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 began.

Priscilla Chan remembers the bloodied 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 mentored 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 useless if they weren’t healthy, safe, and happy in the places they lived,” Chan told MercuryNews with tears in her eyes. “And that’s what led 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 famous in Silicon Valley, and his life is widely known, Chan rarely answers questions about her private life in public. Those childhood stories are the starting point for the formation of multi-million dollar charitable funds that help schools and hospitals.

Wealth and power were foreign to Chan, the child of immigrants whose parents lived 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, went even further when she announced 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 accept children from kindergarten through eighth grade and will offer everything from mental health care to prenatal care for students and their families. The private school is funded by Chan and Zuckerberg, but 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 somewhere 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 still known as the “American Dream,” Chan knew her upbringing was different from that of children raised in Irish Catholic towns.

“I felt like my identity was different. I felt very much like an outsider. My family didn’t share the same beliefs as everyone else,” she said. Her Chinese-speaking grandparents raised her and her two sisters while their parents, Dennis and Yvonne, worked long hours in a Chinese restaurant and even held other 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 her fill the void. Peter Swanson, her science teacher and tennis coach, remembers Chan asking permission to join the tennis club so she could apply for a scholarship to Harvard. Along with a series of straight A's and sky-high SAT scores, adding a sport would open the door to Harvard for this little girl. Mr. Swanson remembers that Chan was never a naturally talented tennis student, but always a hard worker.

Soon after, she became captain of the tennis team and the robotics team. She 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," Mr. Swanson said. "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 child born in Quincy. She felt as if she had gotten into college by accident. Doubt crept into her mind, and at times 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 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 other public housing projects in Dorchester, where they 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 in a few 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 attending 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 mistakenly thought was 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 Harker’s graduation that year, “but the kids in general have the same foundation 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 deemed a failure, and much of the money went to salaries, contract costs, school charters, and consultants.

While Chan and Zuckerberg recognize that trying to improve New Jersey's schools is challenging, they also believe their program will lead to higher graduation rates and teach students 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 children 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 quietly with 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 a family wants to invest and want the best for their child,” Chan said. “But after having Max, I feel that every day.”

According to VOV