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Jan 10, 2017 · 2 min read
CZI Announces David Plouffe to Lead Policy and Advocacy Work
Mark Zuckerberg: Priscilla and I are excited to announce that David Plouffe is joining the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to lead our policy and advocacy effort and Ken Mehlman will lead our policy advisory board.
Our approach at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is to bring engineering to social change. We build tools to bring personalized learning into more schools and help scientists cure all diseases in our children’s lifetime. Part of creating sustainable social change is also helping to build movements around these issues — to fight for more science funding and better education for all children.
Advocacy has always been part of our approach. We wrote about its importance in our letter to our daughter when we started CZI. When we launched our science initiative last year, I spoke about how we need to change that our government spends 50x more treating people who are sick than finding cures so people don’t get sick in the first place.
I’m excited to work with David on this. He has great experience building movements as part of companies like Uber and as campaign manager for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
Similar to how we built the science initiative, Priscilla and I have spent the past year meeting with many policy and issue experts across the political spectrum. We’re grateful some of them will be joining us as members of our policy advisory board.
Ken Mehlman will lead this board. Like David, Ken has a long history in both the public and private sectors. He ran the Republican National Committee, was campaign manager for George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, and today is a member at KKR where he partners with companies around the world. David and Ken built campaigns for different parties but have also come together to work on issues like marriage equality.
David and Ken will announce more members of the policy advisory board over the next few months. They’ll work together to find opportunities to work with governments, partners and people everywhere to advance human potential and promote equal opportunity.
On behalf of our whole team, Priscilla and I want to welcome David and Ken. We’re looking forward to working with you!
