Renton Technical College, Oregon Arts and Culture Recovery Program and the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience are among the 286 organizations that received funds in billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott’s latest round of donations.
Scott gifted $2.7 billion to organizations in categories and communities she described as having been historically underfunded and overlooked.
Scott, the former wife of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, has pledged to give away the majority of her wealth during her lifetime.
On her blog, Scott urged readers to focus on the groups she had supported and the work that they do, rather than her philanthropy.
“People struggling against inequities deserve center stage in stories about change they are creating,” she wrote. “This is equally — perhaps especially — true when their work is funded by wealth. Any wealth is a product of a collective effort that included them. The social structures that inflate wealth present obstacles to them. And despite those obstacles, they are providing solutions that benefit us all.”
At the end of 2020, Scott announced she had given away $4.1 billion over four months to 384 organizations, part of a giving pledge she announced last year.
Five Washington state organizations were included: Craft3, a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) focused on investing in Black-, Indigenous- and people of color-owned businesses, which received $10 million; The Pride Foundation, which received $3 million; Easterseals Washington, one of 22 child-centered affiliates from around the country, which received an undisclosed sum; Walla Walla Community College; and the YMCA of Greater Seattle.
Scott said on her blog that she and her team chose to make relatively large gifts to the organizations to enable their work and “as a signal of trust and encouragement, to them and to others.”
Scott has given away $8.5 billion since she began making the gifts in July 2020.
This is her first time announcing donations since she remarried to Dan Jewett, a Seattle science teacher.
“Me, Dan, a constellation of researchers and administrators and advisors — we are all attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change,” Scott, who is worth almost $60 billion, wrote in the post. “We are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands, and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others.”
Scott, who ended up with a 4% stake in Amazon.com Inc. after her divorce, has quickly become one of the most consequential philanthropists in the world and last year set a record for the largest annual distribution by a living person. Scott has been lauded by experts and philanthropy critics alike not only for the speed and scope of her gifts, but also for the organizations she’s giving to — smaller ones typically overlooked by big donors — and her dedication to making charitable gifts with no strings attached.
Information from Bloomberg News is included in this report.
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