Robin Williams’ Son is Continuing His Philanthropic Work

It had been a year since Robin Williams passed away, yet his philanthropic work lives on, perpetuated by his eldest son, Zak Williams. He has an MBA degree from Columbia University and is using his business degree to teach prison inmates at the San Quentin Prison in California how to manage their finances when they have served their jail time.

Zak said that he could have coasted through life, living off the wealth left by their father. However, he wants to have pride and joy in the work that he does by giving back to the community through his business education.

Finance class at San Quentin Prison

At the recommendation of his wife, Alex Mallick Williams, who is a Human Rights Watch associate director, Zak Williams started to teach a finance class at San Quentin last October. It is a weekly course that Zak teaches with Curtis Carroll, an inmate, fondly called “Wall Street” because he had a background in stocks and is able to predict which ones will be good to invest on. Their finance class involves teaching inmates resume writing, looking for a job, managing finances as well as planning for retirement. Zak Williams is already thinking of taking the class further by developing it into a program that could be used to help people in low-income neighborhoods, who could really use help such as this. However, he says that developing the curriculum outside of prison would take time, even if he and Carroll are already thinking about it at this point.

Williams said that it is not difficult to be compassionate towards his fellowmen and that he believes that his father would have loved the program that he started and would even enjoy participating in it. He appreciates his co-teacher, whom he said could have just served his prison sentence, but he chose to seek further learning and preferred to be accountable for the students they teach.

Asked how he came to start the program, Williams said that he was passionate about analyzing investors and markets, and said that there is a set of skills needed for analysis and problem solving that he enjoyed exploring. As a whole, he believes that this set of skills helps develop a different way to understand the market and creates a stronger understanding of human condition and the economy.

By Maj. Enrique Vasquez (https://www.dvidshub.net/image/69764) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons