Harlow, Chan discuss motivations, future for Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative
Priscilla Chan is the daughter of refugees, a first-generation college student, and co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, an organization working to use technology to solve some of the hardest problems facing the world today. She considers herself lucky.
She feels lucky that her parents were able to flee Vietnam and start anew in the United States. She feels lucky that she was able to graduate valedictorian of her technical high school and attend Harvard University.
She recognizes that not everyone has the same luck or the same opportunities. After working as a teacher and pediatrician in San Jose, Chan decided that she needed to find a way to give back. This led to the founding of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
In her featured session at Austin’s South by Southwest festival on Friday with CNN anchor Poppy Harlow, Chan shared three stories to highlight the impact that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is making in the communities it serves. She shared how the organization she co-founded is revolutionizing education, medicine and the criminal justice system.
In education, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has leveraged technology to help teachers meet students where they are in the learning process with Summit Learning. Summit Learning has created a platform to help students learn at their own pace and for teachers to keep up with their progress more easily.
An early project at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was the creation of Meta, a tool that uses artificial intelligence to manage biomedical research papers. Chan noted how information about specific biomedical research was difficult to access when she worked as a primary care doctor. As such, she made it her mission to create a platform to make it easier for doctors to find the information they need, when they need it.
With the criminal justice system, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has created coding schools in prisons that have led to a recidivism rate of 0% for those who have participated in the programs.
By partnering teachers with engineers, artificial intelligence with biomedical research and coding programs with prisons, Chan has worked to make the world more just so that luck is no longer the determinant of one’s success.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative practices what Chan preaches. The organization is intentionally about 60 percent women with a 50 percent technology workforce (in which 51 percent of the workforce is women). The organization is also made up of 30–40 percent underrepresented minorities.
Chan explained that this is done to “make [the organization] better at reaching [its] mission of getting students the attention they deserve, fixing the criminal justice system, and eradicating diseases by representing the populations [it] wants to serve.”
Chan and the initiative will next work on ways to build educational programs that focus on underserved and underrepresented communities to create a more diverse workforce in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields.
At Harvard University, Chan realized that if she could succeed, then she could break down the system that keeps other people down. She has dedicated her life to giving back and living up to the African proverb that reads, “if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want go far, go together.”
Tuulia Koponen is Latinitas’ social media and communications intern. She is a senior at The University of Texas at Austin where she studies public relations. You can keep up with Tuulia on Instagram.
