--- title: Jeff Bezos Is Making His Biggest Charitable Donation Ever. See the $2 Billion Details description: Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, just committed $2 billion to the Bezos Day One Fund, aimed at helping homeless and creating preschools. authors: - name: Brad Tuttle role: Senior Editor url: https://money.com/author/brad-tuttle/ bio: Brad Tuttle is a former senior editor at Money with over 10 years’ experience covering a vast number of personal finance topics, including careers, cars, travel, budgeting, investing, insurance, credit cards, consumer psychology, real estate, banking, and shopping and deals. education: Columbia University School of Journalism, MS at_money_since: 2014 articles: 366 covers: - Business - Banking - Career Advice - Credit - Credit Cards - Economy and Politics - Education - Health and Wellness - Housing - Identity Theft - Insurance - Investing - Lifestyle - Loans - Mortgages - Personal Finance - Pets - Professional Services - Retirement - Shopping - Taxes - Technology social: - https://twitter.com/bradrtuttle - https://linkedin.com/in/brad-tuttle-834b225 former_staff: true published: '2018-09-13T17:02:04.000Z' modified: '2024-05-16T13:21:29.000Z' section: Business tags: - Billionaires - Jeff Bezos - philanthropy word_count: 427 canonical: https://money.com/jeff-bezos-charity-homeless-preschools/ type: Article source: structured-blocks --- > **Disclosure:** We research all brands listed and may earn a fee from our partners. Research and financial considerations may influence how brands are displayed. Not all brands are included. [Learn more](https://money.com/page/disclaimer/). ![Amazon's Emmy Celebration - Arrivals](https://img.money.com/2018/09/jeff-bezos-2-billion-charity-607710646.jpg) *Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.* Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, just made a long-awaited announcement about what philanthropic causes would benefit from his enormous fortune — which has doubled in one year and is now estimated at more than $160 billion. Bezos, the reigning [world's richest man](https://money.com/richest-people-in-the-world/), [released a statement](https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/1040253796293795842) on Twitter on Thursday explaining that he and his wife MacKenzie were committing $2 billion to launch a new initiative called the Bezos Day One Fund. The charitable fund will "focus on two areas," Bezos explained: "funding existing non-profits that help homeless families, and creating a network of new, non-profit, tier-one pre-schools in low-income communities." The world has been waiting for a major philanthropy announcement from Jeff Bezos for over a year. In the summer of 2017, Bezos tweeted a request from the masses for philanthropic ideas “at the intersection of urgent need and lasting impact.” He followed up in June 2018 by [saying on Twitter](https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/1007077455146860544/) that the response he'd gotten "was inspiring, thoughtful, helpful, and appreciated," and that he'd "settled on two areas that I'm very excited about." Now, with the announcement of the Bezos Day One Fund, we know what charitable areas the Bezoses will focus on. One part of the effort, dubbed the "Day 1 Families Fund," will give money to non-profit organizations that are "doing compassionate, needle-moving work to provide shelter and hunger support to address the immediate needs of young families," Bezos's message stated. The other component, called the "Day 1 Academies Fund," will create "and operate a network of high-quality, full-scholarship, Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities," Bezos said. He stressed that the organizations launched and overseen by his fund will "directly operate these preschools," and that he expects them to run with an Amazon-like sense of efficiency, professionalism, and constant improvement: > "I'm excited about that because it will give us the opportunity to learn, invent, and improve. We'll use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession. The child will be the customer." Until now, Jeff Bezos hasn't been as big a player in philanthropic circles as one might expect, given his colossal wealth. Before today's $2 billion announcement, the highest-profile charitable donation made by Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos was a [$33 million gift](https://time.com/5101089/jeff-bezos-daca-dreamers-scholarship-donation/) in early 2018 to help give college scholarships to undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children — a.k.a. Dreamers. Bezos also recently [gave $10 million](https://money.com/jeff-bezos-just-made-a-10-million-political-donation-heres-where-the-worlds-richest-man-is-putting-his-money/) to the [With Honor](https://www.withhonor.org/) fund, a nonpartisan political committee that helps elect military veterans of all political backgrounds to Congress. ```json { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@graph": [ { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://money.com/jeff-bezos-charity-homeless-preschools/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://money.com" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Business", "item": "https://money.com/business/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Entrepreneurship", "item": "https://money.com/entrepreneurship/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 4, "name": "Jeff Bezos Is Making His Biggest Charitable Donation Ever. 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