Jeff Bezos Announces $2 Billion Philanthropic Effort To Help Homeless Families and Start Preschools in Low-income Communities (nbcnews.com)

Rick Schumann writes: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie on Thursday announced a $2 billion philanthropic effort aimed at helping homeless families and starting preschools in low-income communities. Bezos, believed to be the world's richest man, with a net worth of more than $160 billion, announced the new program on Twitter. "We're excited to announce the Bezos Day One Fund," he wrote. The fund will be split between the Day 1 Families Fund, which Bezos wrote will "issue annual leadership awards to organizations and civic groups doing compassionate, needle-moving work to provide shelter and hunger support to address the immediate needs of young families." The Day 1 Academies Fund "will launch and operate a network of high-quality, full-scholarship, Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities," Bezos said. Bezos said that the preschools will be directly operated by the organization and "use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon." "Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession," Bezos wrote. "The child will be the customer." Bezos quoted the poet William Butler Yeats: "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."

Comments

LOL.

[olsmeister]

Half of the recipients probably will be Amazon employees.

idea

[religionofpeas]

He could give his employees decent salaries. That would help.

Re:idea

[TFlan91]

Amazon has 566,000 employees (source).

A cynic would say that is only a one time payout of ~$3,533 per employee. A realist would understand that only the bottom rungs of the income ladder should get this money, so let's redo the math:

Amazon has "125,000 full-time hourly associates in the U.S" (source).

Now it's a one time payout of $16,000!

A "warehouse associate" earns ~$13/hr (source).

That is a staggering (/s) $27,040 per year.

Does Bezos really think that the overhead of starting, yet another, charity and its administrative costs is cheaper than just giving his lowest level employees a decent living wage?

This announcement says, yes, he does think that. But you say, that's just stupid.

So a then you would say, who benefits?

The Day 1 Academies Fund "will launch and operate a network of high-quality, full-scholarship, Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities," Bezos said.

Bezos said that the preschools will be directly operated by the organization and "use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon."

"Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession," Bezos wrote. "The child will be the customer."

(source)

"The child will be the customer."...

In the age of DeVos, Bezos is going to open private charter schools, for the youngest among us, and run them like a business, but the difference is that the "child will be the customer".

Smell something?

Would someone learn the likes and dislikes of these children and slowly build an "anonymized" ad profile for that child, following them throughout their life span, knowing exactly what products they are likely and not likely to buy?

Now the decision to pass over that wage increase and open a "charity" makes sense.

Start with your own workers first

[xack]

Proper toilets for a start instead of making your workers go in bottles.

do what now?

[Anonymous Coward]

and "use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon."

So slave labor, minimum wage, shit working conditions...

I Mean

[American AC in Paris]

This is great. Now other people in need can benefit from Bezos' magnanimity, just like his warehouse employees do.

He makes $260 million every day

[rsilvergun]

This is about 8 days pay for him. That sounds like a lot (8 days pay for me is around $1800 bucks) but if I give $1800 to charity that's a big impact on my life. When you're pulling in $260 million a day it's hardly noticeable.

I'm fed up with ultra rich trying to buy us off with token charitable donation in the hopes we don't demand they take care of their workers. He can start by paying his employees enough that they're not living in the parking lot of his warehouses (excuse me, "fullfillment centers") and they can get off food stamps. Then let's see him give enough to charity that it actually impacts his quality of life.

As it stands I feel like we're being made to go begging to the rich for the basic things needed to run a country and a society...

Livable Wages

[sdinfoserv]

If Bezos paid his warehouse slaves a livable wage, there would many fewer poor. But then he wouldn't be worth $163B...
Think of it this way, you could give EVERY SINGLE AMAZON employee (all 563,000) a one time bonus of $177,500, and Bezos would still be worth $63 Billion dollars.
How much does a king need?

Re:Double-edge sword

[werepants]

The first group is not something that "the rich" can solve, and they can't really solve the second either.

That's exactly what the second group of people need. An opportunity to find work and earn a living and a place to stay while finding and applying for job positions.

Actually, "the rich" can, or at least we as a society can. Utah has had a lot of success giving the homeless exactly this - basic housing while they get back on their feet. It's cheaper, on the whole, than the police, ER, and jail costs that we would otherwise incur. It's not a silver bullet (nothing ever is) but there are meaningful policy steps that we can take to improve the situation.