The for-profit charity organization founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, has done an about-face on its commitment to corporate diversity.
Executives at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) informed employees on Tuesday evening that the organization would in effect do away with both internal and external diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, according to an internal email and other correspondence viewed by the Guardian. On 10 January, leaders at CZI reassured staff that its longstanding support for DEI was not changing. Zuckerberg’s company Meta had announced earlier that day it would terminate its DEI programs, in the days before Donald Trump’s second inauguration.
Marc Malandro, CZI’s chief operating officer, wrote in the email to all employees he had been reviewing the organization’s programs “to ensure that they align with our focus as a science philanthropy as well as the current legal and policy landscape”.
“Given the shifting regulatory and legal landscape, we will no longer have a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility team at CZI,” he wrote.
The organization also rolled back its “diverse slate practice”, an effort to ensure that qualified candidates from a diverse set of backgrounds be interviewed for all open roles at the charity. Meta nixed a similar rule last month.
CZI’s billions of dollars in funding for investments and grants flows from Zuckerberg and Chan’s enormous personal fortune created by Meta, the social media company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp that Zuckerberg co-founded (as Facebook) more than 20 years ago. The couple operate CZI as co-founders and co-CEOs. When Meta early this year decided it would end its own DEI efforts, CZI employees grew concerned that their organization would follow since the company and the foundation often enact similar corporate policies. As Meta’s CEO, Zuckerberg has made clear in recent months his desire to be in the good graces of Trump’s new administration, which has ended diversity initiatives in federal hiring and pressured businesses to do the same.
Despite CZI’s top HR executive telling staff last month: “Meta’s changes to its DEI efforts does not impact ours,” employees had remained wary the organization would stick to its commitments. There have been several past instances of CZI following Meta’s lead in making operational changes, from layoffs to a recent return-to-office mandate. A CZI spokesperson declined to comment.
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In addition, Malandro wrote that CZI has ended all “social advocacy funding”, including work and grants focused on immigration reform and racial equity. “There are a small number of multi-year grant commitments we made previously that we will still honor, but none of these will support political activism,” Malandro wrote. The organization will now focus more strictly on grants and work around “biology and AI”, his email added.
To that end, CZI also conducted layoffs within its community team, formerly part of the organization where work has focused on affordable housing and “economic inclusion”, and moved other members of the team elsewhere within the organization. The head of the community team is leaving CZI next month, according to another email viewed by the Guardian. The landing page for CZI’s community work has been scrubbed of any mention of work on inclusivity or economic fairness.
CZI’s website has changed more drastically in recent days, removing many past references to its years of public support of corporate diversity and promoting underrepresented groups in scientific research.
Among the changes: a page previously dedicated to CZI’s DEI work that highlighted its own employees’ diverse backgrounds no longer exists. Another page that previously said the foundation focused all its work through “a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens” removed that phrase. A quote from Chan from CZI’s main page that read: “Luck is not a national strategy. We need to build strategies that take luck out of the equation for every person,” is gone. The organization has given thousands of grants over the years, including to many programs and organizations focused on diversity efforts, as well as to institutions that the Trump administration has railed against, such as the National Institutes of Health.
CZI also on Tuesday informed those who had already applied to its Science Diversity Leadership awards, a grant program awarding $1.15m to selected researchers, that it had “decided not to continue” with the program. The organization did not give an explanation in an email about the end of the program, though the process for selecting a new cohort of researchers was well under way, according to another webpage that has now been deleted from CZI’s website.
A person who had applied for the award and was expecting to hear back this month instead received a brief email informing them that it would be discontinued. The person told the Guardian it was “extremely frustrating”, and that it pointed to “an even bigger problem at CZI”.
