When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took to Twitter last June to publicly solicit ideas for how to execute his philanthropy, Don Graham says he did what every nonprofit leader “who was not sound asleep” did — get in touch.
“The first line of the email was, ‘I will now make it unanimous. Everybody in the United States has now written you in response to your tweet,’” Mr. Graham says of his initial overture to Mr. Bezos.
Of course, Mr. Graham, the former chief executive and chairman of The Washington Post, already knew the billionaire internet entrepreneur. He had sold Mr. Bezos his family’s newspaper in 2013.
Soon after that transaction, Mr. Graham co-founded the nonprofit TheDream.US to provide college scholarships to undocumented students. And it was on behalf of those students that he reached out to Mr. Bezos.
“I was able to tell Jeff that this is an impossibly motivated group of young people,” Mr. Graham says of his pitch.
Only One Email
Mr. Graham didn’t get a response. The head of Amazon gets a lot of email, he notes, and “as far as I know he only has one email. He doesn’t have a private email of any kind.”
Mr. Graham did run into Mr. Bezos — whose wealth is now estimated at more than $100 billion, thanks to soaring Amazon stock prices — at a business meeting several months later and took the opportunity to make a case for supporting TheDream.US again.
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“I said, ‘One reason I’m asking you for help is that help from someone like you would be a tremendous shot in the arm for these young people, who are getting a lot of negative things said about them,’” Mr. Graham recounts.
He followed up with a second email to Mr. Bezos with additional data about the young people in question.
“I tried to be complete, and I just said, ‘I can assure you that you will have high-quality students in good institutions, and they will make you proud,’” Mr. Graham says.
That was the extent of the contact between the two men until Mr. Bezos emailed Mr. Graham last Tuesday. He wrote that he and his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, aimed to donate $33 million to TheDream.US, enough to cover the cost of college for 1,000 undocumented students.
In a statement about the donation, Mr. Bezos said that his father immigrated to the United States from Cuba at age 16, speaking no English.
“With a lot of grit and determination — and the help of some remarkable organizations in Delaware — my dad became an outstanding citizen, and he continues to give back to the country that he feels blessed him in so many ways,” he said. “MacKenzie and I are honored to be able to help today’s Dreamers by funding these scholarships.”
Huge Boost
Nonprofits have been closely watching Mr. Bezos for clues to how he might give away some of his fortune. Given the personal connection between Mr. Graham and Mr. Bezos, any analysis of what it says about Mr. Bezos’s future plans for philanthropy must be taken with a grain of salt.
Still, Mr. Bezos is known as a shrewd and even ruthless businessman, and it’s unlikely he would give such a large sum to a cause if he didn’t believe strongly in it, regardless of his affinity for Mr. Graham.
The gift proved timely, says Candy Marshall, president of the nonprofit, coinciding with debate in Washington over the soon-to-expire Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, and if and how to grant its 800,000 enrollees permanent legal status. A grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation last year enabled TheDream.US build up a collection of stories featuring its students, Ms. Marshall says, and the media attention surrounding the Bezos gift created a chance to move those stories out to the public.
With Mr. Graham serving as chief fundraiser, TheDream.US had raised a total of $165 million before the Bezos gift was announced last week, she says, far exceeding the original vision to raise $1 million to pay for 40 students to go to college. That support has largely come in the form of multimillion gifts from individual donors, such as hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman.
The nonprofit made higher-education awards to just under 1,200 students in April 2017, Ms. Marshall said, the largest slate of recipients yet. She predicts the number of awards given this spring will be about 800.
