Last year, MacKenzie Scott announced plans to give $250 million to nonprofit organizations through an open call process. Yesterday, she revealed the gifts will actually total $640 million. Scott has given away $17.3 billion in total.
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Discussion 10 comments
If only this was the norm for the other billionaires.
More humans like this please. One of the recipients is right in my backyard and they are absolutely thrilled to have this level of support. Amazing.
Interesting. I used to work in the nonprofit world and was always told how difficult it was to give away free money. Maybe those millionaires weren’t shooting straight 🤔
Well she did have to hire a firm just to help her evaluate the grant applications. It's easy to give away free money, it's hard to give away free money _effectively_
One of my greatest pleasures in life is how well MacKenzie has managed to keep a very low profile through all of this. How low? It's 2024 and all press releases about her are still using the same cropped photo of her from 2018. See that black triangle in the lower left part of the photo? That would be one cropped-out Jeff Bezos.
Yeah, she doesn't do interviews or appearances. She does the research, gives the money, and lets people get on with their important work. It's admirable in so many ways, even with the low bar set by other billionaires.
It's a running gag for me now and I will be very sad if and when the media starts using a new photo of her.
These donations are such game changers for organizations, especially being unrestricted. Heck, I'd bet most of these orgs would be thrilled with $100k of unrestricted funds.
There's a better way to provide "support for people working to improve access to foundational resources in their communities", and a large part of that is paying people fair wages, taxing corporations and the wealthy at fair rates, and abolishing billionaires. It's great that she's giving away this money, sincerely, but she / Jeff should have never been able to accumulate so much to begin with. Billionaires, instead of taxpayers and voters, choosing which parts of society benefit from funding doesn't sound like much of a democracy.
100% wholeheartedly agree with you here.
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