Revealing how Facebook boss's wife spends money on charity

In 2010, Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan embarked on their first major education project, donating $100 million to a public school in Newark, New Jersey.

Priscilla Chan, in a rare interview, revealed how her and Mark Zuckerberg's goals came to be.

Priscilla Chan still remembers the bloody face of the boy who had been beaten when he jumped into a neighbor’s house. It was the first time she had seen someone else suffer. As a student, Chan had been a counselor for kids in an after-school program aimed at quelling gang violence in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. Of course, tutoring and trips to soccer fields and skating rinks couldn’t solve the students’ problems.

“I realized that helping these kids with their homework was pointless if they weren’t healthy, safe, and happy in the place they were living,” Chan told MercuryNews in a rare interview, tears welling up in her eyes. “And that’s what really drove me to decide what to do with my life and career.”

Chan is the quiet one behind the couple’s philanthropic work. While Mark Zuckerberg is a Silicon Valley celebrity, and his life is widely known, Chan rarely speaks publicly about her private life. Those childhood stories are the starting point for the formation of multimillion-dollar charitable funds that support schools and hospitals.

Wealth and power were foreign to Chan, the child of immigrants who grew up in Vietnam and never went to college. Now Chan and her husband have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to improve education and health care for children, including those in the Bay Area. The couple has vowed to give away 99 percent of their Facebook shares, worth more than $45 billion, to charitable causes.

And Chan, a former teacher, has gone even further, announcing last October that she was founding and would be CEO of an elementary school called The Primary School, which will provide health care and education to 50 families in East Palo Alto and the Belle Haven neighborhood of Menlo Park when it opens this fall. Partnering with the Ravenswood Family Health Center, the free school will enroll children from kindergarten through eighth grade and provide services ranging from mental health to prenatal care for students and their families. The private school is funded by Chan and Zuckerberg, though they have not said how much they are putting into it.

Chan, a pediatrician at San Francisco General Hospital who has always shied away from the limelight, has embraced the spotlight to make a difference for the Bay Area’s most disadvantaged children. It wasn’t a single moment, but a series of experiences that led Chan on a journey from a career in education to a position in between being a teacher and a doctor.

Although she grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts, her family emphasized the importance of education and hard work as the keys to a better life for an immigrant family. But even in a country that is still called the “American Dream,” Chan knows that her upbringing is different from the children raised in Irish Catholic towns.

“I felt like my identity was different,” she said. “I felt very much like an outsider. My family didn’t have the same beliefs as everyone else.” Her Chinese-speaking grandparents raised her and her two sisters while their parents, Dennis and Yvonne, worked long hours in a Chinese restaurant and held multiple jobs.

Although her parents had never been to school, they always wanted their three sisters to have a better future. That was their only idea. One day, Chan told her mother that she wanted to take the SAT. Her mother asked, "What is that?"

Fortunately for Chan, at Quincy High School, teachers helped fill the void. Peter Swanson, her science teacher and tennis coach, recalled that Chan had asked permission to join the tennis club so she could apply for a scholarship to Harvard. Along with a series of straight A’s and a high score on the SAT, adding a sport would open the door to Harvard for the little girl. Mr. Swanson recalled that Chan was never a naturally talented tennis player but was always a hard worker.

Soon after, she became captain of the tennis team and the robotics team. Chan also graduated at the top of her class in 2003. Thanks to those achievements, she was accepted to Harvard University. "Teachers can inspire students, but students can also inspire teachers," said Mr. Swanson. "She was truly an inspiration."

Chan and his friends in the Robotics team at Quincy High School (Source: Dailymail)

At Harvard, surrounded by brick buildings, libraries, and bronze statues, Chan saw the many opportunities an Ivy League education could bring. The doors of opportunity were wide open to the young woman. Yet Chan also felt out of place, even more so than she had felt when she realized she was an Asian-American kid born in Quincy. She felt as if she had gotten into college by accident. Doubt crept into her mind, and there were times when she wanted to give up.

“There are definitely a lot of people I grew up with who didn't have these opportunities,” Chan said.

So she went to the Phillips Brooks House Association, a nonprofit run by Harvard students, and signed up for the Franklin Afterschool Enrichment program. Volunteers met in front of Lamont Library and took buses to Franklin Hill and Dorchester public housing, where volunteers taught and cared for children.

Seeing a child with blood on his face from being beaten was the first time Chan felt someone’s inner pain, but it wouldn’t be the last. She remembered looking for a girl who hadn’t come to school for several days. When Chan found her in the park, she noticed her front tooth was missing. Another memory that made Chan cry.

Chan met Zuckerberg while she was a student at Harvard, waiting in the bathroom at a party. The two married in 2012 in the backyard of their Palo Alto home in a small ceremony that many people mistook for a graduation party.

After earning a biology degree from Harvard in 2007, Chan spent a year teaching science to fourth and fifth graders at The Harker School, a private school in San Jose. “The kids there are completely different than the kids I taught in the volunteer program,” Chan said at the Harker’s graduation that year, “but the kids in general have the same background and the same foundation that they need to build on.”

The students at Hacker School all knew her boyfriend was the Facebook CEO, but none of them really cared, said Naomi Molin, one of Chan’s students. After class, Molin and her friends would run up to their favorite teacher, cling to her legs, and refuse to let go. “Ms. Chan was the easiest teacher to talk to,” Molin said.

In 2010, Zuckerberg and Chan embarked on their first major education project, donating $100 million to a public school in Newark, New Jersey. However, the project was widely considered a failure, with much of the money going to salaries, contract costs, school charters, and consultants.

While Chan and Zuckerberg recognize that trying to improve New Jersey's schools is a challenge, they also believe their program will lead to higher graduation rates and teach kids the importance of working with the community.

The road from child to adult is a long and difficult one, and Chan knows she can’t do it all alone. There’s no antibiotic or cure a doctor can prescribe to cure domestic violence or the problems kids may face at home. So her Primary School team spent a year learning about the community around them.

Inspired by her time working with children as a volunteer and pediatrician, Chan began working on The Primary School while pursuing her residency at the University of California, San Francisco. The program required her to complete a project, but Chan’s ambitions were much bigger: she wanted to open a school.

In late 2015, Chan gave birth to Max, the couple's first daughter, but she knew her education reform career couldn't wait.

“Before I had Max, all those experiences made me feel so strongly about how important it is for a child to have all the opportunities and how much families want to invest and want the best for their children,” Chan said. “But after having Max, I feel that every day.”

According to VOV