Beyond Linsanity: Inside Jeremy Lin’s Philanthropic Journey
As a native New Yorker and longtime hoops nerd, my conflicted Knicks fandom has gone through many stages, including those dogged mid-’90s squads that battled those dastardly Pacers. But there’s been no era quite like the 2012 Linsanity Knicks. For a few electric weeks, Jeremy Lin, a Harvard grad turned unlikely Knicks starting point guard, looked like the best player in basketball. He even seemed to earn Kobe’s respect.
But the “Linsanity” phenomenon was about more than basketball. Lin embodied something we’d rarely seen in American sports until then: an Asian American man who was confident, charismatic and unapologetically himself on one of the world’s biggest stages. He challenged long-standing stereotypes about Asian masculinity as an Asian American athlete who was dynamic, emotional and central to the cultural conversation, a story that still feels unfinished today. For that, he landed on the covers of Sports Illustrated and Time.
So I wasn’t exactly surprised to learn that the Jeremy Lin Foundation, which Lin founded in 2011 while playing with the Golden State Warriors, has become a well-run, purpose-driven organization with a professional staff and a clear mission: empowering AAPI youth and other communities of color through community engagement, solidarity and narrative change.
The foundation started by hosting youth basketball camps and has since expanded into a broader focus on youth empowerment, awarding nearly $1 million in grants in 2023 alone. Its latest effort, the Thrive Together Collaborative, brings together about 20 nonprofits that serve under-resourced AAPI youth. As of 2023, the foundation’s assets stood at just over $10 million.
When I recently spoke with Lin, who called in from Taiwan, we talked about what first compelled him to give back before he had the means or celebrity to do so, how his philanthropy evolved post-Linsanity, his growing interest in collaboration, his thoughts on athlete giving, and where he hopes to take his foundation next.
Jeremy Lin’s early lessons and growing up in the Bay Area
Born in Torrance, California, outside of Los Angeles, and raised in a Taiwanese family in the Bay Area, Lin grew up in an environment of contrasts. In Palo Alto, his school was majority white. At church, he was mostly surrounded by Asians. And then there was East Palo Alto across the highway, a predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood with one the highest per-capita crime rates in the country at the time. Hoops was one of the things that united these different worlds.
Some of his youth teammates came from East Palo Alto, and Lin remembers driving with his mother to pick them up for games and hearing their stories. One in particular stayed with him. “One of my close teammates [talked] consistently about not getting a good night’s sleep because a gunfight broke out right outside his house,” he said. Right then and there, Lin made an internal promise that if he ever had a platform, he would use it to help.
That conviction continued when Lin reached the NBA, signing a nonguaranteed contract with the Golden State Warriors in 2010. As an undrafted rookie, he spent much of his time bouncing between the Warriors bench and the G League (then called the D-League), earning less than $500,000 that year — a modest sum by NBA standards, and far from guaranteed. Yet even then, Lin baked giving into the equation.
His mother, Shirley, helped him get his foundation off the ground — the same woman who once dipped into her 401(k) so Lin could train for the NBA draft. “I didn’t have the financial means to support and fund the foundation the way that I wanted to early, but we were still able to do camps and do different things, and I thought that was really meaningful,” Lin said.
For those local basketball camps, Lin was often the one hauling basketballs from his car and setting up on site. “It was very makeshift, but it was awesome,” Lin said.
Finding focus at the Jeremy Lin Foundation and establishing a mission
Linsanity arrived in February 2012, punctuated by moments like Lin waving off his entire team and pulling up for a cold-blooded, game-winning three on a winter day in Toronto. But beyond those magical weeks, Lin’s career became one of near-constant motion. Over 15 years of professional basketball, he played for a number of teams — eight alone in the NBA — moving from New York to Houston, then to Los Angeles, and later to the Toronto Raptors, the very team he once beat in electric fashion. In each city, he said, he tried to give back in some way.
By 2014, Lin began deepening his investment in the foundation. That year, he donated $1.175 million, up from about a half-million annually in prior years. By fiscal year 2015, that figure had nearly doubled to $2 million. Even in the early days, Lin himself was the foundation’s primary benefactor — back in 2011, he contributed nearly $60,000 from his modest rookie earnings.
Seven years in, though, Lin began to feel that the foundation lacked a clear identity. Its giving was frequent but scattered. “The funding early on was no real vision. It was just kind of arbitrary, like, ‘I feel like putting this in, so I’ll put this in.’ I just tried to be radically generous. But again, it was very reactive. And so now… the last eight years have been a lot more proactive.”
The realization pushed him to refocus. Rather than chasing new projects in every city he played, Lin decided to anchor the foundation’s efforts in the two places that shaped his life and legacy, the Bay Area and New York, and to center its mission around AAPI youth and community empowerment.
Today, that mission plays out through a mix of grantmaking, collaboration and capacity-building initiatives designed to support under-resourced AAPI youth and other youth of color. The foundation prioritizes programs that address mental health, self-confidence and leadership development, themes that repeatedly surfaced in its conversations with grantees.
Lin shared two stories about how his work is really starting to make an impact in communities. The first happened during the pandemic and involved one of the foundation’s Oakland grantees, Harbor House. A young student was falling behind at school for a reason that had nothing to do with grades or motivation. He had recurring lice, which was affecting his ability to focus and learn. The staff at the organization made weekly visits to wash his hair and check on him, offering steady care that almost felt parental. “Love and service are very sacrificial, very costly, and very difficult,” Lin said. “But if you’re willing to go and do those things, you can literally change the trajectory of a kid’s life. And I think that’s what these organizations are doing.”
Another moment came when a few students from a New York grantee, Coalition for Asian American Children and Families, joined a board call to share their experiences. They spoke about learning Asian American history and teaching their classmates what it means to take pride in that identity. Listening to them, Lin thought about his own adolescence and how long it had taken him to feel the same kind of pride.
Learning from communities and establishing the new Thrive Together Collaborative
When Wharton MBA Stephanie Hsu joined the foundation as executive director in 2020, she saw an organization ready to refocus. “I was drawn to the board’s commitment and desire for deep, meaningful work that centered the communities they worked with,” she said. “I was struck by how Jeremy had set aside a large portion of his NBA salary for giving and set up the foundation’s endowment 15 years ago, when he joined the NBA undrafted.”
One of Hsu’s first priorities was to hone the foundation’s scope through deep community listening. In her first months, she surveyed more than 50 community leaders to understand top youth needs and where Lin’s platform could make the greatest impact. “The board was struck that AAPIs comprise 7% of the U.S. population, yet only 0.3% of philanthropic funding goes to AAPI causes, despite 1 in 4 AAPI youth struggling with poverty in places like New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. We began to focus our work there.”
Those findings helped crystallize the foundation’s direction, most recently through its new Thrive Together Collaborative, a donor network supporting about 20 nonprofits serving under-resourced AAPI youth for the next five years.
The Thrive Together model reflects how Hsu and the foundation approach systems change: long-term funding, shared learning and community ownership. She says that the aim of the collaborative is to provide culturally relevant mental health services. “It’s been an incredibly tough time in the nonprofit space, so it brings us a lot of hope and joy to be able to bring support to organizations that are working with youth in the margins right now, Hsu said.
Hsu and her lean team spend much of their time reviewing landscape data and talking directly with grantees. Some days are spent on site visits with youth leaders or after-school mentors. Lin echoed the importance of being in community and partnership. “I could try to, like, do everything myself, but the reality is, there’s a lot of really good organizations doing a lot of really good work. So I’m kind of, I’m just naturally bigger on teamwork,” he said, relating it back to basketball and how the point guard’s responsibility is to bring the best out of the other four players on his team.
Jeremy Lin on athlete philanthropy and what the future holds
Lin has spent enough time in locker rooms and boardrooms to see both the promise and pitfalls of athlete philanthropy. Too often, he says, athletes start foundations during their peak earning years, only for the enthusiasm to fade once the spotlight, or sometimes even the money itself, wanes. “The number of foundations started early in an athlete’s career is quite high,” he noted, “but the number that lasts until retirement or beyond is much smaller.”
Lin is no stranger to the challenge of staying true to a mission while life changes around you, but says he’s learned to lean on structure rather than willpower. Through multi-year grants, long-term partnerships and a steady board, the Jeremy Lin Foundation is designed to weather the natural ups and downs of a post-playing career.
Still, Lin finds hope in his peers who have managed to make philanthropy a sustained part of their lives. He points to Stephen Curry, his former teammate with Golden State, who continues to give in Oakland even after relocating to San Francisco. He also cites players like LeBron James and Russell Westbrook, whose philanthropy has remained active and intentional across decades and teams. For Lin, their example is proof that consistency, not visibility, defines real impact.
Now based in Asia, Lin is entering a new phase of life focused on family and reflection, but is intent on keeping philanthropy central to his identity. The foundation is one of the four main pillars of his broader JLIN brand, but its charitable work in the Bay Area and New York may be the clearest expression of who he’s become. And if his journey so far is any indication, Lin doesn’t plan on fading from the philanthropy scene anytime soon.
“How can we mobilize the community to really rally?” he said. “I think it’s a failure on me and the foundation if, at the end of these collaboratives, they’re still reliant on me. There’s something special about the real work coming when, a few years later, they don’t need you. They’ve been empowered, they’ve been connected, and they’re able to take that and run with it.”
