Airbnb Co-Founder Brian Chesky Gives $100 Million to Help Students Who Want Public Service Careers

Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky is giving $100 million to the Obama Foundation for a scholarship program that aims to give college students pursuing careers in public service a leg up by reducing their student debt, providing money for travel, and connecting them to a network of leaders.

The two-year program, called the Voyager Scholarship, the Obama-Chesky Scholarship for Public Service is directed at students in their junior and senior years of college from across the United States who plan to work in public service after they graduate. Students in the program will receive $25,000 a year for tuition for their final two years of college and a $10,000 stipend and free Airbnb housing to create a summer work-travel experience between their junior and senior years. The summer travel must be related to the field they hope to enter after they graduate.

“So many people would like to go into public service, but they can’t afford to. They have too much of a financial burden looming over them,” Chesky said in a video about the scholarship program. “We could remove that burden so that people could actually go into public service, serve their community, but also broaden their horizons.”

Chesky, whose parents were social workers, is an industrial designer by training. In 2008, he and two friends, Joseph Gebbia Jr. and Nathan Blecharczyk, started the online lodging company where he currently serves as CEO. Forbes estimates Chesky’s net worth at $9.4 billion. This is his largest public donation so far, but he signed the Giving Pledge in 2016 so it is likely Chesky will continue to give large sums to charity in the years to come.

In March, Chesky, Gebbia, and Blecharczyk pledged to match up to $10 million in contributions from other donors to the nonprofit arm of their company, Airbnb.org, to support the company’s efforts to provide free short-term housing to refugees fleeing Ukraine.

The travel aspect of the scholarship does not end with the summer travel project. Students in the Voyager program will also receive a travel stipend of $2,000 a year for 10 years to continue to help them see more of the world and forge connections with others in their fields.

The program includes an annual meeting — the first one will be this fall — where Voyager students will meet with President Obama and Brian Chesky to discuss how “empathy and understanding” are important parts of leadership. They’ll also hear from guest speakers on different approaches to public service and connect with other scholarship recipients. The program will also sponsor a speaker series where students can connect with public service leaders, and they will have access to the Obama Foundation’s resources and programming throughout their careers.

“If we want this next generation of leaders to be able to do what they need to do, they have to meet each other. They have to know each other. They have to understand each other’s communities,” President Obama said in the video, “You’re going to find young people from every corner of this country who are going to be future change makers. There are leaders everywhere. We just have to find them.”