NEW YORK (AP) — Billionaire creator and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott acknowledged one other $2 billion in donations in a weblog submit on Wednesday, bringing the entire she’s given away since 2019 to $19.2 billion.
She additionally revealed new details about how she was managing her wealth, saying she had directed advisors to speculate her funds into “mission-aligned ventures.” Many of the grants she made in 2024, she mentioned, went to bolstering financial safety and alternatives..
“I’ve asked the investment team helping me manage the assets I’m working to give away to source funds and companies focused on for-profit solutions to these challenges,” Scott wrote. That’s in distinction to “withdrawing funds from a bank account, or from a stock portfolio that increases the wealth and influence of leaders who already have it.”
Most of Scott’s wealth comes from shares of Amazon that she acquired when she divorced the corporate’s founder, Jeff Bezos. Forbes estimates her present wealth to be $31.7 billion, even after making a gift of her cash for 5 years.
Gabrielle Fitzgerald, founder and CEO of The Panorama Group, has researched Scott’s giving and offered recommendation and help for nonprofits who’ve acquired Scott’s items. She mentioned she sees a rising focus in Scott’s giving on problems with poverty.
“She is creating an amazing role model for philanthropists, although I don’t see very many that have followed her role modeling,” Fitzgerald mentioned. “But it really shows that it’s easy to give away a lot of money to good groups.”
In asserting the items on her Yield Giving web site, Scott mulled over the which means of “investing,” writing that it “seems to have undergone a kind of semantic shriveling. On the list of its big, beautiful, original definitions? To devote resources for a useful purpose. To endow with rights. To clothe.”
Scott, who doesn’t touch upon her giving past the uncommon submit on her web site, has shaken up the nonprofit sector along with her embrace of “trust-based philanthropy,” offering large grants with no strings hooked up to over 2,450 nonprofits.
In 2024, she additionally gave repeat items to a number of organizations — one thing of a brand new improvement in her giving, which has set a excessive bar for the way a lot and how briskly megadonors may give. Two organizations, CAMFED, which helps women training in Africa, and Undue Medical Debt, which was previously referred to as RIP Medical Debt, each received third donations from Scott this yr.
“I was taking my luggage off the security screener at LaGuardia Airport and my phone rang and I was told that MacKenzie Scott was awarding us another $65 million,” Donovan mentioned in an interview in November.
His group had acquired $50 million from Scott in 2020, making them one of many nonprofits that has acquired probably the most funding from Scott, based mostly on grant information made public on Yield Giving. About 500 organizations haven’t disclosed the quantity of funding they’ve acquired from Scott.
“We were not expecting their second gift. Every time they award this funding, they’re very clear that organizations should not expect it,” Donovan mentioned, including his recommendation is, “Really treat it that way. Don’t use it for regular operating expenses. Don’t use it for things that will create a cliff or a hole in your budget for your organization.”
This yr was already a standout in Scott’s giving as a result of it was the primary time that she awarded grants via an software course of. In March, she introduced the recipients of an “open call” for functions from nonprofits. She shocked recipients by awarding extra money to extra organizations than she had initially promised, committing $640 million to greater than 360 nonprofits.
The truth that her grants are unrestricted, which means that nonprofits can use them nevertheless they wish to additional their charitable goal, is a part of what makes them so useful, Donovan mentioned. 5 years into her philanthropic blitz, he mentioned it’s now attainable to see her impression throughout complete sectors.
“The scale of this giving has really not just changed individual organizations but changed entire fields like affordable housing,” he mentioned.