Updated: MacKenzie Scott Surprises Scores of Nonprofits With $4.2 Billion

MacKenzie Scott announced Tuesday that she has given away nearly $4.2 billion since July to 384 nonprofits working to aid those hurt by the Covid-19 pandemic and the recession. The donations follow Scott’s announcement this summer that she had provided $1.7 billion to an array of nonprofits, mostly groups focused on advancing equity.

Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos, has a net worth $57 billion, according to Forbes.

Recipients of the donations unveiled today include a long list of food banks and emergency relief funds, along with organizations providing debt relief, employment training, financial services for people in high-poverty areas, and education for those who lack access to high-quality schools and colleges. Additional recipients include civil-rights groups and legal-defense funds that take on institutional discrimination.

“This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Americans already struggling,” Scott said in an essay on Medium to announce the gifts. “Economic losses and health outcomes alike have been worse for women, for people of color, and for people living in poverty. Meanwhile, it has substantially increased the wealth of billionaires.”

The money was distributed to organizations in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington D.C., Scott wrote.

She said the gifts are unrestricted and the money provided upfront.

Unrestricted Gifts

As in her July announcement , Scott listed the recipients of the gifts but not individual amounts. However, some organizations provided that information independently.

The YMCA of the USA announced a $20 million gift and said 43 local Y‘s across the country also received contributions.

“YMCAs are vital community assets, and it’s gratifying when a donor recognizes that,” YMCA of the USA president and CEO Kevin Washington said in a statement. “We can’t thank Ms. Scott enough. Today is a great day for the Y.”

Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black institution in Texas, announced it had received a $50 million gift. The university said that $10 million will be used for financial aid and the rest will added to its $95 million endowment.

As with Scott’s previous giving, the largess arrived with little or no public notice.

“I was stunned and, for a time, speechless,” Ruth Simmons, president of Prairie View, said in a news release. “At first I thought I had surely misheard the amount, and I asked them to repeat it; they clarified that it would be ‘$50 (five-zero) million.’”

Scott made gifts to 15 other historically Black colleges and universities included:

• $40 million to Morgan State University in Baltimore announced a gift.
• $30 million to Winston-Salem State University in N.C.
• $25 million to Alcorn State University in Lorman, Miss.
• $20 million to Delaware State University.
• $20 million to Lincoln University in Chester County, Penn.
• $20 million to Claflin University in Orangeburg, S.C.
• $20 million to the University of Maryland Eastern Shore in Princess Anne.

Other gifts confirmed by recipients included:

• $50 million to RIP Medical Debt.
• $30 million to Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY
• $30 million to Lehman College/CUNY in the Bronx, N.Y.
• $20 million to Goodwill Industries International
• $20 million to YWCA El Paso Del Norte Region
• $15 million for the Nonprofit Finance Fund, a nonprofit community-development financial institution.
• $15 million to Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles, a women’s college.

Scott’s announcement drew swift and effusive praise from many corners.

Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, praised Scott in a statement for surrounding herself “with advisors that come from under-resourced communities, not the folks that typically sit on foundation boards.” He added that Scott’s donations shame “mega-foundations that worry more about perpetuity than the suffering of their neighbors during an unprecedented crisis.”

Benjamin Soskis, senior research associate in the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute, tweeted that Scott “understands evangelical nature of giving while living.” He added that he wasn’t sure Scott’s approach was the best one, “but she’s setting up another model of how to give that all serious donors will have to consider. Pluralism of models of giving is good.”