Twitter billionaire Jack Dorsey donated $10 million for cash gifts to needy U.S. families.
Jack Dorsey, the billionaire CEO of both Twitter and the payments app Square, has made a $10 million gift to a group called Project 100, which will in turn give $1,000 in cash to 10,000 families who have been affected by the coronavirus pandemic, the group announced on Tuesday.
Project 100 is a joint effort between nonprofits GiveDirectly, Propel and Stand for Children. GiveDirectly has been making cash donations to very poor families, first in Kenya and then Uganda, for more than seven years.
“The GiveDirectly funds were transferred to me within minutes of completing the survey on my Fresh EBT app,” said Josette Denis, a mother of six who lives in the Bronx, New York, and was a recipient of the $1,000 gift, according to a statement from GiveDirectly. The Fresh EBT app was developed by Propel to help people track food stamp balances on their mobile phones.
Project 100 has raised a total of $84 million since April, including the $10 million gift from Dorsey. Its goal is to raise $100 million in order to provide cash gifts to 100,000 American families. Other donors to Project 100 include former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, billionaire Lynn Schusterman, and Blue Meridian Partners, a nonprofit group whose donors include billionaires Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin and MacKenzie Bezos.
Dorsey has been on a giving spree since early April when he transferred $1 billion worth of his Square equity to a limited liability company called #startsmall. He announced in a tweet that #startsmall would be his charitable arm, and that he would track all donations in a public Google sheet. According to the document, this gift to Project 100 was made on May 15, 2020. So far, Dorsey has distributed $85 million worth of Square stock to more than 50 nonprofits since April.
On May 21, Dorsey also gave $5 million to Humanity Forward, a nonprofit founded by Andrew Yang, which is making $250 cash gifts to 20,000 families who have been economically impacted by the pandemic. Dorsey was the first billionaire to back Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign, whose signature policy was promoting a universal basic income in the United States. When Dorsey announced #startsmall, he said the main areas of focus would be Covid-19 relief, universal basic income and women’s health and education.
Dorsey owns stock in both Twitter and Square, and Forbes currently puts his net worth at $4.8 billion. That net worth figure includes the value of the Square shares owned by Dorsey’s LLC #startsmall that he has not yet given away.