the need steadily rises.
Is philanthropy incapable of addressing economic inequality? Responding to my article on why liberal grantmakers lost the fight against MAGA, in part by failing to confront deep economic inequities, Navruz Baum, a union organizer, argues in a guest IP post that philanthropy can’t be expected to play such a role because it’s a creature of the existing capitalist order and also “fundamentally antidemocratic.” Baum says that what we need is not donors but independent mass movements. “If funders were truly serious about building democracy, they would give up control.”
That’s all for today. Thanks for reading, and drop me a note with any tips or thoughts. You can reply to this email. Also, if you’re not yet a subscriber, please join!
