Unrestricted grants have expanded the reach of Indigenous groups after years of low funding and little trust from established grant makers.
Although Scott’s donations to Native American nonprofits are a small subset of the billions she has donated since 2020, they are unique in that they have gone to groups led by Native Americans.
“For a long time, we saw a lot of the money that was going to Native causes and concerns was going to non-Indigenous controlled museums and art foundations and education funds, so it’s really good in that context to look at [these gifts] from MacKenzie Scott and see it’s almost all Native-controlled organizations,” says Miriam Jorgensen, who studies the flow of philanthropy into Native American-led organizations and is research director of Harvard’s Project on Indigenous Governance and Development. “That’s an important contrast of this giving.”
More on Scott
Scott gave 37 grants totaling $132.5 million to Native American-serving nonprofits over the past four years. That’s 0.8 percent of the $17.3 billion she has given to more than 2,300 charities so far and reflects philanthropy’s sparse giving to Native American-led organizations. Less than 0.5 percent of funding from large U.S. foundations goes to Native American nonprofits, according to a 2019 report by Candid and Native Americans in Philanthropy.
Scott is not the biggest funder of Native American groups. The Bush, Kellogg, and Northwest Area foundations are among the grant makers that routinely support Native American-controlled nonprofits. Foundations gave 4,128 grants totaling $208.4 million to organizations benefiting Native Americans in 2015 and 2016, according to the Candid study. But her recent seven- and eight-figure gifts to Indigenous groups have been highly publicized, resulting in a kind of seal of approval that charity leaders say has increased their groups’ visibility.
“It made a big difference in how we were perceived by individual donors and foundations and corporations,” says Robert Martin, president of the Institute of American Indian Arts, a public tribal land-grant college in Santa Fe, N.M., that received $5 million from Scott in 2020. “Since this all occurred, we’ve established [student employment] partnerships with Nike and NBCUniversal and a number of others.”
The college is focused on Native American arts, and about 80 percent of its students are eligible for Pell grants. Martin’s team placed $2.8 million of Scott’s gift into the college’s endowment to increase scholarships and grow the endowment from $6 million to about $20 million over the last four years, as well as help start an M.F.A. program in cultural administration.
Unrestricted and Simple
Misconceptions about Native American-led nonprofits and Native Americans are commonplace and have hurt fundraising, says Michael Roberts, who leads First Nations Development Institute, an advocacy and economic-development organization. His group, which received $8 million from Scott, conducted a study in 2016 that found Native Americans are largely invisible to both the public and grant makers.
“When they do think we exist, they have all sorts of wonderful misconceptions about who we are — everything from being very impoverished to being spiritual children of nature to being casino-rich Indian tribes,” Roberts says. “Most of that is grounded in what folks learned from outdated K-12 textbooks or from public media.”
His organization interviewed program officers and foundation executives about their views of Native Americans and found their answers largely mirrored the public’s.
“I was a little miffed when I saw that, because this is a group of folks who are probably more highly educated than the general public and say they are more racially and socially aware,” Roberts says.
Getting a Scott donation was completely different from his experience with foundations, Roberts says, not only because the money was unrestricted but because the process was so simple. There were two phone calls from Scott’s advisers to talk over the group’s work and a third saying the money was on its way.
The MacKenzie Scott Effect
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Individual Giving
Does MacKenzie Scott’s Giving Approach Signal a New Era?
“There’s no private foundation that I have dealt with in the 20 years I’ve been at the helm of First Nations where the process for getting $8 million, if it was available, came that easy. None. Not Ford, not Kellogg, not Gates, not Northwest Area Foundation, not 11th Hour,” Roberts says. “There’s no one that has given as freely and as unobtrusively as these guys.”
Scott’s money doubled First Nations Institute’s endowment, launched its Tribal Lands Conservation program, helped purchase a new building, and tripled the amount of grants it awards to other Native American-led organizations.
There was another unexpected benefit.
“All of a sudden, foundations feel comfortable giving us million-dollar grants as opposed to a quarter of a million-dollar grants,” Roberts says.
The National Urban Indian Family Coalition used a $2 million gift from Scott to hire more staff, provide employees with better health insurance and raises, and increase grants. The Seattle nonprofit advocates for Native Americans living in urban areas and provides grants to about 55 human-service organizations that serve Native Americans living in more than 40 cities nationwide.
Executive director Janeen Comenote says Scott’s money freed her up to focus on mission instead of worrying about meeting payroll, and like other groups, the grant made other funders take notice.
“When you have that breathing room to take care of your staff and you’re providing more resources on the ground for communities to do better — that to me is the most important part of getting a gift like this,” she says. “Foundations, when they see good work being done, also want to fund that work. It has a snowball effect.”
Enhancing Government Money
Comenote also says that Scott’s gift has helped counter common misconceptions that most Native Americans live in rural areas or on reservations. U.S. Census data shows 75 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native people live in urban and suburban areas. She says charities need money so they can hire staff to boost their local presence in these places. Her group’s increased grant making has enabled nonprofits to dedicate more time to forging relationships with local and state governments, and this has resulted in many grantees getting more or first-time government funding.
But government grants come with many restrictions, says Erik Stegman, CEO of Native Americans in Philanthropy. Charities can’t use that money to build endowments, hire staff, or fund nonprogrammatic work, so unrestricted money from philanthropists like Scott enhances government support because charities can use it as they wish.
“You can spend your entire life chasing after heavily siloed parts of federal money, and that tends to build a deficit mind-set,” Stegman says. “When an infusion like this comes along, it makes government dollars work better because it fills in the gaps.”
Jorgensen adds that many Native American-led nonprofits Scott is supporting, except for the tribal colleges, are not the kind that attract much government money.
“She’s given to activism around land, she’s given to higher education, and she’s given to cultural survival things like Native arts and cultures,” says Jorgensen. Those efforts “have their own transformational effect because they’re going into spaces that are more self-determined.”
Fundraising Bump
Grant makers aren’t the only ones increasing their support because of Scott’s giving, Native American charity leaders say. Individual donors are stepping up, too. Average individual giving has gone up at the Native Forward Scholars Fund since it received $20 million from Scott, says Angelique Albert, CEO of the fund, which provides scholarships, career development, and education support to Native American undergraduate and graduate students.
Before Scott’s gift, most donors gave $5 to $25, Albert says. Now the fund is attracting more donors giving $1,000 or more. Albert says that increase stems from using some of Scott’s money to hire four more fundraisers and expand marketing efforts.
“We’ve had an amazing service to provide for over 50 years,” she says, “but people didn’t know about it.”
The attention-grabbing power of Scott’s gifts has also helped small, locally focused charities. The Carolina Panthers football team gave the Boys & Girls Club of the Lumbee Tribe, in North Carolina, a $5,000 donation. The charity’s youth services director, Rose Marie Lowry-Townsend, doesn’t think that would have happened without the $1.25 million grant it received from Scott in 2022.
“Folks don’t write us checks for $1,000, and they definitely don’t write us checks for $5,000,” Lowry-Townsend says. “That one was very unusual for us.”
Scott’s donation has been crucial, she says. It enabled her Boys & Girls Club to buy computers — often the only ones local youths can access for homework, college applications, and career research — and purchase new buses for field trips.
Whether Scott’s giving to Native American-controlled nonprofits will continue to influence private donations remains to be seen, says Native American philanthropy scholar Jorgensen.
She views Scott’s giving as the second phase in a recent push to increase Indigenous philanthropy. Jorgensen notes that the NDN Collective (also a Scott grantee), a regranting nonprofit founded in 2018 that works to empower Indigenous communities, was the first to increase the flow of charitable dollars to Native American-led groups.
Will there be a third wave? “Indian country and Native communities are calling for this. They’re saying, ‘Stop giving money to the museum and start giving money to us,’” Jorgensen says. “MacKenzie Scott’s giving shows that Native-controlled organizations can manage this kind of money.”
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.