Sheryl Sandberg

SOURCE OF WEALTH: COO of Facebook, former Google executive, best-selling author

FUNDING AREAS: Women's Issues, Global Health, Poverty, Environment, Hunger Relief, Coping with Grief, COVID-19 Relief

OVERVIEW: Sandberg has been increasing her grantmaking, providing more indications of where her philanthropy may go in the future. She does some of her philanthropic grantmaking through the Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation, which supports the efforts of LeanIn.Org, OptionB.Org, and the Dave Goldberg Scholarship Program. She also created the Sandberg Goldberg Charitable Support Fund with a donation of $87 million, although it will likely remain unclear what this organization supports until tax filings become available.

BACKGROUND: Sheryl Sandberg graduated from Harvard with a degree in economics, where then professor Larry Summers recruited her to be his research assistant at the World Bank. While there, Sandberg worked on projects dealing with health problems such as blindness, leprosy and AIDS in India. Later on, she went back to Harvard and earned an MBA. Shortly after earning her graduate degree, Sandberg and Summers reunited and she became his chief of staff while he served as secretary of the Department of the Treasury under President Clinton. Sandberg led the Treasury's work on forgiving debt in the developing world during the Asian financial crisis.

After her stint at the U.S. Treasury, Sandberg worked at Google, where she served as vice president of global online sales and operations. There, she was responsible for online sales of Google's advertising and publishing products and also ran Google Book Search. She was also instrumental in starting Google.org, the company's philanthropic arm. In 2008, Sandberg moved to Facebook as the company's COO, where she cultivated Facebook's philanthropic vision. In recent years, Sandberg has been named one of Fortune magazine's 50 Most Powerful Women in Business, Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world, and the Wall Street Journal's 50 Women to Watch. In June 2022, Sandberg announced that she plans to Facebook and intends to turn her attention to philanthropy full time.

ISSUES: 

WOMEN'S CAUSES: In early 2013, Sandberg founded an organization called Lean In, which grew out of her bestselling book. Its mission is “to empower women to achieve their ambitions.” Lean In runs a network of more than 33,000 Lean In Circles worldwide and also engages in annual campaigns around specific gender equity issues. Sandberg sits on the board of Women for Women International, which has a humanitarian mission of helping women survivors of war become self-sufficient by providing microloans and job skills training. The charity works through a sponsorship model, in which a donor contributes a set amount each month and the sponsored "sister" gets the assistance she needs. 

In July 2017, she gave 590,000 shares of Facebook stock, at the time valued at around $98 million, to her donor-advised fund to benefit disadvantaged women and girls, as well as the Second Harvest Food Bank's "Stand Up for Kids" program, which Sandberg has supported since 2014. In 2019, she gave $1.3 million to Planned Parenthood to support its healthcare clinics across the country, and, in 2022, donated $3 million to the ACLU Ruth Bader Ginsburg Liberty Center to support candidates and ballot measures for abortion rights.

Sandberg gave $5 million through the Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation to help women and girls during the coronavirus pandemic. This grant to CARE and the International Rescue Committee helps those quarantined in dangerous situations, such as in refugee camps or subjected to domestic violence while stuck at home with their abusers.

EDUCATION: Sandberg gave $1 million to Teach for All, a global education group that sees poverty, hunger, discrimination, trauma, and under-performing school systems as obstacles to learning. Also, through her Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation, she funds the Dave Goldberg Scholarship Program, which honors the legacy of her late husband.

RESILIENCE: Sandberg’s new book, Option B, which was published in April 2017, focuses on themes of resilience, exploring "what it takes to help others through hardships: how to speak about the unspeakable, comfort friends in the wake of suffering, and create resilient workplaces, build robust marriages, and raise strong kids." The same month that Option B was published, Sandberg launched OptionB.org, which helps people dealing with a range of hardships, including grief and loss; health, illness and injury; abuse and sexual assault; divorce and family challenges; hate and violence; and incarceration. 

OTHER: She pledge $2.5 million to the Anti-Defamation League in 2019 to combat racism and discrimination in the US and Europe. In 2020, Sandberg made several grants funding COVID-119 relief and recovery efforts, including $5 million to support CARE and the International Rescue Committee for vulnerable populations worldwide, including women and girls, frontline workers, and those who are living in poverty, refugee camps, or areas of conflict. Sandberg also gave $1 million to help the food bank establish the COVID-19 Emergency Fund for Feeding Families to help needy people in the Silicon Valley area during the coronavirus pandemic.

LOOKING FORWARD: Sandberg signed the Giving Pledge, and she has set aside more wealth for her philanthropy. Her total giving exceeds $550 million but much of her giving has gone to donor-advised funds, so it is difficult to see where that money has gone. With her wealth topping out at well over $1 billion, expect her grantmaking to continue in some form for years to come. 

CONTACT: Rachel Thomas, Cofounder and President, Lean In, info@leanin.org

LINK: Lean In