Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg And Fellow Tech Executives Raise $7 Million COVID-19 Fund For Bay Area Food Bank

Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg and her fiancé Tom Bernthal have raised a $7 million emergency COVID-19 fund for a food bank in Silicon Valley where one in three children struggle with food insecurity, Sandberg told Forbes on Monday. 

Sandberg and Bernthal, a marketing executive, donated an initial $1 million, and raised an additional $6 million from a host of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, including billionaires Aneel Bhusri of Workday, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Intuit’s Scott Cook. Sandberg has garnered nearly $200,000 in donations through a fundraiser on Facebook.

“People don’t have paychecks, which means they can’t buy food,” says Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sandberg, who is worth $1.5 billion by Forbes’ estimate. “I think people really are starting to think not just about the immediate health issues, but also the very immediate kind of critical needs and issues that this represents.”

Second Harvest of Silicon Valley, a food bank, serves more than 250,000 people every month. Sandberg has been volunteering there for eight years. The fund will go towards paying temporary employees for Second Harvest, which distributes food to local organizations such as the Boys and Girls Club and soup kitchens as well as directly to families, as its volunteer workforce has dwindled. “Even before the broad calls for isolation, the food bank volunteers were down by 37%,” says Bernthal. “At a time when all these families need it the most, the food bank’s job has become the hardest.” 

Sandberg and Bernthal got the idea to launch an emergency fund four days ago while stocking up on groceries. They called Second Harvest that afternoon and raised most of the money by Friday morning.

Currently, Second Harvest is also considering a grab-and-go process to provide more meals to children who typically depend on school lunches. The couple is now reaching out to their friends across the country to run food drives for their local food banks. So far, COVID-19 has topped 4,400 cases and is tied to 80 deaths in the U.S. with the numbers predicted to mushroom over the coming days.

“You know, this may be one of the defining moments of our lifetime, could be a defining moment in a century,” Sandberg says. “But I have to believe that if that happens and as that happens, people are going to step up to equal the challenge in front of us.”