Women in Business | The New York Times – Giving Billions Fast, MacKenzie Scott Upends Philanthropy
Through a streamlined operation, Ms. Scott has given away $6 billion this year, much of it to small charities and nonprofits.
On a Monday evening in November, Dorri McWhorter, the chief executive of the Y.W.C.A. Metropolitan Chicago, got a phone call from a representative of the billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott. The news was almost too good to be true: Her group would be receiving a $9 million gift.
Between the pandemic and the recession, it had been a difficult year for the Chicago Y.W.C.A., which runs a rape crisis hotline and provides counseling to women on jobs, mortgages and other issues. Money was tight. Ms. McWhorter shed tears of joy on the call.
Similar scenes were playing out at charities nationwide. Ms. Scott’s team recently sent out hundreds of out-of-the-blue emails to charities, notifying them of an incoming gift. Some of the messages were viewed as possible scams or landed in spam filters. Many of the gifts were the largest the charities had ever received. Ms. McWhorter was not the only recipient who cried.
All told, Ms. Scott — whose fortune comes from shares of Amazon that she got after her divorce last year from Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder — had given more than $4 billion to 384 groups, including 59 other Y.W.C.A. chapters.
“Women-led, Black women-led organizations tend to be at the very bottom of the pile for philanthropists,” Ms. McWhorter said. Ms. Scott “has a recognition that the organizations are doing the good work and let us be the stewards of those dollars.”
In the course of a few months, Ms. Scott has turned traditional philanthropy on its head. Whereas multibillion foundations like Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have fancy headquarters, Ms. Scott’s operation has no known address — or even website. She refers to a “team of advisers” rather than a large dedicated staff.
By disbursing her money quickly and without much hoopla, Ms. Scott has pushed the focus away from the giver and onto the nonprofits she is trying to help. They are the types of organizations — historically Black colleges and universities, community colleges and groups that hand out food and pay off medical debts — that often fly beneath the radar of major foundations.
“If you look at the motivations for the way women engage in philanthropy versus the ways that men engage in philanthropy, there’s much more ego involved in the man, it’s much more transactional, it’s much more status driven,” said Debra Mesch, a professor at the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University. “Women don’t like to splash their names on buildings, in general.”
As she did in July when she announced donations of $1.7 billion to 116 organizations, Ms. Scott unveiled her latest round of philanthropy through a post on Medium.
She noted that she had made “unsolicited and unexpected gifts given with full trust and no strings attached.” Such strings are a mainstay of modern philanthropy: onerous grant proposals and nerve-racking site visits, followed by reports on the variety of performance benchmarks that charities are required to meet to keep the money flowing.
“Not only are nonprofits chronically underfunded, they are also chronically diverted from their work by fund-raising and by burdensome reporting requirements that donors often place on them,” Ms. Scott wrote.
Charitable groups applauded the unconditional nature of Ms. Scott’s gifts.
“That mentality of trust is what we need in philanthropy,” said Katie Carter, chief executive of the Pride Foundation in Seattle, an L.G.B.T.Q.+ charity that received a $3 million donation.
Ms. Scott has moved away from “the heavy hand of the philanthropy in steering the direction of social change,” said Benjamin Soskis, a senior research associate in the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute. Many big-time donors, he said, “model themselves off of venture capitalism and take an extremely aggressive approach in terms of monitoring” the performance of grant recipients.
Experts on philanthropy said Ms. Scott’s nearly $6 billion in gifts might be among the most ever handed out directly to charities in a single year by a living donor (as opposed to a billionaire making a huge one-time gift to a foundation to be disbursed over decades). And rather than a few targeted donations, she gave broadly to hundreds of groups.
“She’s moved extraordinary sums out the door, quickly, in an anti-paternalistic way,” said Rob Reich, co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford.
Read the full article: The New York Times