Mark Zuckerberg’s charity ended its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs on Tuesday. It also ended its social advocacy efforts, such as working for immigration reform and racial equity grants.
Marc Malandro, who is the chief operating officer of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, told staff about the news in an email on Tuesday evening.
This comes after Zuckerberg’s Meta ended its DEI programs last month. The company did this to make sure it was “building teams with the most talented people.”
To “restore free expression” across Facebook, Instagram, and Meta platforms, Meta also ended its fact-checking program and eased speech limits. The company said its content moderation methods had “gone too far.”
Malandro told the whole company in the memo that he and the leadership team have been looking over CZI’s programs and ways of doing things “to make sure that they align with our focus as a science philanthropy as well as the current legal and policy landscape.”
“As a result, we want to reiterate that we made the decision a few years ago to wind down our social advocacy work and have since discontinued that funding, as well as share some new changes we’re making to our hiring and HR practices around diversity,” he said.
Malandro said CZI puts “the vast majority of our resources into building Biohubs and supporting research teams to solve complex questions around biology and health.”
Malandro said that CZI is “very focused on solving four grand challenges that will give scientists the tools to help cure, prevent, or manage all diseases in the coming decades.” These challenges include creating an AI-based virtual cell model to predict and understand how cells will behave; creating cutting-edge imaging systems to see living cells in action; implanting sensors into tissues to learn more about inflammation, which is a major cause of many diseases; and engineering and using the immune system to find, stop, and treat disease early on.
But Malandro said that because CZI is now focusing on science, they have “wound down our social advocacy funding.”
“This includes our previous work on immigration reform, as well as our racial equity grantmaking as we’ve completed the five-year program we announced in 2020,” he said. “It’s been a while since we started any new programs in this area.” Just a few of the multi-year grant promises we made in the past will still stand, but none of them will help with political activity.
Malandro told us: “Looking ahead, we expect CZI’s increasing focus to continue to be pushing the frontiers of biology and AI.”
This is what Malandro said about DEI: “the shifting regulatory and legal landscape.”
“In addition, given the shifting regulatory and legal landscape, we will no longer have a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility team at CZI,” he said. “The three members of that team have transitioned to new roles and responsibilities.”
When it comes to hiring, CZI has “discontinued our Diverse Slate Practice.”
“Going forward, we will continue to cast a wide net to source top candidates while always selecting the best candidate for the role,” he said.
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“We remain dedicated to ensuring our work serves everyone, that you feel welcome at CZI, and that you can do the best work of your career here,” he said. “To support this, we are building a workforce that reflects a broad range of experiences, thoughts, and opinions, supporting employees via our employee resource groups which are open to all to join, and driving effectiveness in our work by rewarding individual initiative, excellence, and hard work.”
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