MacKenzie Scott has given $12.8 billion in charitable gifts since 2020, including 12 donations totaling $347.4 million that have been publicized since the beginning of April, according to a Chronicle tally.
Scott’s largest donation publicized since April went to Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. The national youth-mentoring charity received $122.6 million from Scott and is using the unrestricted donation to support programs in its national office in Tampa and at 38 of its 230 chapters throughout the United States.
In a departure from the last two years, Scott did not announce a round of donations this summer as she has each summer and December since she started formally disclosing her charitable giving in 2020. She also has not named the charities she has supported.
Instead of publicizing a total amount given in recent months or listing the nonprofits to which she has donated, Scott is leaving it up to the charities to decide whether to publicize gifts they receive from her. That has made it harder for the public to understand which nonprofits have benefited from her generosity and which causes she is supporting now.
There are pros and cons to Scott’s latest approach. By leaving it up to the charities, she is giving them the power to decide whether they want the public attention. Yet to many observers, the move feels like a retreat from the transparency to which she seemed committed when she started giving large sums to charity.
One scholar thinks Scott’s change in approach could be a principled decision to try to limit the influence of her giving.
“The more she’s transparent in advance about the criteria on which she’s choosing some organizations over others for funding, the more that the whole sector has really powerful incentives to align themselves with her priorities and her judgments about what counts as good work,” says Emma Saunders-Hastings, a political theorist who studies the role of private power and wrote the book Private Virtues, Public Vices: Philanthropy and Democratic Equality.
Saunders-Hastings says Scott’s reluctance to be fully transparent, leaving it up to the charities to decide what to disclose, might be linked to her concerns about wealthy donors having too much influence over social change, something Scott has written about in some of her Medium posts.
“The more explicit she is about the factors that will get you a gift from MacKenzie Scott, the more her voice does shape the priorities of organizations in the sector, whether or not they’re eventually chosen for a gift,” Saunders-Hastings says.
She sees Scott as someone who is trying to think in complicated ways about how to give a lot of money away without exercising “objectionable kinds of power” over the people she is trying to support. “That’s quite different from some of the other approaches to giving that have gotten a lot of attention in recent years,” Saunders-Hastings says.
Scott has recognized the problems in her various approaches and wrote in a blog post late last year that she planned to make public more information about her gifts over the next year and to create a website and a searchable database of all her gifts.
A Few Departures
This latest collection of donations follows the round of gifts Scott announced in March. That announcement included contributions going back to December 2021. So far, the Chronicle has confirmed the size of 301 of the at least 1,268 donations Scott has made since 2020.
After the Big Brothers Big Sisters donation, Scott’s largest announced gift since April was announced in early August, $55 million to the California Community Foundation, and was a departure for Scott in several ways. That donation was neither unrestricted nor a first-time donation, which the majority of her gifts are. She gave the nonprofit $20 million last year to establish the LA Arts Endowment Fund, which supports diverse, small to midsized arts organizations in Los Angeles.
In another change, the latest gift came in the form of real estate. She donated two Beverly Hills homes, which are together valued at about $55 million, to support affordable housing and immigrant programs in the Los Angeles area. Scott directed officials at the organization to sell the two homes. After one of her advisers had four or five conversations with Antonia Hernández, the community foundation’s president and CEO, Scott’s team and Hernández decided to use 90 percent of the proceeds to permanently endow the foundation’s grant making to help low-income people in Los Angeles find affordable housing there.
Scott said the nonprofit could use the remaining 10 percent for any purpose. Hernández decided to direct that portion to the foundation’s work to help immigrants through the expensive and arduous process of becoming a U.S. citizen, and get them involved in the civic life of their communities.
The community foundation has received many gifts of homes, land, and even a vineyard over the years. Hernández says she thinks the organization’s history of receiving such donations is part of why Scott and her team felt confident the foundation had the organizational expertise and infrastructure to handle a gift of two multimillion-dollar homes.
“We’ve established a history of knowing how to accept real-estate gifts and then how to sell them and use the proceeds,” Hernández says. “They apparently did some due diligence and learned that we are experts.”
While both of Scott’s gifts to the community foundation were for specific programs, Hernández says what impressed her most about her conversations with Scott’s representatives was their willingness to listen to her suggestions about where the money would be most useful within the areas Scott wanted to support.
“The thing that stood out to me in my conversations with them was their openness to listening and their thoughtful approach,” Hernández says. “I didn’t feel like l was being dictated to.”
Scott followed her California Community Foundation gift with two large donations to help children and youths. She gave $44 million to Friends of the Children, a charity that helps children at risk of entering the welfare system by providing them with a mentor. The gift is unrestricted, and officials there plan to use $15 million of the total to support the organization’s national headquarters. The remaining $29 million will go to 12 of the nonprofit’s affiliates.
Scott gave a $38.8 million gift to Junior Achievement USA, and it, too, is unrestricted. It will support the youth-development organization’s national office and 26 of its branches nationwide. The nonprofit offers students from kindergarten through high school programs in financial literacy, career skills, and business-ownership training.
The other nonprofits that have announced donations from Scott since April are:
- Noora Health, which provides training and other resources to family members caring for loved ones, received $20 million from Scott.
- Learning Policy Institute, an education-policy research organization, received $16 million.
- Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which helps first responders, as well as U.S. service members and their families, received $15 million.
- Urban Alliance, a work-force training group, received $10 million.
- Health Leads, a charity that connects vulnerable people of color to social services, received $8 million.
- Rising Ground, a human-services group, received $8 million.
- Children’s Home Society of North Carolina, a foster-care and adoption nonprofit, received $8 million.
- CUNY Graduate Center received $2 million.
To see more of Scott’s publicized donations and learn about other big donations from many other donors, see the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
