A Sneak Peek Into MacKenzie Scott’s Giving, Courtesy of Her Grantees

Four years in, it feels as if the only thing we really know about MacKenzie Scott’s grant-making process is that we don’t know much at all. Since Scott started surprising nonprofits with unrestricted, multimillion-dollar gifts, just a few details about her selection process have become public.

We know that she has a family office in Seattle called Lost Horse LLC that oversees her philanthropic donations. It’s well known that she relies on the Bridgespan Group consulting firm to help her identify and vet potential grantees. There also is a searchable database of gifts on her Yield Giving website that provides some insights on the causes and organizations she wants to support.

But the hows and whys of Scott’s selection process — why certain nonprofits were chosen over others, why some nonprofits were given more than one chance to demonstrate their value, and how a small group of nonprofits received more than one gift from Scott — most of that remains unknown. Scott is mysterious even to her grantees, who have no way of contacting her directly.

Grantees often talk about being contacted out of the blue by Scott’s team and notified about the funding. They don’t have a clear sense of why they were chosen because no one tells them. The exceptions are the participants from Scott’s first open call for proposals, which was launched last year and resulted in 361 awards to nonprofits. They had the benefit of receiving feedback from a panel of reviewers.

Second Time’s the Charm

WINGS was among the earlier grantees. The Brazil-based network of donors and philanthropic groups received a $2 million grant from Scott in 2023. WINGS was reviewed twice by Scott before receiving any funding, executive director Benjamin Bellegy says.

The organization was first contacted by Bridgespan in 2022. The group was not told how it had landed on Scott’s radar, but suspects it was word of mouth. WINGS has a long list of high-profile funders, such as Community Foundations of Canada, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Ford, Gates, and Aga Khan foundations. WINGS also works in partnership with Candid, a research organization for the nonprofit world that received a $15 million gift from Scott in 2021.

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WINGS submitted information to Bridgespan detailing its finances, long-term vision, and intended impact, Bellegy says.

At the end of the process, WINGS received an email that, according to Bellegy, essentially said, “If the donor is interested in funding you, you will hear back from their team. Otherwise, you will not hear back from us, but we may be in touch at some point in the future.”

WINGS didn’t hear back, and the staff assumed the organization was rejected.

But the following year, WINGS was again contacted by Bridgespan. The organization was again asked to submit information about its operations. However, this time the process included two virtual interviews and moved more quickly, Bellegy says.

The group was asked to lay out how it worked in proximity to the causes it supported. In the nonprofit world “proximate” is typically used to describe engagement between the organization and local groups and community leaders.

“The proximity question was really central for them,” Bellegy says.

However, demonstrating proximity to local communities presented a challenge for WINGS, which is a global umbrella organization for grant makers and nonprofits that provides guidance and advocates for causes such as increased funding for efforts to mitigate climate change-.

“The first time, they were probably still trying to understand how we fit into their criteria, and it was not as obvious for us, being a global network,” Bellegy says. “We’re not grassroots ourselves, although we are grassroots oriented in our mind-set and what we promote.”

The second time, WINGS put more effort into telling a compelling story about its growth, value to the philanthropy community, and impact, he says. It worked.

Within five months, a member of Scott’s team called WINGS to tell the organization it would receive $2 million. Bellegy wonders if the gift would have been larger if WINGS were a more traditional nonprofit group. He is optimistic that Scott might decide to provide additional funding.

“Although the grant is presented as a one-off, I’m hopeful there will be future opportunities to renew their support,” he says. “I think it’s possible because we keep growing our impact in ways that are aligned with MacKenzie Scott’s priorities.”

Easterseals

No Explanations, No Thank-Yous

Very few organizations have received a second Scott grant. In fact, when Scott’s team sends notification of the award, it specifies that it is a one-time gift, grantees say. But that does not keep many from hoping for more.

“It really is like lightning in a bottle when you get a transformative gift like that, and that’s exactly what it was for us,” says Kendra Davenport, CEO of Easterseals Inc.

Scott sent a total of $162 million to the Easterseals’ national office in Chicago and 22 of its affiliates around the country at the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020. Easterseals provides community services that include health care, education, and employment resources for people with disabilities, their families, and their caregivers.

The national office chose to redistribute most of the $15 million grant that it received to affiliates through a competitive process, Davenport says. Each winner got about $4.5 million. The money helped fund work that many affiliates struggled with, such as supplementing the very low Medicaid reimbursements for direct-service professionals to care for people with disabilities so that those workers can have a living wage, she said.

The $15 million grant to the national office also helped to implement a strategic plan that included creating more brand recognition for Easterseals, Davenport says.

“We launched a direct-response television campaign with MacKenzie Scott’s money. So, we have commercials now airing on prime-time networks,” she says. “We did it to raise money, but really more to raise awareness around Easterseals and what we do.”

Lever for Change

The organization shared some of the impacts that the Easterseals national office and affiliates were asked to provide to Scott’s team after the first year. However, as they were preparing the second-year reports, Yield Giving sent an email stating that further reports were unnecessary.

“There was no explanation provided,” Davenport says. “But we assumed it was because of the impressive work that we were doing, and Ms. Scott felt the philanthropy she graced us with was really taking hold and being well utilized by our affiliates.”

Davenport says she sometimes thinks about what more Easterseals could do if it received a second infusion of cash from Scott. Moreover, she wishes there was some way to thank Scott for the initial grants.

“Our affiliates would love nothing more than to thank her personally and to show her the fruits of the investment she made,” Davenport says. “But she is a private person, and we haven’t had that opportunity yet. But, hopefully, someday.”

Another Open Call?

For most nonprofits vying for a grant from the reclusive billionaire, feedback can be hard to come by. However, those who participated in the open call she hosted last year were the exception.

Each of the 1,000 top-scored applications were read by five randomly assigned experts from an evaluation panel of reviewers, says Cecilia Conrad, CEO of Lever for Change, which oversaw the competition. Every reviewer had to write comments.

“While there is some variance in how many comments they write or the quality of them, what we have heard from participants is that feedback has been incredibly valuable,” Conrad says. “One organization said something: ‘It taught me about how I needed to frame our story a little differently.’”

Lever for Change, a nonprofit spinoff of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, has worked with Scott before. It designed a $40 million open call for gender-equality nonprofits for Scott, Melinda French Gates’s Pivotal Ventures investment firm, and Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies in 2021. The group received its own $8 million grant from Scott in 2021 for its efforts to connect donors to nonprofits. It also is slated to run another open call for Melinda French Gates later this year. It will be her first since splitting from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in June.

“I’ve likened us to a real-estate broker matching buyers and sellers,” Conrad says. “That’s not a perfect analogy, but what we do is work with funders of all types to design an open call or for large grants.”

Lever for Change designed Scott’s most recent competition with guidance from her team on the eligibility criteria. The competition was limited to community-focused nonprofits in the United States and U.S. territories “whose explicit purpose is to advance the voices and opportunities of individuals and families of meager or modest means, and groups who have met with discrimination and other systemic obstacles,” according to a notice posted on Scott’s website. Previous Scott grantees were not eligible. Scott’s team made clear that the intent was to complement the grant making that was already happening, Conrad says.

Of the 361 winners, 279 organizations received $2 million, and 82 received $1 million.

Lever for Change would like to host another open call for Scott, but has not yet been told if that is a possibility, Conrad says.

“I have no idea,” she says with a smile.