Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s late-summer tweet announcing his philanthropic ambitions didn’t provide a step-by-step plan for how he’ll deploy his money for good.
But for those scratching for more clues on how he and his wife, MacKenzie, will give $2 billion, a small part of their vast fortune, Bezos left a clear example: a Seattle nonprofit called Mary’s Place. While other ultrawealthy donors have shown a preference for highly developed strategies based on intricate theories about how to make the world better, Mary’s Place has a simple mission: The organization and its executive director, Marty Hartman, are devoted to making sure nobody in the city spends a night out in the street.
In his tweet, Bezos was fuzzy on the structure of his philanthropy, the timeline for deploying the money, and the possibility that he would make follow-on gifts.
But his “vision statement” guiding his philanthropy came straight from the simple declaration that fuels Mary’s Place’s work and is never far from Hartman’s lips: “No child sleeps outside.”
In the months since, the Bezoses have followed that vision with initial grants, including a total of $97.5 million to 24 organizations that provide direct services to homeless families.
Life on the Streets
Over the past several years, life on the streets was the norm for more than 1,000 of Bezos’s young neighbors. Amazon and its Fortune 500 peers in the region, like Boeing, Expedia, Microsoft, and Starbucks, rebounded from the recession in good health. The local economy boomed, pushing housing prices in Seattle out of reach for many residents.
As public officials, business and nonprofit leaders, and residents tried to find answers, Amazon pushed back on one proposed solution: a tax on big companies that seemed tailored to the retail giant.
The debate seemed to pit Amazon against homeless advocates, even though the company and homeless service providers have often worked on the same side. Over the past several years, Amazon has developed close ties with Mary’s Place and other nonprofits in the region that focus on the needs of people who shelter for the night in their cars or under highway overpasses.
The relationship became so close that when Amazon employees move into their new headquarters building in downtown Seattle two years from now, they will be accompanied by up to 200 people without homes who will take temporary residence in a Mary’s Place facility in the same complex.
Hartman thinks Bezos’s goodwill is simply a way of helping his fellow Puget Sound residents.
“He may have a global vision, but he’s got a local heart,” she says. “He’s very passionate about his neighbors.”
State of Emergency
Mary’s Place got the attention of big companies like Amazon and Starbucks because the nonprofit proved it could redeploy a byproduct of the city’s real-estate woes. As the recession hit in 2008, construction ground to a halt. Many landowners were stuck with properties slated for redevelopment, but deals froze in place. As properties sat in limbo, Hartman mobilized realtors, architects, contractors, and lawyers to turn them into temporary shelters.
But thanks to the vibrant core of big companies in the area, Seattle’s economy boomed after the recession. The influx of professionals seeking housing pushed vacancy rates down. Rents went through the roof.
In 2015, after Mayor Ed Murray declared the city’s homeless situation a state of emergency, Hartman and others pushed City Hall to streamline the process for granting temporary-use permits for those properties to shelter homeless people in former banks and emptied hotels.
“Landlords love it because it puts someone in the building,” says Hartman. “For Mary’s Place, it’s lifesaving.”
Hartman’s use of idle real estate caught Amazon’s eye. In 2015, she says, she sat down with executives from the online retail giant and Starbucks.
“They said. ‘What is your big-dream vision for this community?’ " she recalls. “They had us put that down on paper.”
Hartman responded with her usual refrain: Her dream was that no child in Seattle or its surrounding area would have to sleep outside. The companies responded warmly. Starbucks, the Starbucks Foundation, and the Schultz Family Foundation each gave the network of shelters $1 million. Neither Hartman nor Amazon will provide exact numbers for the retail giant’s gifts. Allison Flicker, an Amazon spokeswoman said the company has given a total of $40 million in cash, products, and services since 2016 to Mary’s Place and FareStart, another Seattle nonprofit that helps homeless people. One of the biggest gifts was the provisional use of a home. Impressed by the charity’s pioneering use of idle real estate, Amazon let the nonprofit use two former hotel properties it owned to shelter people in 2016.
Over the years, hundreds of Amazon employees have volunteered for Mary’s Place, cooking meals and providing free legal services and job training. Flicker, the spokeswoman, said the company is attracted to the nonprofit’s dedication to providing an immediate need.
“They are a lifesaving organization with proven results, and they think big when it comes to fighting family homelessness,” she said in a statement.
Diverse Services
Last year Mary’s Place attracted $13.6 million in donations, about six times its 2013 haul. During the seven years ending in 2017, the nonprofit went on a hiring spree, going from 24 staffers to 200. The additional cash and staff muscle allowed the group to serve 300,000 meals in 2017, up from the 40,000 or so in 2010.
Mary’s Place offers more than a bed for the night. It offers counsel and provides financial support for families looking to get into permanent housing. The nonprofit offers health checkups, paid internships for homeless people, and a range of activities for children. Through its Popsicle Place program, it works with health-care providers to identify children being discharged from intensive care, or who regularly need dialysis or surgeries, who live with their parents in cars near hospitals. Those children are given priority placement at a Mary’s Place shelter.
As Mary’s Place built its programs to address the immediate needs of homeless people in the city, elected officials, nonprofit leaders, and business executives searched for a lasting remedy.
One solution supported by many was a tax on large companies based on their employee head count — think Amazon — whose explosive growth helped boost Seattle rents and priced city residents out of their homes. Passed by the City Council in May, the “head tax” was supposed to raise about $50 million a year. Amazon paused construction of its new headquarters in a move seen by many as a clear threat: Rescind the tax or we’ll take our business elsewhere.
The city responded to the pressure from Amazon and other businesses and canceled the levy.
Hartman declined to say whether she supported the tax.
Seattle hasn’t been the only high-rent battleground where tech companies have tried to fight back narrowly designed tax levies. San Francisco voters approved a ballot measure earlier this month, which faces a potential court challenge, that imposes a corporate tax of up to $300 million annually to fight homelessness. The measure sparked a public fight between Salesforce.com founder Mark Benioff, who supported the tax, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who didn’t.
Questions Abound
Meanwhile, other nonprofits that provide services to the homeless are waiting anxiously to hear what might be next from Bezos. Jody Waits the development officer of YouthCare, a Seattle group that works to keep teenagers and young adults off the streets, said her board members buzzed with questions about whether their organization might benefit.
Because its focus is on teenagers, rather than the families and children who typically benefit from the work of Mary’s Place, Waits says it’s a long shot that YouthCare will receive any money from Bezos. But she’s glad the tech mogul made homelessness a priority.
“More resources to address homelessness is a win, whether or not YouthCare benefits,” she says. “No question. Hands down. Applause in every direction.”
Waits, a supporter of the Seattle head tax, thinks debate over the measure quickly narrowed into an Amazon vs. the homeless brawl. With Bezos making homelessness a key pillar of his philanthropy, Waits hopes other donors get motivated to give and to work with other players in the city to come up with a comprehensive solution.
“We cannot solve this without additional affordable housing, and that’s going to take this type of philanthropic commitment as well as public dollars,” she says.
Bezos and other donors who take on homelessness have plenty of examples to learn from. For instance, the Raikes Foundation, founded by former Microsoft chief executive Jeff Raikes and his wife, Microsoft alum Tricia Raikes, spent about $2.3 million on youth homelessness programs last year.
In addition to focusing on emergencies, the foundation seeks to address homelessness before it happens by working with schools, welfare agencies and law-enforcement agencies to identify children who are at risk.
Raikes said that Bezoses did not come to him for advice, but if they had, he would have suggested taking a broad view of how to combat the root causes of homelessness.
“I’m glad that Jeff and MacKenzie plan to focus on homelessness,” he said in a statement. “There is a lot of great work being done at the systems level on this issue in our community that they can learn from.”
Immediate Impact
Bezos isn’t the first wealthy donor to be moved by the urgency that fuels Marty Hartman.
Mary’s Place used a $1 million gift and a $4 million loan from Washington State philanthropists Mark and Lisa Caputo to help the nonprofit finance a new shelter. The 200-bed facility in Burien, a town south of Seattle, opened in October.
Marty Hartman’s do-it-now approach persuaded the couple to front the money so their gift would have a more immediate impact, says Lisa Caputo.
Hartman’s expertise and passion helped seal the deal. After an initial meeting with her, the Caputos started looking for real estate. Hartman came back to them within months, having scoped out a building with the help of volunteers that was ready to be renovated and shepherded the project through the city permit process she pushed to expedite.
“She doesn’t see roadblocks,” Caputo says.
While the Bezos announcement has made others curious about what may be next for Mary’s Place, Hartman says, the nonprofit isn’t in a position to share its work nationally by educating other nonprofits. There are still a lot of people spending the night outside in Seattle.
“We’ve got our heads down,” she says. “We have more work to do here.”
