On Tuesday, MacKenzie Scott announced another round of donations to hundreds of organizations. Members of this new group of recipients were selected after they applied for funding through an “Open Call” for grants.
Scott’s philanthropic organization Yield Giving, in partnership with the nonprofit Lever for Change, awarded $640 million to 361 organizations; each received $1 million or $2 million in funding. Her initial plan had been to donate $250 million– $1 million each to 250 organizations.
The new donations bring her total lifetime philanthropic giving to $17.3 billion–all done in less than five years. Scott announced her first round of donations in 2020, a year after she and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos divorced and resulted in her receiving $36 billion worth of Amazon stock. Forbes estimates that Scott is currently worth $35.6 billion.
The latest announcement is the first time Scott—who is known for relatively small, unsolicited donations with no strings attached—has put out a call for nonprofits to ask her for funding. The application process, which opened in March 2023, received more than 6,000 applicants and underwent a lengthy selection process, including peer reviews and two rounds of panel evaluations.
Grant winners were chosen due to their work “advancing the voices and opportunities of individuals and families of meager or modest means, and groups who have met with discrimination and other systemic obstacles,” Scott wrote in a post on her Yield Giving site. “Grateful to Lever for Change and everyone on the evaluation and implementation teams for their roles in creating this pathway to support for people working to improve access to foundational resources in their communities. They are vital agents of change,” Scott wrote.
Recipient organizations include Gender Justice, The Neighbor Project, the Florida Immigrant Coalition, Black Girl Ventures and Harm Reduction Therapy Center.
Lever for Change, the organization that managed the grant competition and application process, wants to shift the way the ultra-rich do their giving, which has historically been centered on large grants frequently topping $100 million to storied institutions and causes close to the wealthy donors like alma maters, medical research, museums and, in the notable case of Warren Buffett, other billionaires’ foundations (Buffett donates to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and to foundations run by his children).
Lever for Change wants philanthropists to give instead to more global, grassroots organizations supporting causes like maternal and infant health, refugee aid and racial equity. To accomplish this, Lever for Change matches donors to a network of 116 closely-vetted organizations for grants averaging less than $10 million and has organized 13 funding “challenges” sponsored by donors—including, notably Scott’s Open Call challenge.
“We know that there is a will for some of the accumulated wealth to be distributed out in the forms of working towards social change, but we also see continual evidence that that's slow in happening,” Lever for Change CEO Cecilia Conrad told Forbes. “There tends to be a great deal of reliance on networks that exist and are known … so what we have tried to do is to design a process that opens the doors for organizations and problem solvers around the world to tell us what great ideas they have for solving problems.”
Conrad went on to explain: “The idea is to find the best ideas. And the way to find the best ideas is to do it in an open and equitable way.”
Correction, March 29, 2024: The story was updated to state that Scott’s donations total $17.3 billion, not $17.2 billion.
