As restaurants and schools closed, wealthy donors started to see an avenue to pledge money where they could more immediately make a difference: Food banks, hospitals and other community organizations now on the front lines of the economic fallout.
Professional athletes and team owners, like Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks and the Minnesota Timberwolves’ Glen Taylor, stepped in with donations to help cover salaries to arena staff.
Billionaires’ Backyards
The bulk of philanthropic funding usually comes in the first few weeks following a hurricane or other large disaster, when the issue is front-page news, Grabois said. Most calamities, however, are limited in scope and duration when compared with the current one, which will affect the entire planet for the foreseeable future.
And there’s a good chance the giving won’t be spread out evenly.
With many prominent donors concentrated in places like San Francisco, New York and Seattle, philanthropic dollars have so far been concentrated in the backyards of the very rich, including several ranked near the top of the 500-member Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk delivered 1,000 ventilators to Los Angeles this week. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the charitable foundation led by Priscilla Chan and her husband, Facebook Inc. co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, donated ventilators to a San Francisco hospital, while the social media giant’s operating chief, Sheryl Sandberg, teamed up with a group of tech executives and venture capitalists in contributing more than $7 million to a local food bank.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is also working with the University of California, San Francisco to help create more tests for the virus.
Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, the world’s two richest people. joined others in Seattle to contribute more than $13 million to a community-relief fund. In Portland, current and former Nike Inc. executives, including founder Phil Knight, donated $10 million to Oregon nonprofits.
Uneven Distribution
While local relief funds and community foundations have stepped in to help areas that have fewer billionaires, “more money typically goes to wealthier communities,” said Rob Reich, co-director of Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and author of “Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How it Can Do Better.”
“Even in ordinary times, there’s an uneven distribution of philanthropic funds geographically with money concentrated in wealthier places,” he said, pointing to the example of Bay Area parents who donate money to an already-wealthy school district to benefit their own kids.