author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott announced on June 15 that she and her husband, Dan Jewett, had given $2.7 billion to 286 organizations, including universities, arts organizations and other nonprofits. It was her third announcement of this kind since she first publicly discussed her giving intentions in May 2019.
Scott, who was previously married to Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, has donated about $8.5 billion to a constellation of nonprofits she calls “high-impact organizations in categories and communities that have been historically underfunded and overlooked.” She’s emphasizing racial justice, women’s rights and LGBTQ equality.
The $5.8 billion Scott gave to charity in 2020 amounted to nearly 2% of the $324 billion donated by individuals over the course of the year.
In early 2021, she emphasized arts organizations much more than in her prior funding rounds, noting that her goal was to lift up arts nonprofits that focus on diverse communities. She also supported a number of organizations such as the Donors of Color Network and Native Americans in Philanthropy, which aim to grow civic engagement among communities of color, and charity-research leaders such as the Urban Institute and the Bridgespan Group, which has been advising her.
Scott made it clear that she trusts the organizations.
Scott has left it up to the causes she’s funding to reveal precise totals for each gift.
As a scholar of philanthropy, I believe Scott is modeling five best practices for social change giving.
Don’t attach strings. All of Scott’s gifts were made without restrictions. That’s unusual, especially for her largest donations. For example, she gave $40 million to California State Fullerton, a public university, in 2021. In 2020, she gave $40 million to the Local Initiatives Support Corp., which advocates for and builds affordable housing.
Rather than specify a purpose, Scott made it clear that she trusts the organizations’ leaders by providing absolute flexibility in terms of how to use her money.
Champion representation. In Scott’s initial round of giving, she highlighted organizations whose leaders represented the communities they served, such as the Movement for Black Lives and Latino Justice, which are run by leaders of color, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the Transgender Law Center.
She says this approach brings “lived experience to solutions for imbalanced social systems.” Backing groups led by people directly affected by an issue is a common tenet of social justice giving at a time when organizations led by people of color receive less funding than white-led groups.
Act first, talk later. Rather than making lengthy announcements about her plans and taking years to give away large sums of money, Scott chose to distribute this money rapidly and directly.
Unlike philanthropic peers such as Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Scott’s initial three rounds of giving haven’t been channeled through a large-scale foundation or other entity bearing her own name.
And when she makes her public announcements, the gifts are already made.
Don’t obsess about scale. Many of the organizations receiving these gifts are relatively small in scale and lack widespread name recognition. The multiracial justice group Forward Together and the Campaign for Female Education, a global aid group often called CAMFED, for example, until recently operated on annual budgets of $5.5 million or less.
While she’s made some gifts that support relatively large public institutions of higher education, her focus has remained on schools that educate students from underserved communities.
Leverage more than money. Philanthropy that’s intended to bring about social change inherently expresses the donor’s values, Scott acknowledged in her announcement. She continues to highlight the inequitable social structures that have put her in a position to make such significant gifts, saying “it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands.”
Elizabeth J. Dale is associate professor of nonprofit leadership at Seattle University. Distributed by The Associated Press.
