by Queenie Wong / © 2016, San Jose Mercury News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Priscilla Chan remembers seeing blood all over the boy’s face, a sign he had gotten jumped in his own neighborhood.
Chan, then a Harvard student and now a Bay Area philanthropist, pediatrician, mother, and wife of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, was mentoring the child in an after-school program meant to quell gang violence.
Yet stellar tutoring and field trips couldn’t cure the student’s woes.
“I realized that my homework help was going to completely be futile if these kids couldn’t be healthy, safe and happy in the place that they lived,” a teary-eyed Chan told the San Jose Mercury News in a rare interview. “That really drives a lot of what I decided to do in my life and career.”
Giving back
Chan is the private face of the philanthropic couple, working quietly behind the scenes. While Zuckerberg’s life story is widely known, Chan rarely talks publicly about how her personal story has helped shape the couple’s multimillion-dollar donations to schools and hospitals.
Wealth and power used to be foreign to Chan, the child of immigrant parents who fled Vietnam on refugee boats in the 1970s 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. They have vowed to donate 99 percent of their Facebook’s shares—worth more than $45 billion—to charitable causes.
And Chan, a former teacher, has taken it a step further. [Last year] she announced she was founding and would be CEO of The Primary School, which will link health care and education for 50 families. Teaming up with the Family Health Center, the free school, serving students from pre-K to eighth grade, will provide services from mental health to prenatal care for students and their families. The private school is funded by Chan and Zuckerberg, but they have not disclosed how much they are pumping into the effort.
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