Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott is one of the most generous philanthropists in the US – but her massive donations offer scant long-term support to charitable organizations, according to a report.
The billionaire – who pledged to donate half of her $35 billion wealth after finalizing her divorce from the Amazon founder in 2019 – last year sent large, unrestricted gifts to a number of big-name nonprofits. Though unusually large, some experts say Scott’s donations aren’t well executed.
“Her gifts are super generous, but unfortunately, they don’t provide long-term sustainability,” Gabrielle Fitzgerald, founder and CEO of Panorama Global, which has studied Scott’s donations and their impact, told Fortune.
In 2019, Scott signed The Giving Pledge, an initiative launched by Warren Buffett, Melinda French Gates and Bill Gates to encourage America’s richest to donate more than half of their wealth. Since then, she has given more than $19 billion to over 2,000 nonprofits.
Her net worth is $31.2 billion – about $4 billion less than she had after her divorce from Bezos, according to Forbes.
Many of Scott’s large, unrestricted donations have gone to bigger-name nonprofits, like her $436 million gift to Habitat for Humanity and Habitat affiliates in 2022.
To expand her donations, Scott last year offered $1 million grants through a partnership with Lever for Change. She required nonprofits to have annual budgets between $1 million and $5 million to apply for the grants – which narrows down the applicant pool to just a small percentage of the nearly 2 million US nonprofits, according to a Fortune report.
Fitzgerald questioned the billionaire’s move to exclude smaller organizations.
“I think the interesting question will be: Will she drop down to the below $1 million annual budget nonprofits in the future?” Fitzgerald told Fortune.
Scott should also consider making repeat donations to organizations she has supported in the past, Fitzgerald added.
Scott made $1 million and $2 million gifts to 361 of the more than 6,000 nonprofits who applied for the grants – expanding the initial $250 million she put on the table to $640 million.
“She’s been an inspiration for a lot of people, but not a lot of people are acting upon that inspiration,” Pamala Wiepking, a professor at Indiana University’s philanthropy school who has studied the impact of unrestricted gifting like Scott’s, told Fortune.
Many philanthropists’ goals do not actually align with the way they give grants, Wiepking said.
Though she regularly speaks with funders interested in changing their ways of gifting, she rarely sees changes, Wiepking said.
Scott has been tight-lipped when it comes to her donation strategy. After facing criticism for not giving any media interviews on her donations, Scott launched her website, Yield Giving, where she publishes short essays on her gifts.
In 2022, she released a database of her donations on the site. Unlike The Giving Pledge, Yield Giving does not have a contact page.
Advocates of unrestricted nonprofit funding have argued that organizations should have free rein to use gifts however they see fit to prevent penny pinching on their operations or salaries.
Some donors of unrestricted gifts give this type of funding to participate in the nonprofit work and offer their own expertise, according to the Fortune report.
But with Scott, “there’s no long-term relationship,” Wiepking told Fortune. “What they are saying with trust-based philanthropy is to offer support beyond a check, and that’s typically not what she is doing.”
Scott has donated an average of $3 billion a year, making her one of the country’s largest philanthropists. Her grants this year mostly went toward organizations working on “race and ethnicity” and “youth development,” according to her website.
A slightly larger share of her funding this year went to democracy-focused groups, according to Fitzgerald.
Scott has awarded most of her grants to nonprofits across the southern US. In her latest round of funding, California and New York had the largest number of grant recipients.
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