Mark Zuckerberg is most famous as the Facebook founder and billionaire CEO. He and his wife, have promised to give away 99 percent of their Facebook shares to help charity via their philanthropic organisation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

They run the Initiative together.

Their initiative, instead of focusing on the logistics of providing healthcare, focuses on preventing and curing disease in the first place. Instead of focusing on charter schools versus public schools, the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation will focus on giving all teachers access to the tools they need in order to be able to do their job of educating young people.

It’s great to be able to read this as back in 2016 I remember how there was a lot of negative news in the press about Mark Zuckerberg including: being accused of imperialism in India, censorship of historical photos, and livestreaming footage of human rights violations. Things came to a head in November, when Facebook was accused of influencing the US presidential election through political filter bubbles and a failure to tackle the spread of misinformation.

On a positive, their initiative will focus on investing in philanthropies powered by technology and how it can help social change be more far-reaching. This shows how the use of their technology and team’s expertise and knowledge can be used to do this at a faster rate too.

“By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.”

We are not all in a position to work in this way with technology but we can certainly be mindful of how we use it…do we use it responsibly? Do we share our knowledge to help others less able or less fortunate than us?

I will leave you with that thought, until next time,

Elisa x