Jeff Bezos donated nearly $ 100 million to help the homeless

By Rachel Sandler

Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos will donate $ 96.2 million to organizations that help homeless families, according to his charity.

Donations will be made through the Bezos Day One Fund to 32 nonprofits in 21 states, with grants ranging from $ 750,000 to $ 5 million. Since Bezos founded the Fund in 2018, the Bezos Day One Fund has donated nearly $ 100 million a year to organizations providing services to homeless families. In total, the Fund has donated $ 398 million so far.

“We are very happy about this,” said Anne Miskey, CEO of Union Station Homeless Services in Pasadena, California. Miskey says the organization will receive $ 5 million in Amazon shares on Thursday, the largest private grant the organization has ever received. The money is earmarked specifically for family services and will be used over a five-year period, among other things, to hire more workers and renovate the site used to house homeless families. “We want to create more privacy for single families so they don’t have to sleep in dormitory-like spaces. We want to provide a safe, comfortable and decent place to help them get permanent housing,” Miskey said.

Bezos is the second richest man in the world, with a fortune of about 205.5 billion dollars according to Forbes. The donations announced Wednesday represent less than 1% of his total fortune and the Bezos Day One Fund has not revealed details on exactly how Bezos is funding it.

Bezos has sold nearly $ 27 billion worth of shares since Amazon went public in 1997, but has so far refused to disclose whether he is financing the Bezos Day One Fund in cash or with his stake in Amazon. Last week, Bezos donated $ 16,283 shares of Amazon, valued at $ 58 million, to nonprofits, according to SEC documents, but an Amazon spokesman declined to comment on exactly where the shares went. Earlier this year, Bezos pledged $ 200 million to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Aviation and Space.

Bezos has not signed Giving Pledge, a commitment to donate most of his fortune to charity, but seems to have stepped up his charitable offerings in recent years. Regardless of its focus on homeless families, the Bezos Day One Fund is creating a network of Montessori kindergartens without tuition in underprivileged communities.

In addition, last year Bezos pledged $ 10 billion over 10 years to create the Bezos Earth Fund, which aims to tackle climate change. Last week, Bezos said in an interview that he spends more money on the Bezos Earth Fund than on his space company, Blue Origin. We do not know exactly how much money Bezos has invested in Blue Origin, but in 2017 he said he would sell about $ 1 billion in Amazon stock a year to invest in the company.

According to Forbes, Bezos has donated shares of Amazon worth at least $ 650 million over his lifetime, representing less than 1% of his current fortune. It is noted that Forbes counts only the donations that have already been given and does not include those for which a commitment has been made but has not yet been delivered.