Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, announced a $2 billion fund Thursday to help homeless families and create preschools.
Bezos is the world's richest person, with an estimated worth of $164 billion. How he would use that fortune for philanthropy has long been a point of discussion, especially after June 2017 when he solicited ideas on Twitter for ways he could make a difference.
Now that question has been answered, at least in part. On Thursday, Bezos sent out a long Tweet introducing a $2 billion Bezos Day One Fund that will support two charities, one aimed at homeless families, the other at creating preschools in underserved communities.
In his tweet, Bezos said the exciting questions to ask were: "Where's the good in the world, and how can we spread it? Where are the opportunities to make things better?"
The two funds he introduced Thursday attempt to answer that.
The Day 1 Families Fund will issue annual leadership awards to organizations that are doing "needle-moving" work to provide shelter and hunger support for families with young children. Its vision statement comes from a fundraising campaign, "No Child Sleeps Outside," for Mary's Place, a Seattle homeless shelter that Amazon donated more than 47,000 square feet of space to in one of its buildings and which provides a home to 200 women, children and families.
The Day 1 Academics Fund plans to launch and operate a network of high-quality, free Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities. Bezos said the network will give the organization the opportunity "to learn, invent and improve," using the same principals that have driven Amazon's growth.
The "Day 1" name comes from Bezos' insistence that it is always Day 1 at Amazon. In his annual letter to shareholders in 2016, he wrote, "Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1."
Amazon's main headquarters building in Seattle is also called Day 1. And each time the headquarters moves, the new building takes that name.
