Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
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The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is an organization established and owned by
Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
founder
Mark Zuckerberg Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born May 14, 1984) is an American businessman who co-founded the social media service Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms, of which he is the chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling sharehold ...
and his wife Priscilla Chan with an investment of 99 percent of the couple's wealth from their Facebook shares over their lifetime. The CZI is legally set up as a
limited liability company A limited liability company (LLC) is the United States-specific form of a private limited company. It is a business structure that can combine the pass-through taxation of a partnership or sole proprietorship with the limited liability of ...
(LLC) that can be seen as a for-profit charity and is an example of philanthrocapitalism. CZI has been deemed likely to be "one of the most well-funded philanthropies in human history". Chan and Zuckerberg announced its creation on 1 December 2015, to coincide with the birth of their first child. Chan has said that her background as a child of immigrant refugees and experience as a teacher and pediatrician for vulnerable children influences how she approaches the philanthropy's work in science, education, immigration reform, housing, criminal justice, and other local issues. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's main areas of work include science, education, and justice and opportunity, which focuses on promoting housing affordability, criminal justice reform, and immigration reform. The mission of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is to "build a more inclusive, just, and healthy future for everyone" and to "advance human potential and promote equality in areas such as health, education, scientific research and energy".Devon Maloney
"Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg's 99% pledge is born with strings attached"
, ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'', Wednesday 2 December 2015 (page visited on 3 December 2015).
In 2017, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative pre-leased a 102,079 square foot portion of the new Broadway Station development in downtown
Redwood City, California Redwood City is a city on the San Francisco Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area, Bay Area of Northern California, approximately south of San Francisco and northwest of San Jose, California, San Jose. The city's population was 84,292 accor ...
, where it is headquartered. After the election of
Donald Trump Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who is the 47th president of the United States. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party, he served as the 45 ...
as US president and the discontinuation of government and Meta
Diversity, equity, and inclusion In the United States, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are organizational frameworks that seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented or subject ...
(DEI) programs, CZI announced on 10 January 2025 that it would continue its diversity programs. On 19 February 2025 CZI COO Marc Malandro, sent an email to all employees saying "Given the shifting regulatory and legal landscape, we will no longer have a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility team at CZI." On 14 May 2025, CZI discontinued funding to any program that could be associated with DEI.


Activities


Education

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative invested $24 million in Andela, a startup focused on training software developers in Africa through a boot camp and four-year fellowship program that pairs their trainees with U.S. companies needing development help. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative led the company's Series B funding. In 2016, Chan and CZI co-founded The Primary School, a nonprofit organization that promised to provide
K–12 K–12, from kindergarten to 12th grade, is an English language expression that indicates the range of years of publicly supported primary and secondary education found in the United States and Canada, which is similar to publicly supported sch ...
education,
prenatal care Prenatal care, also known as antenatal care, is a type of preventive healthcare for pregnant individuals. It is provided in the form of medical checkups and healthy lifestyle recommendations for the pregnant person. Antenatal care also consists of ...
, early childhood education, primary health care, and other programs and services for free to residents in
East Palo Alto, California East Palo Alto ( ; abbreviated E.P.A.) is a city in San Mateo County, California, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population of East Palo Alto was 30,034. It is situated on the San Francisco Peninsula, roughly halfway between the c ...
and the surrounding areas. She served as the emeritus board chair of the school.In 2022, The Primary School received approximately $8 million in donations, and in 2023, the school recorded nearly $4 million in contributions. In April 2025, CZI announced that it was closing The Primary School's East Palo Alto and San Leandro (East Bay) campuses at the end of the 2025-2026 school yearA Message from The Primary School.
The Primary School. Retrieved 23 April 2025.
"due to a lack of funding".Flores, Jessica (23 April 2025)
Shock after closure of Zuckerberg-funded school in Silicon Valley: "We had it all here".
San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 23 April 2025.
Chan did not attend meetings announcing the tuition-free school's closure, and parents are uncertain about what's next for their children. As part of the school's closure announcement, CZI pledged $50 million over five years to "parent engagement programs, early childhood education and health care services" in "the East Palo Alto, Belle Haven, and East Bay communities". In September 2016, Indian education startup Byju's announced raising $50 million in a round co-led by The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and
Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California, specializing in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. the firm had appro ...
, along with investors Sofina,
Lightspeed Venture Partners Lightspeed Venture Partners is a global venture capital firm focusing on seed stage, early stage investments and growth stage investments in the enterprise, fintech, consumer and healthcare sectors. Lightspeed has eleven offices globally and as o ...
, and Times Internet. The funding has been raised to fuel their international expansion. On 6 March 2018, the Harvard Gazette published that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative would pledge $30 million to the Reach Every Reader project. Both Harvard's President Drew Faust and MIT's President L. Rafael Reif were quoted in the article, as were Priscilla Chan, HGSE Dean James E. Ryan, and MIT's Sanjay Sarma, VP for Open Learning at MIT, and others. The article states: "To make significant progress in early literacy at scale, the team will engage in a rigorous, scientific approach to personalized diagnosis and intervention. They will develop and test a scalable, web-based screening tool for reading difficulties that diagnoses the underlying causes, and a set of targeted home/school interventions that change the way we approach intervention for young children with reading difficulties." The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is supporting the development of a civic tech talent pipeline by funding Coding it Forward. The Initiative has funded a free online learning platform, Summit Learning, that is based on a personalized learning philosophy. The use of the platform in some schools has led to concerns about efficacy and student privacy. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has funded a number of small-scale, grassroots initiatives to better understand the "physical, mental, social and emotional health and development of students as a way to improve academic success," as well as new efforts to make Native American or Black culture more embedded in students' curriculums. Chan said, "We have to be really thoughtful about how we can be helpful and build a collective community alongside others and behind practitioners and school leaders," and that educational initiatives must be responsive to local needs because "there is not one thing that's going to solve everything." In May 2022, the Chan Zuckerberg initiative announced grants totaling more than $4 million in support of education communities. The grants will support a range of professional learning, mentoring, and wellness practices to support teacher retention. The grants include $1 million donations to FuelED, The Teacher Well, Profound Gentlemen, and $500,000 to Profound Ladies and Black Male Educators Alliance of Michigan.


Housing and economic opportunity

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, in partnership with The San Francisco Foundation and other philanthropic, business, and health organizations, created the Partnership for the Bay's Future in 2019 to "preserve, produce, and protect affordable housing". The Partnership includes a $500+ million fund for subsidized affordable housing units in the Bay Area, as well as grants for local governments and community organizations to work together to pass local housing legislation that protects tenants and promotes affordability. On 1 October 2018, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced it was helping to launch Opportunity Insights, a new non-partisan, not-for-profit research and policy institute focused on improving economic opportunity led by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Nathaniel Hendren, leading economists from Harvard University and Brown University. The research aims to "better understand the drivers of poverty as well as solutions that can foster greater economic mobility and security for more families".


Politics

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative supported the failed campaign for the 2020 California Proposition 15, which would have adjusted the original
1978 California Proposition 13 Proposition 13 (officially named the People's Initiative to Limit Property Taxation) is an amendment of the Constitution of California enacted during 1978, by means of the initiative process, to cap property taxes and limit property reassessm ...
by raising large commercial property taxes. In addition, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative opposed the failed 2020 California Proposition 20, a measure which would have led to stricter sentencing and parole laws. Following electoral defeats of CZI-backed initiatives in 2020, the CZI announced a restructuring that would no longer fund political campaigns directly.


Scientific research

In September 2016, CZI announced its new science program, Chan Zuckerberg Science, with $3 billion in investment over the next decade, with Cornelia Bargmann of
Rockefeller University The Rockefeller University is a Private university, private Medical research, biomedical Research university, research and graduate-only university in New York City, New York. It focuses primarily on the biological and medical sciences and pro ...
announced as the first president of science, to begin 1 October 2016. The goal of the program is to help cure, manage, or prevent all disease by the year 2100. $600 million of the $3 billion would be spent on
Biohub Chan Zuckerberg Biohub (CZ Biohub), or simply Biohub, is a nonprofit research organization. In addition to supporting and conducting original research, CZ Biohub acts as a hub and fosters science collaboration between UC Berkeley, UC San Francis ...
, a location in San Francisco's Mission Bay District near the
University of California, San Francisco The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Francisco, California, United States. It is part of the University of California system and is dedic ...
, to allow for easy interaction and collaboration between scientists at
University of California, San Francisco The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Francisco, California, United States. It is part of the University of California system and is dedic ...
;
University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...
;
Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
; and other universities in the area, as well as engineers and others. Commentators saw the move as audacious but a worthwhile goal, while noting that the amount of funding is small relative to overall money spent on biomedical research. This funding is equal to roughly 2% of the NIH budget earmarked for basic research over the same time frame. Any patents generated at Biohub would be jointly owned by Biohub and the discoverer's home institution. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's first acquisition took place in January 2017 with the acquisition of Meta, a Toronto-based artificial intelligence scientific literature search engine that helps scientists collaborate on solutions and accelerates the dissemination of new scientific research. On 28 October 2021, CZI announced the sunset of Meta, with a proposed shutdown date of 31 March 2022. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was a founding sponsor of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence at
Toronto Toronto ( , locally pronounced or ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, most populous city in Canada. It is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Ontario. With a p ...
's MaRS Discovery District in March 2017.


COVID-19 response

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative invested heavily in
coronavirus Coronaviruses are a group of related RNA viruses that cause diseases in mammals and birds. In humans and birds, they cause respiratory tract infections that can range from mild to lethal. Mild illnesses in humans include some cases of the comm ...
research and response following the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. The organization has contributed multiple grants to various universities and partnerships studying how the coronavirus spreads and possible treatments or vaccines. The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub partnered with Stanford and UCSF to help to significantly increase free testing in the Bay Area starting in March 2020. In April 2020, CZI joined the
Government of the United Kingdom His Majesty's Government, abbreviated to HM Government or otherwise UK Government, is the central government, central executive authority of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
and
Madonna Madonna Louise Ciccone ( ; born August 16, 1958) is an American singer, songwriter, record producer, and actress. Referred to as the "Queen of Pop", she has been recognized for her continual reinvention and versatility in music production, ...
in pledging funding for the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, a public-private partnership led by the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation The Gates Foundation is an American private foundation founded by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. Based in Seattle, Washington, it was launched in 2000 and is reported to be the third largest charitable foundation in the world, holding $ ...
,
Wellcome Trust The Wellcome Trust is a charitable foundation focused on health research based in London, United Kingdom. It was established in 1936 with legacies from the pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome (founder of Burroughs Wellcome, one of the predec ...
and Mastercard. The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub announced in July 2020 that it would partner with all 58 California county departments of public health to provide free genomic sequencing of positive coronavirus samples to better understand how the virus is spreading and inform policy decisions.


Open software and open science

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has also invested in the development and maintenance of
open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
scientific software, with a pledge of US$40 million over 3 years for its Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS) program. CZI's Open Science program also supports the
preprint In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset versi ...
servers medRxiv and BioRxiv." Grants included support to projects such as ScientificPython and the visualization library
matplotlib Matplotlib (portmanteau of MATLAB, plot, and library) is a Plotter, plotting Library (computer science), library for the Python (programming language), Python programming language and its Numerical analysis, numerical mathematics extension NumPy. ...
. Besides directly funding projects, CZI's Open Science division organizes workshops with grantees and stakeholders outside the
United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
to foster "global participation in open biomedical research".


Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)

After the election of
Donald Trump Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who is the 47th president of the United States. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party, he served as the 45 ...
as US president and the discontinuation of government
diversity, equity, and inclusion In the United States, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are organizational frameworks that seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented or subject ...
(DEI) programs, CZI announced on 10 January 2025 that it would continue its diversity programs. However, on 19 February 2025, CZI COO Marc Malandro sent an email to all employees saying "Given the shifting regulatory and legal landscape, we will no longer have a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility team at CZI." CZI also cancelled its Diverse Slate Practice, which was intended to ensure that qualified candidates from a diverse set of backgrounds should have access to CZI jobs. Meta had taken similar actions. In 2025 CZI informed programs which could be associated with DEI, including many of their San Mateo County partners, that their funding would not be continued and that they would not be eligible for funding going forward. This was sharply criticized by a number of CZI employees as well as the impacted charities.


Company form and taxation

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is not a charitable trust or a
private foundation A private foundation is a Tax exemption, tax-exempt organization that does not rely on broad public support and generally claims to serve humanitarian purposes. Unlike a Foundation (nonprofit), charitable foundation, a private foundation does no ...
but a
limited liability company A limited liability company (LLC) is the United States-specific form of a private limited company. It is a business structure that can combine the pass-through taxation of a partnership or sole proprietorship with the limited liability of ...
, and is therefore not a tax-exempt organization as many philanthropies are. As an LLC, the organization has more flexibility in how it addresses its goals, and can invest in for-profit startup companies, can spend money on advocacy initiatives and lobbying, can make political donations, does not have to disclose the pay of its top five executives and has fewer other transparency requirements than a charitable trust.Jesse Eisinger
"How Mark Zuckerberg's Altruism Helps Himself"
, ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'', 3 December 2015 (page visited on 4 December 2015).
Kerry Dolan
"Mark Zuckerberg Explains Why The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Isn't A Charitable Foundation"
, ''
Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917. It has been owned by the Hong Kong–based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes. The co ...
'', 4 December 2015 (page visited on 5 December 2015).
John Cassidy
"Mark Zuckerberg and the Rise of Philanthrocapitalism"
, ''
The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...
'', 2 December 2015 (page visited on 4 December 2015).
Under this legal structure, ''
Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917. It has been owned by the Hong Kong–based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes. The co ...
'' wrote, "Zuckerberg will still control the Facebook shares owned by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative". The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative publicly lists its grants, a level of transparency not required for an LLC. It pledged in 2020 to release software developed by it or its grantees under open-source licenses.


See also

* Good Ventures, started by Facebook co-founder
Dustin Moskovitz Dustin Aaron Moskovitz (; born May 22, 1984) is an American billionaire internet entrepreneur who co-founded Facebook, Inc. (now known as Meta Platforms) with Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum and Chris Hughes. In 2008, he left F ...
and his wife Cari Tuna, who takes care of its day-to-day operations *
Corporate social responsibility Corporate social responsibility (CSR) or corporate social impact is a form of international private business industry self-regulation, self-regulation which aims to contribute to societal goals of a philanthropy, philanthropic, activist, or chari ...
* Philanthropy in the United States * Philanthrocapitalism


References


External links

* {{Authority control Organizations established in 2015 Philanthropic organizations based in the United States Facebook Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Zuckerberg family