Jeff Skoll Philanthropy
Jeff Skoll devised the business model that helped launch eBay.
This Canadian-born businessman conceived of the idea of eBay with Pierre Omidyar. The popular story is that Skoll came up with the business plan when Omidyar and his fiancée expressed how difficult it was to find other people who collect Pez candy dispensers. Skoll and his partner quit their day jobs to focus on the concept of internet-auctioning. Jeff Skoll was the first employee of eBay and also served as its first president.
In 1998, Jeff Skoll created the eBay Foundation to encourage the company to engage in philanthropy. A year after that milestone, Jeff Skoll created the Skoll Foundation which works on the principle of entrepreneurial philanthropy – a concept that has been adopted by other companies around the world.
Jeff Skoll’s philanthropic contributions have been widely recognized. Jeff Skoll’s areas of interest include the following organizations and causes:
- Jeff Skoll pledged $47.5 million to the Community Foundation of Silicon Valley.
- He made a donation of $7.5 million to the University of Toronto that allows deserving students to finish a degree in Engineering and an MBA in six years. This dual-degree program was the first in its field in Canada.
- Skoll also spearheaded the Gandhi Project. The program aims to translate and dub the film Gandhi into Arabic using Palestinian actors to make the film relevant to its target audience. The film is being screened and distributed in Palestine to promote non-violence, self-reliance, economic development and empowerment.
- Through the Skoll Foundation, countless grants have been awarded to various charitable and advocacy groups and social entrepreneurship efforts like: Alliance for Nonprofit Management, Inc., BoardSource, Inc., Calvert Social Investment Foundation, Inc., Center for Effective Philanthropy, Community Foundations of America, Stanford University, Duke University, Civic Ventures, Give2Asia, among others.
- Jeff Skoll has donated over a hundred million dollars to the Skoll Center for Social Entrepreneurship. This institution conducts research in the field at Oxford University to ensure that such a profitable but socially relevant model continues to be practiced and improved.
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