Jeff Bezos, the world’s third-richest man, does not have a private foundation but instead gives through his Bezos Earth Fund (climate change), Bezos Day 1 Fund (education and homelessness) and direct contributions.
Photograph by Michael Prince/The Forbes Collection
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world’s third-richest person, announced $110.5 million in new grants to nonprofits working to end homelessness for families from his Day 1 Families Fund, the organization announced on Tuesday.
This round of donations marks the Day 1 Families Fund’s seventh annual round of awards, which range from $425,000 to $5 million and will go to 40 organizations providing services to homeless families in 23 states—including $2.5 million each to the Kentucky-based Welcome House, Los Angeles-based Jenesse Center and a couple of repeat recipients. The Dallas-based Family Gateway group, for example, received a $2.5 million grant this year, after receiving $2.75 million in 2019. Bezos has now granted $749 million of the Day 1 Fund’s $2 billion pledge–made in 2018—to organizations working to help families experiencing homelessness. The new grants bring Bezos’ total estimated giving to $3.5 billion, roughly equal to the amount he got from selling a sliver of his Amazon shares this month (before taxes).
“No child should sleep outside, and it’s a privilege to help in the extraordinary efforts of these organizations,” Bezos, who is worth an estimated $220 billion, wrote in a statement about the new grants. His partner and fiancee Lauren Sánchez added that “with homelessness on the rise, there has never been a more important time to support those individuals and organizations making a difference.”
In 2023, more than a million people experienced homelessness in the U.S. for the first time, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Also, the number of unhoused people across the country increased by 12% compared to the previous year, the largest increase since the organization began tracking data in 2007. The rise in homelessness has hit families especially hard: families now represent almost a third of the country’s homeless population. Rising housing costs and a lack of affordable housing, exacerbated by the pandemic and end of the pandemic-era safety net, are to blame, according to the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness.
To address the acute issues at hand, the Day 1 Fund generally supports organizations that offer emergency or other temporary shelter to specific families. Many of the organizations help those families transition to supportive housing and increase their income so they can then hopefully move to permanent housing.
Ellen Magnis, CEO of Dallas-based Family Gateway, used the nonprofit group’s first Day 1 Families Fund grant in 2019 to help families—often single mothers with hourly-wage jobs who are sick and don’t have sick pay benefits—find short-term alternatives to emergency shelters, which are often full and also expensive to build, like a hotel room. While they are in their temporary housing arrangements, the organization helps families find permanent housing and pays the related up-front fees, like their security deposit and first couple months’ rent. She says that Family Gateway plans to use this year’s grant to meet the “significant increase” in post-pandemic demand.
Michael Goze, CEO of the American Indian Community Development Corporation, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that purchases and develops affordable apartment complexes for unhoused Native people, received a $5 million grant from the Day 1 Families Fund last year. Goze says they’ve been able to use the funding to expand their efforts and are in the process of buying seven more three-bedroom apartments. AICDC pairs people who live in their apartments—including people escaping domestic violence, a single mother working her way through college and a family whose previous building burned in a fire—with case managers and financial advisors in a five-year program to help them earn more and thus move to stable permanent housing.
“Bezos is giving money to the people on the front line, dealing with the problem on a daily basis, and I don’t know that there is anybody better to understand how to create change than the people that are in the fight,” Goze says.
Still, others think the problem goes beyond helping families find housing and needs to be addressed at its root—increasing wages and lowering rents to prevent homelessness in the first place.
“This is a band-aid on a structural problem, although it’s a very good band-aid until we get the proper legislation to increase wages and tenant protections,” says Omar Ocampo, a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank based in Washington, D.C. Ocampo coauthored a report that blames billionaires and billionaire investors for exacerbating the housing affordability crisis by investing heavily in real estate and using it for high-end development, short-term rentals and as an investment asset, resulting in too many vacant homes with skyrocketing rents. “There’s little incentive for billionaires to construct affordable housing at a scale that would put downward pressure on prices,” says Ocampo.
He recommended donations to community-controlled housing like community land trusts (a common destination for MacKenzie Scott’s grants) that make sure properties can’t be resold for profit, as well as philanthropy that advocates for workers’ and tenants’ rights so they can then afford housing without philanthropic assistance.
With a second Trump administration looming, there will likely be less regulation around housing and housing development and fewer taxes on the ultra-wealthy, which can result in billionaires being more philanthropic, Ocampo says. And Bezos, who primarily does his philanthropy through both the Day 1 Fund and his climate-focused Bezos Earth Fund, is not the only billionaire donating to housing and homelessness causes—although it’s far from a favorite cause among billionaires. Perhaps the biggest donor to affordable housing organizations in the country is Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, who has poured nearly $2 billion into those nonprofits, including several community land trusts. In 2019, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff donated $30 million to research initiatives on homelessness at UC San Francisco and over the last year gave 440 acres of land to an affordable housing developer in Hawaii, where he lives and where its governor declared the housing crisis a state of emergency. And brokerage titan Charles Schwab donated $65 million in 2020 to build supportive housing in San Francisco. Given the demand for affordable housing and the rise in family homelessness, there is appetite for more such philanthropy.
