Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez Pledge $100 Million for Maui Wildfire Recovery

Maui Fund

Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez pledged $100 million to launch the grant maker to help those affected by the catastrophic wildfires that destroyed much of Lahaina, Maui, in Hawaii on August 7 and 8. The fund will provide immediate assistance to those in need right now and longer term aid, as recovery and rebuilding efforts will likely take years. The couple own a home on the island of Maui.

Bezos, the multibillionaire founder of online retailer Amazon, has pledged and given at least $12.8 billion to nonprofits, including to his own grant makers, in recent years and has appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors several times since 2018. He announced in November that he plans to give away the bulk of his wealth, currently estimated by Forbes at about $156 billion, to charity during his lifetime. Sanchez is a former entertainment reporter and sports news anchor.

Homestead Community Land Trust

MacKenzie Scott gave $10 million through her Yield Giving fund to provide unrestricted support to bolster this organization’s efforts to build new affordable homes, fundraise to reduce the price of homes for lower-income households, and keep homes affordable permanently in Seattle and surrounding areas.

This is the latest of several donations Scott has made in recent weeks to support affordable-housing efforts across the country. Her other recent gifts include $12 million apiece to Housing Partnership Network and Grounded Solutions Network, and $10 million to National Housing Trust.

Scott is a novelist who helped create Amazon with former husband Jeff Bezos. With a net worth estimated at about $36 billion, Scott is one of the wealthiest women in the world and has given more than $14 billion to at least 1,600 charities since 2020. She appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors in 2020.

University of Mississippi

Bill and Lee Anne Fry pledged a planned gift of approximately $2.5 million to support the School of Business Administration and the university’s athletics programs. Bill Fry graduated from the university in 1980 and later attended Harvard Business School.

Between earning undergraduate and graduate degrees, he served eight years as an officer in the U.S. Navy, achieving the rank of lieutenant in the nuclear-propulsion program. He is a partner at American Securities, a New York private-equity firm he joined in 2010. He previously served as CEO of the Oreck Corporation and led several other corporations. Lee Anne Fry is a retired CIA analyst.

Ohio Wesleyan University

Shirley Paden-Bernstein pledged $1 million to support scholarships for first-generation college students plus provide an annual stipend for students to use for unanticipated costs such as medical expenses or emergency trips home.

The gift will also back other university initiatives, including the Bridge Program, a three-week, credit-bearing program designed to equip first-year students with the skills to thrive at university.

Paden-Bernstein is a clothing designer who founded Shirley Paden Custom Knits, a New York manufacturer of bespoke women’s knitwear. She graduated from the university in 1973 and was a first-generation college student from a family of eight in Philadelphia’s inner city.

San Diego State University

Sandra Wawrytko pledged $1 million through her Charles Wei-hsun Fu Foundation to endow scholarships, events and programming, and operations for the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies. The endowment is expected to generate about $40,000 a year for the center.

Wawrytko has been a member of the university’s faculty for more than 40 years. She teaches Asian philosophy at the College of Arts and Letters, specializing in Buddhist and Daoist epistemology and aesthetics in the context of neuroscience. The $1 million will come from the future sale of a home Wawrytko owns.

Charles Wei-hsun Fu, who died in 1997, was Wawrytko’s husband. He was a professor in the Department of Religion at Temple University for 25 years and later led the Institute of Life and Death Studies at Fo Guang University in Taiwan.

To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.