Visionaries of the Year have been very busy.

The Chronicle’s Visionary of the Year award is designed not only to recognize achievement in innovation, but also to encourage endeavors with the potential to grow — or “scale,” as they say in the tech world. As our nominating committee begins assessing candidates for the 2018 award, it seemed like a good time to check in with the winners of the first three years.

The upshot: They’ve been busy.

What all three have in common is an audacious ambition to help people overcome barriers to bettering their lives. Evan Marwell, the 2015 winner, is committed to make high-speed Internet available to classrooms throughout the nation. Chase Adam, the 2016 winner, is determined to establish health care systems throughout the world. Priscilla Chan, the 2017 winner, includes eradication of diseases among her noble goals.

Chan and her husband, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to identify and fund projects to improve health and education on a local to global scale.

As Chan was receiving her Visionary of the Year award in April, the Primary School in East Palo Alto was in its first year with 51 students, all 4 years old and from low-income families. The school’s approach is to recognize and help students overcome obstacles to their scholastic readiness.

“Parents at our schools have many commitments and challenges — many jobs, long commutes, language barriers — but when presented with an opportunity to engage deeply around their children’s needs and goals as parents, they showed up,” Chan wrote in response to my email question. “We are so proud that our parent program engagement was consistently greater than 90 percent for our first year. Our group coaching model enabled parents to support each other to learn how to drive, repair each other’s homes, complete immigration paperwork, make a plan around their child’s medical needs, understand their child’s learning goals and more.”

Those 51 children have entered kindergarten better equipped to learn. And the program is growing, with 200 children attending the Primary School this fall, with some as young as 3.

Chan, daughter of Chinese Vietnamese refugees and the first in her family to go to college, is committed to making that opportunity available to others. As a Harvard University student on financial aid, Chan was on a program that enabled her to engage in public service instead of traditional workstudy.

“I found my life’s work running an after-school program for kids living in a low-income housing development right near where I grew up in Quincy, Mass. — serving kids and families that were just like mine,” she said.

Her and Zuckerberg’s initiative recently made a $12 million grant to their alma mater to provide 2,000 Harvard students from low-income families with similar experiences in public service.

Another of the initiative’s major projects, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub at UCSF’s Mission Bay campus, has grown in the past year from an operation of two to a full-time staff of more than 60. The Biohub offers scientists from a wide range of backgrounds and specialties to “pursue their riskiest, most exciting ideas, all in the hopes of moving closer to the goal of helping to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century,” Chan said.

Meanwhile, Marwell and Adam have upbeat progress reports of their own.

Marwell’s EducationSuperHighway has helped connect more than 39 million students to high-speed Internet — including 4.3 million students in 4,000 schools this year. Marwell, taking his startup-world sensibility to the nonprofit sector, plans to shut down the organization and look for another worthy venture when his broadband-for-all mission is complete.

Adam’s nonprofit, Watsi, has used crowdfunding to assure life-changing surgeries to nearly 15,000 patients around the world who otherwise could not hope to afford such care.

“Our long-term goal has always been to help governments achieve universal health coverage,” Adam said. “The initial success of Watsi coverage has accelerated our progress toward that goal faster than we ever could have imagined.”

As these three visionaries demonstrate, a combination of idealism, ingenuity and resolve can be a powerful force for good.