Focus Areas
Education
Throughout Ivy’s career, she found that the one common thread of upward mobility for individuals and communities was education. We believe in empowering youth and adults to seek education at all levels, particularly in cases where they lack the financial resources to attain it. Example programs we support: Destination Space STEM camps for high school and undergraduate students, Elevate Tutoring undergraduate scholarships and middle/high school tutoring, Taiwan undergraduate scholarships and primary/middle school tutoring, Cambodia undergraduate scholarships, University of Oxford undergraduate bursary, Johns Hopkins University graduate engineering scholarship, Duke University entrepreneurship community outreach.
Taiwan Ivy Cheng Scholarship recipients and mentors
Infrastructure Projects
In some communities, education is a luxury because healthcare, water supply, housing, sustainable energy, and other critical needs require the bulk of their attention. We seek infrastructure projects that relieve the pressures of these acute needs so that people can refocus some of their effort towards education. These efforts include improving access to healthcare in remote Tibet villages, providing computers to communities in Cambodia that enables education access, and investing in workforce housing in downtown Seattle, where there is insufficient affordable housing for first responders.
Heartwood is a workforce housing complex in downtown Seattle to increase housing access
Research & Development
Longer-term investments are also needed to improve the lives of the underserved. For example, many pediatric congenital heart disease patients are treated with inadequate therapies that are borrowed from technology developed for adults. Our foundation has provided funding for Starlight Cardiovascular, a medical device startup focused on developing dedicated devices to treat society’s youngest patients, with the aim of keeping their hearts beating well into childhood and adulthood. We are currently exploring other research and development opportunities to help improve people’s lives with the goal of upleveling via education, healthcare, and infrastructure.
Starlight Cardiovascular is developing a patent ductus arteriosus stent to maintain blood circulation in neonates