Experienced development officers know that most mega-gifts rarely materialize like a bolt of lightning in a clear blue sky. Instead, they’re usually the byproduct of years of cultivating smaller gifts that, over time, build up to that jaw-dropping mega-commitment. But sometimes the figurative lightning bolt can be genuinely surprising when it finds the funder in question boldly venturing outside its stated priorities.
Consider the Bezos family’s 10-year, $710.5 million commitment to Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center (known as Fred Hutch) to galvanize cancer and infectious disease research. By allocating millions to recruit researchers, construct new facilities, build out a clinical research infrastructure, and expand immunotherapy research, the couple, seemingly overnight, catapulted themselves into the upper echelons of medical research mega-donors.
This isn’t typical territory for the family’s giving through their Bezos Family Foundation — though, as I’ll get to below, it isn’t foreign territory for the family itself. Since its inception in 2000, the charitable giving vehicle for Jeff’s mother Jackie and stepfather Mike Bezos has focused on early learning, excellence in K-12 education and youth leadership. While the foundation has funded research in a variety of fields like online learning, character development and adolescent neuroscience — some related to medical research — a search of the terms “cancer” or “infectious diseases” on its online grants list yields zero results. Conventional wisdom suggests that Jeff is the Bezos family member most concerned with medical research.
Of course, scanning a grantmaker’s website doesn’t account for gifts or commitments made outside of the family foundation structure. As we’ll see, Jackie and Mike have previously made substantial public-facing gifts earmarked for cancer research and community health. Nor does invoking conventional wisdom explain what’s taking place behind the scenes in conference rooms and Zoom calls. In this case, Jackie and Mike Bezos’ mega-commitment was the product of a 20-year backstory that includes a chance introduction by a family friend, the pandemic’s unintended consequences and a merger. All the while, Fred Hutch development staff remained in close contact with the couple, showing them how previous gifts were pushing the field forward and helping them shape what would become their 10-year commitment.
“This was not a case of us sitting down and presenting a proposal, making an ask and getting an answer,” said Kelly O’Brien, Fred Hutch’s vice president of philanthropy. “It was an iterative process of looking at what was most important to the family and putting a lot of rigor behind how we would use the funding over the course of the decade.”
“The most successful venture investment of all time”
Before I delve into how it all came together, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the most obvious ingredient of any mega-commitment — prodigious wealth. While commentators debate whether Jeff should be giving away money faster, his mother and stepfather may be sitting on billions of dollars thanks to their astonishingly savvy investment in a nascent Amazon.
In 1995, Jackie and Mike invested $245,573 in the company, undeterred by Jeff’s warning that there was a “70% chance” they’d never see their money again. Two years later, Amazon went public, and in 2000, the pair launched the Bezos Family Foundation. Its stated mission is “investing in the science of learning and the experiences that youth need from birth to high school to pursue their own path for success.”
The more Amazon grew, the more it became apparent that Jackie and Mike were presiding over a burgeoning fortune. In 2014, IP editor David Callahan noted that the couple were the real Bezos family members to keep an eye on.
In 2018, Bloomberg’s Tom Metcalf engaged in some revealing speculation about the pair’s wealth, writing that Mike and Jackie donated 595,027 shares in Amazon to their foundation from 2001 through 2016. If Jackie and Mike didn’t sell or donate any additional shares, Metcalf concluded, they would have owned about 3.4% of the company, making them the second-biggest individual owners after their son and among the richest people in the world. Bezos’ parents’ stake “could be worth almost $30 billion today,” Metcalf wrote in a piece published on July 31, 2018. Since then, Amazon’s stock price has increased 34%.
A look at extracted financial data from the Bezos Family Foundation’s Form 990-PF for the fiscal year ending December 2020 shows it had $91 million in total revenue and made $80 million in charitable disbursements — a 433% increase over 2012, when gifts mostly flowed to nonprofits in the education field. In 2019, the couple contributed 42,220 Amazon shares to the foundation, totaling $75 million, and disbursed $88 million in funding. That year’s Form 990-PF listed Jeff and his then-wife MacKenzie as board members.
In late November of last year, the Bezos family made a $166 million gift to NYU Langone Health to support the health and wellness of diverse populations across the hospital’s Brooklyn-based community. The gift came on the heels of a 2017 pledge of $25 million to fund initiatives to help mothers, children and families in Brooklyn.
While Fred Hutch’s press release quotes Mike and Jackie, the $710 million commitment, like the NYU gift, was ultimately attributed to “the Bezos family.” This language, coupled with uncertainty regarding the exact size of the pair’s fortune, raises the possibility that their centibillionaire son fronted at least part of the bill. As is often the case when the super-rich move money around, the exact mechanics here are murky.
Of course, the Bezoses aren’t the only super-rich folks interested in cancer. The field of medical research — and cancer in particular — is replete with huge gifts and commitments from mega-donors, many of whom have been personally affected by the disease. In the last two years alone, Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis, Fiona and Stanley Druckenmiller, and Jared and Monica Isaacman have made cancer-related gifts or pledges totaling $100 million apiece. In 2021, William and Alice Goodwin announced a $250 million pledge to endow a new cancer research foundation, Break Through Cancer. Perhaps the closest analog to the Bezos announcement in terms of sheer dollars comes from British billionaire Alexander Knaster, who has pledged more than $650 million to the Mark Foundation for Cancer Research since he established it in 2017.
All of which is to say that the size of the Bezos commitment — that’s a cool $70 million per year, for those keeping track at home — is huge, even by the medical research field’s lofty standards, and all the more so given the family’s small public footprint in the space. So how, exactly, did this commitment materialize?
Return on investment
The story begins about 20 years ago when Mike and Jackie were starting to think seriously about their giving. At the time, a Fred Hutch volunteer who was friends with the couple reached out and introduced them to the center and its work. The pair made two visits to the campus before making their first (relatively modest) gift in 2008.
A year later, they made their first principal gift — a $10 million challenge gift for immunotherapy. Fred Hutch went on to raise the additional $10 million within a year. Subsequent gifts were earmarked for ongoing support of immunotherapy, integrated research centers for translational data science and understanding the pathogenic causes of cancer.
These gifts didn’t magically appear in a vacuum. Fred Hutch staff continually provided Jackie and Mike with annual reports that “showed not only financially what we were doing with those gifts of magnitude, but also how we were generating a return on investment,” O’Brien said. “We showed them how scientists who were supported with start-up grants went on to receive federal grants. We showed them how industry partnerships and clinical trials were getting started because of things they seeded.”
Staff at Fred Hutch would spontaneously send the couple news items of interest. “It could be something as simple as a note from our president saying, ‘Just wanted to make sure you saw that this faculty member you supported was featured in the Journal of Internal Medicine,” O’Brien said. Similarly, the team made it a point to invite the couple to events. “It was important to make sure that they knew about an event opportunity that might be of interest to them.”
The couple visited the Fred Hutch campus at least once a year, and sometimes twice. All told, they have met with approximately 45 scientists, four Fred Hutch presidents, and various board members over the course of their 20-year involvement with the center.
The relationship also benefited from longstanding personal involvement by staff members. Principal Gift Officer Nancy Greenwood-Vehrs sat in on the very first meeting with the couple and has been working the relationship for the past 20 years. Similarly, Dr. Fred Appelbaum, who oversees the center’s immunotherapy work as head of Fred Hutch’s clinical research division, was also involved from the start, O’Brien said.
Pivoting during COVID
Dr. Thomas Lynch was named president of Fred Hutch in January 2020 and had made working with Jackie and Mike a top priority. Then COVID hit. “Our first 100 days onboarding plan for our new president went right out the window,” O’Brien said. “We really had to work very differently.”
That meant embracing Zoom, which, as it turned out, enabled development officers to meet with more prospects and donors, and often more frequently. And so, for the next two years, Jackie and Mike discussed the contours of their commitment with Lynch, O’Brien, Greenwood-Vehrs and Applebaum virtually and, somewhat less frequently, in person. O’Brien also worked with other Fred Hutch personnel in developing the priorities, budgets and intended impact of a potential commitment from the family.
The pandemic affected the complexion of the commitment in another important way. Fred Hutch has a Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division that seeks to prevent, treat and cure illnesses such as cancer-related infectious diseases and HIV. In 2020, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services named the center an “Operation Warp Speed” partner to coordinate the development, manufacturing and distribution of COVID-19 diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines. Later that year, the center launched an AstraZeneca trial.
That pandemic-era interdisciplinary work affected the commitment from Jackie and Mike, which aims to advance both cancer and infectious disease research. “We sometimes say that science builds on science, and I think that became very true in the pandemic, which positioned a conversation with Jackie and Mike to think about what the next decade was going to look like at Fred Hutch,” O’Brien said.
A merger and diversifying clinical trials
Another component in the commitment’s backstory is the recent merger between the formerly named Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, a merger which formed the current Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. Throughout 2021, stakeholders spoke with Jackie, Mike and other major donors, including Seattle businessman Stuart Sloan and his wife Molly, about how the merger would create what O’Brien called “one of the world’s great cancer centers” by accelerating clinical research and expanding clinical trials.
Donors were supportive of the merger, and in April of this year, it became official. In early September, the Sloans made a $78 million gift to seed a new precision oncology institute at Fred Hutch. A month later, when Fred Hutch announced the Bezos commitment, its press release quoted Mike as saying, “As long-time Fred Hutch supporters, we were encouraged to see the recent merger expand its capacity to aggressively investigate and treat cancer and infectious diseases.” Mike and Jackie’s commitment sets aside $225 million to construct a new building that will house the Stuart and Molly Sloan Precision Oncology Institute.
The Bezos commitment also earmarks $149.5 million to expand the center’s clinical research infrastructure to increase enrollment of individuals from diverse backgrounds, among other aims.
I spoke with O’Brien while researching an upcoming Inside Philanthropy white paper on the state of cancer funding, and practically every funding leader I’ve heard from has cited diversifying clinical trials as a top priority. Various factors have contributed to the underrepresentation of certain ethnic demographics in trials, including the fact that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration doesn’t explicitly require drugmakers to enroll more minority patients. There’s also what ProPublica’s Caroline Chen and Riley Wong call the Black community’s “lingering distrust of the medical community due to a history of being victimized by medical experimentation,” such as the Tuskegee experiments carried out from 1932 through 1972.
This is another area in which the pandemic, as tragic as it may sound, created an area of opportunity for medical researchers. The COVID vaccine rollout “showed that you can build trust when communities are brought in early to understand the benefit of clinical trials,” O’Brien said. “Operation Warp Speed showed how we can ensure we diversify trials, and I think the cancer field can learn a lot from that experience.”
Prelude to a comprehensive campaign
It’s been more than 20 years since Fred Hutch had its last comprehensive fundraising campaign. “The question for us has always been, ‘What will the campaign be for?’” O’Brien said. “This is the opportunity, following the merger, to begin to really work closely with donors to determine what matters most to them.”
Fred Hutch’s press release announcing the Bezos commitment said the center will “require $3 billion in philanthropic support over the next decade” and that its leaders believe the family “will inspire additional donor support.” O’Brien said it was “a little unusual” to mention a specific dollar amount since the center hasn’t even formally launched a campaign, but that “we felt that we needed to be transparent about our needs following the merger.”
The center has also sought to dispel the idea that mega-donors will carry the entire fundraising load. “The challenge is so great that it was going to take a very large group of donors coming together with gifts of all sizes, and that message resonated with Mike and Jackie and Stuart and Molly,” O’Brien said. The center plans to formally launch a 10-year, multi-phased comprehensive campaign next year; the first phase culminates with the center’s 50th anniversary in 2025.
So now the real work begins, and O’Brien and her team plan to implement the same strategies that yielded huge commitments from the Bezoses and the Sloans. “I think they really enjoyed the process of asking a lot of questions — ‘How does recruitment at this level work? How does collaboration at other places work?’ — so they could see how the funds would spur specific types of activity,” she said. “It was a hands-on strategic process, and I can’t credit them enough for how thoughtful they were in gauging what kind of impact they wanted to have.”