NONPROFIT NEWS FROM ELSEWHERE
MacKenzie Scott has given $133.5 million to a nationwide network of nonprofits helping students stay in school and thrive. Communities in Schools helps children who are at risk of dropping out or falling behind by offering services ranging from tutoring to helping their families find public housing or local food banks. Rey Saldaña, the organization’s president and CEO, said news of the donation — the nonprofit’s largest unrestricted gift — came out of the blue via a phone call to the network’s national office. Communities in Schools trains and places staff in about 2,900 high-poverty schools in 517 districts across the country, at a cost of about $80,000 to $100,000 per employee. Saldaña said the national office will receive $20 million of the donation, with the rest going to local branches in grants of about $2.5 million to $3 million. The money will help the program expand into more schools and offer more services, he said. Local branches in Washington state, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Atlanta are among those receiving direct donations. With her Amazon fortune, Scott has given away more than $8 billion in publicly announced unrestricted gifts since 2020. (Washington Post)
Plus, read a Chronicle article about Scott’s style of philanthropy.
News this week of MacKenzie Scott’s latest big gift and Melinda French Gates’s rethink of her giving habits raises the issues of how women approach charity and the growing role of women in big philanthropy. Scott and French Gates have both recently urged a broader view of philanthropy, away from a narrow dollars-and-cents definition to include gifts of time and work, which jibes with the findings of one recent study finding that women are more likely to volunteer and make other nonfinancial donations. Similarly, Scott’s spectacular record of giving since her divorce from Jeff Bezos in 2019 echoes other research finding that single women of all income levels donate more to charity than single men do. French Gates, who is steering more of her dollars away from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, plans to boost the 1.9 percent of charitable giving that goes to organizations working on women’s and girls’ issues. Both Scott and French Gates are part of what a recent Wealth-X study found was a growing share of women among ultrawealthy donors, “as a result of changing cultural and societal attitudes, growth in female entrepreneurship, an increasing focus on gender equality issues, and a rapidly growing number of intergenerational wealth transfers to sons and daughters.” (Fortune, Market Watch)
Major Gifts
- Adrienne Arsht Lists Brickell Home for $150 Million, With Proceeds to Charity (The Next Miami)
- KKR Co-Founder Kravis, Wife Gift $100 Million to Sloan Kettering for Cancer Project (Bloomberg)
- Retired Hotelier and Real Estate Developer Gives $50 Million to Expand St. Joseph Medical Center in Bellingham, Wash. (Becker’s Hospital Review)
- Sage Publications Gives $36 Million to McCune Foundation (Pacific Coast Business Times)
More News
- A Bold New Experiment Out of Florida: Guaranteed Income for the Formerly Incarcerated (Vox)
- Inside the Rockefellers’ Charity Consulting Firm (Business Insider)
- Human Rights Campaign Hit With Racial Bias Suit by Former President Fired in Andrew M. Cuomo Scandal (Washington Post)
- Youth Services Nonprofit in NYC Falsified Medical Visit Numbers, Will Pay $12.9 Million Settlement (Village Sun)
- Edina, Minn., Nonprofit Named in Large Federal Nutrition Funds Fraud Case (Sun-Current)
- A Town That Saved a Mountain, and a Mountain That Saved a Town (New York Times)