While many donors want scale, few offer space to experiment and learn or to deepen community impact. This shift in the locus of decision-making is critical. To address this, cohort members used their Scott grant to elevate their entire fields, by prioritizing collaborations with peers and strengthening capacities among their communities. Ms. Scott and Mr. Bezos met when they both worked at the hedge fund D.E. Her net worth, estimated at $36.1 billion in October 2019, has increased by some $23 billion since then. MacKenzie Scott An umbrella organization for more than 120 women's funds and foundations is among the recipients of the latest $2.7 billion round of grants from McKenzie Scott. Instead, three times in the past 11 months, she has written a blog post on the website Medium, shared some reflections on philanthropy and the causes she supports, and announced that she had given away $1 billion or more. Helping any of us can help us all.. General operating support for organizations. She had three children from her former marriage and they adopted one girl from China. A gift like this for a nonprofit is equivalent to a billion dollars.. In each post, Scott includes a short essay explaining her view on philanthropy alongside the list of groups receiving funds. Women-led, Black women-led organizations tend to be at the very bottom of the pile for philanthropists, Ms. McWhorter said. The development community can learn about how to fund internationally from the choices, questions, and experiences of Scott grant recipients. Scott's approach to philanthropy is unusual in a number of ways. please try again later. And though in many ways Ms. Scott is upending how philanthropy has worked in recent decades, she also invested in several mainstays of the existing philanthropic community. All Rights Reserved. Please note: Mackenzie Charitable Foundation do not make grants to individuals. The Bloomberg timeline shows how the pace of giving shifted after the couple divorced; prior to 2019, they made several million- and multimillion-dollar donations here and there. Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press, inaccurate and at times bizarre responses. Political candidates or organizations, fraternal organizations or veteran organizations. Like the $4 billion Scott gave to 384 organizations in the last four months of 2020, the donations are unrestricted, so recipients can use the money as they see fit. Weve looked at the impact of these grants with the ambition to share lessons with other windfall gift recipients and to inspire other funders on how to localize, decentralize, and shift power from elite corridors of development aid to the community level. Terms & Conditions. A representative for MacKenzie Scottcurrently the worlds 19th richest person with a net worth of $59 billionhad a message to deliver. The choices, experiences, and reflections of Scotts global grant recipients provide valuable insights to understand where global development aid has fallen short and how to improve philanthropy in order to advance systems change. It works on two levels!). Other recipients include theAdvancement Project,American Indian Graduate Center, Co-Impact,Grantmakers for Girls of Color,Groundswell Fund, LatinoJustice, Movement for Black Lives,Narrative4,Point Foundation, PolicyLink, RAINN, Spelman College, andUnidosUS. MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is shown here in 2018. In February alone, nine organizations announced gifts from Scott totaling $264.5 million. Subscribe here. FORTUNE is a trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, registered in the U.S. and other countries. Large global development organizations adopted remote and distributed approaches to staffing long before the pandemic. That changed in December 2020. Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott in 2018. Recognizes the positive impact of diversity to improve lives in our community. Ms. McWhorter shed tears of joy on the call. Conference expenses, memberships, tickets to events or informational visits by experts or recognized speakers. Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has announced details of the more than $3.86 billion in gifts she has awarded since June of 2021.. Over the past nine months, Scott has awarded grants to 465 nonprofits. She refers to a team of advisers rather than a large dedicated staff. It also promises an upcoming open-call process to introduce an additional pathway for information about organizations to reach us. The open calls will focus on one or more specific themes, geographies, and types of organizations at a time, according to the website. After deeper research into 822 of them, she and her advisers selected 384 groups to receive nearly $4.2 billion in funds. The president of the University of Central Florida said his institution will receive $40 million the largest donation in the university's history. "We are so grateful for MacKenzie Bezos' support of our work to empower LGBTQ students and springboard a new generation of LGBTQ leaders toward success," said Jorge Valencia, executive director and CEO of the Point Foundation, the nation's largest LGBTQ scholarship fund. Among the recipients are more than 220 organizations operating globally, half of which are based outside the United States. She noted that she had made unsolicited and unexpected gifts given with full trust and no strings attached. Such strings are a mainstay of modern philanthropy: onerous grant proposals and nerve-racking site visits, followed by reports on the variety of performance benchmarks that charities are required to meet to keep the money flowing. In her blog post, Scott describes systemic societal inequities and her belief that giving money to organizations directly working with communities in need is the way her wealth can be put to use, saying that she, her husband and her staff and advisers "are all attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change. 5 min read. A new MacKenzie Scott Opportunity Scholarship Fund, set to launch this year, is expected to yield an estimated $400,000 per year in new funding for scholarships. Editor's note: Updated on Feb. 15, 2022 to include a donation to Leading Educators. The MacKenzie Scott Opportunities Scholarship (S.O.S) will assist first-time, credential-seeking, young adults under age 25 attend college. Many donors of large amounts have specific instructions for how they want charities to use their funds. Forbes takes the position that people with billions of dollars at their disposal warrant more scrutiny than average Americans because of the power that money wields. And rather than a few targeted donations, she gave broadly to hundreds of groups. Criteria for Grantmaking All organizations applying for Foundation funds must be able to demonstrate the following organizational characteristics: Staff capacity, sound fiscal policy and responsible financial management. The University of Texas at San Antonio is also receiving $40 million, which its president called "completely transformational." (I'm still chuckling at the image for the year 2014 when the Bezoses donated a total of $2.25 million to fund clinical food allergy . Unable to update subscription. They divorced in mid-2019 and she received 25% of his Amazon stake. In her post on Medium, she explained that her teams focus, which includes new areas, has been to support the needs of underrepresented people from groups of all kinds. According to the Giving Pledge signatory, approximately 60 percent of the organizations that have received gifts are led by women, and 75 percent are led by people with lived experience in the regions they support and the issues they seek to address. Eventually. Metropolitan Chicago. Though she has donated more than $8 billion over the past 11 months, primarily through direct gifts to nonprofits, today she is richer than ever, worth some $60 billion, according to Forbes. She has not been transparent either about the vehicles being used for philanthropy or about the process, said Mr. Reich of Stanfords Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. So she applied to art school, only to be rejected. FORTUNE may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. She had a tough childhood, she says, having grown up in the 1980s as the child of Peruvian immigrants in San Franciscos Bay Area amid the onset of the war on drugs and era of mass incarceration. Yet even as she disbursed her billions, Ms. Scott expressed some ambivalence about her fortune and the source of it, writing in a blog post that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands.. All completed Initial Grant Applications must be submitted by April 30 for consideration in that year. (In practical terms, shes even more impressive: Last years second-biggest donor to charity, Elon Musk, directed his $5.7 billion donation in Tesla shares to his personal foundation, reaping a tax benefit without distributing much of the money to charity, tax records show.). Powered and implemented by Interactive Data Managed Solutions. A representative for MacKenzie Scott currently the world's 19th richest person with a net worth of $59 billionhad a message to deliver. Her Oakland neighborhood was beset by pollution and gang violence. Ms. Scott has moved away from the heavy hand of the philanthropy in steering the direction of social change, said Benjamin Soskis, a senior research associate in the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute. Between the pandemic and the recession, it had been a difficult year for the Chicago Y.W.C.A., which runs a rape crisis hotline and provides counseling to women on jobs, mortgages and other issues. Giving Billions Fast, MacKenzie Scott Upends Philanthropy Through a streamlined operation, Ms. Scott has given away $6 billion this year, much of it to small charities and nonprofits.. Scott prefers simply to announce via blog post the organizations she has chosen for her next multibillion-dollar giveaway. Editor's note: Updated on Feb. 22, 2022 to include a donation to National 4-H Council. MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is shown here in 2018. Another education nonprofit, Leading Educators, got $10 million to provide professional development for teachers. Accions Covid relief fund provided support to The Red Door, helping Free to pivot her business model. Anyone can read what you share. MacKenzie Scott promised she would give her fortune away until the safe is empty. That has proved to be harder than expected. Editor's Note: This article was updated on February 19, 2022 to include two additional donations, to Shatterproof and Young People in Recovery. Experts on philanthropy said Ms. Scotts nearly $6 billion in gifts might be among the most ever handed out directly to charities in a single year by a living donor (as opposed to a billionaire making a huge one-time gift to a foundation to be disbursed over decades). But she is not using a foundation. Ms. Scott is working on her giving with the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit organization in Boston that advises charities and philanthropies, including those set up by Mr. Gates and Michael Bloomberg, as well as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. After calls for more transparency, in December Scott wrote that she hopes to launch a website with a searchable grants database this year. As she has before, Ms. Scott also included a literary reference, this time from the Sufi poet Rumi. Instead of traditional in-person corporate events, The Red Door began to provide food for virtual conferences by making at-home deliveries to attendees in the Bay Area. Among those receiving grants the average size was just under $10 million were the Alaska Native Heritage Center, Broward College in Florida and Jazz at Lincoln Center. A significant amount was granted to organisations focused on issues of equity, with noteworthy support to leaders of colour and those identifying as LGBTQIA+. Were not looking to spend the money right away, he says. However, some organizations have revealed how much money they'll receive. The article also notes that Bezos and Scott tend to differ in how they donate their money. MacKenzie Scott's 2020 giving outstripped the over $5 billion in grants given by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2019. Please Note: We are NOT MacKenzie Scott or Dan Jewett. But the Red Door had the rug pulled out from under it when Covid hit. "Though this work is ongoing and will last for years," she wrote, "I'm posting an update today because my own reflection after recent events revealed a dividend of privilege I'd been overlooking: the attention I can call to organizations and leaders driving change.". Even as the philanthropic funding discourse is gradually shifting toward localized and decentralized decision-making, funding practice hasnt kept up. MacKenzie Scott(formerly Bezos) has announced the recipients of $1.67 billion in grants awarded since she signed theGiving Pledgefourteen months ago. She has this anti-elite approach to philanthropy. Ms. Scott is under no obligation to publicly disclose anything about her giving. Stop having to work every weekend. MacKenzie Scott in 2018. Scott's post lists all the recipients but doesn't state the amount of money they've been granted. Shes moved extraordinary sums out the door, quickly, in an anti-paternalistic way, said Rob Reich, co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford. Scott alluded to her thinking behind helping groups helping others in her latest Medium post, writing, We believe that teams with experience on the front lines of challenges will know best how to put the money to good use. Ultimately, Urrutia says, Scotts philanthropy sends the message that you and your team know how to best deploy the dollars.. Must be postmarked by April 30th. Free ensured Covid compliance while continuing to create trademark dishes (like herb-sliced chicken breast and key lime tartlet) made with local, organic ingredients by delivering customized gift boxes and ready-to-heat meals to each conference participants home. MacKenzie Scott is a philanthropist, author, and ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to whom she was married for 25 years. Long Beach City College, in California, thanked Scott for $30 million also the single largest donation in its history. "Though we still have a lot to learn about how to act on these beliefs without contradicting and subverting them, we can begin by acknowledging that people working to build power from within communities are the agents of change. MacKenzie Scott has unveiled a website to provide more transparency around her philanthropic efforts. Thanks to the soaring value of that stock, Ms. Scott is accumulating wealth faster than she can give it away. The Foundation is a nonprofit, tax-exempt charitable organization . And something greater rises up every time we give." Our new weekly Impact Report newsletter examines how ESG news and trends are shaping the roles and responsibilities of todays executives. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. You may request printed copies of these forms by contacting Client Relations at 18003870614 or at service@mackenzieinvestments.com. Offers may be subject to change without notice. Scott also won praise from philanthropy experts for the way she donated her money: without strings attached. Shes not putting herself in the drivers seat., MacKenzie Scott Gives Away Another $2.74 Billion Even as Her Wealth Grows, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/business/mackenzie-scott-philanthropy.html. Though her net worth now exceeds the value of the endowment of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest charity in the world, Ms. Scott has shown no interest in developing that kind of formal structure around her giving. Less than two months into 2022, Scott isn't showing any signs of . An elected, engaged Board of Directors which fairly reflects the organizations constituencies and has the ability and policy-making authority to complete the proposed project. In her post on Medium, she explained that her team's focus, which includes new areas, has been "to support the needs of underrepresented people from groups of all kinds." She was behind the wheel when she and Mr. Bezos drove to Seattle to start an online bookstore named after a Brazilian river. She just doesnt seem to be tuned in to that kind of stuff at all, Mr. Callahan said. Additionally, the funds were used to invest in systems that would outlast the founding leaders and teams. ", "In this effort, we are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands, and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others," Scott wrote. The National Council on Aging got $8 million, while mental health nonprofit the Jed Foundation got $15 million. The Scott grants provide them with breathing room, flexibility to make strategic choices, and the opportunity to focus on systems change work. Staff capacity, sound fiscal policy and responsible financial management. These are the kinds of stories Scotts grant was able to propel, says Urrutia. Scott, the ex-wife of the worlds richest person, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (net worth nearly $200 billion), was making a transformative donation to Morgan of $40 million. The website unveiled this week is the result. It also distinguished her from her former husband, the richest man in the world. Women dont like to splash their names on buildings, in general.. In December 2021, Scott briefly tried to withdraw even further from the limelight, and announced that she would let her recipients announce her gifts themselves. The website dropped at the end of a year in which Scott became more famous than ever, despite her shying from the spotlight, and not always for her donations. For global south organizations in the cohort that had rarely received unrestricted funds, using this grant to build stronger, more flexible and more diverse revenue streams was a top priority. Find new creative ways to help. MacKenzie Scott : "There are lots of resources each of us can pull from our safes to share with others. Ms. Scott's latest round of giving was less than the $4.2 billion in grants announced in December, which she linked directly to the enormous needs generated by the pandemic. But now Scott, who is also an author and the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has announced in . Today, they are worth about $62 billion, although its unclear how many of the shares Ms. Scott still holds. Over the course of 2020, MacKenzie Scott announced grants totaling almost $6 billion. Scott, who now controls one-quarter of the former couples combined wealth of more than $250 billion, gave away almost $6 billion last year to working charitiesorganizations that do good on a daily basis, rather than just steward philanthropic money. Yield Givings website doesnt include any sort of contact information, and a page on Inquiries politely discourages what must be a deluge of informal pitches from anyone who knows anyone who knows Scott. That allows their endowments to keep growing and the foundations to survive in perpetuity, and some foundations argue that it allows them to take the time to make grants that will yield the best results. They were valued at the time at $38 billion. 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