In 2019, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott pledged to give her vast fortune away to charity. Through an unrelenting stream of donations, Scott has stuck to her word and granted around $19.3 billion to more than 2,450 different nonprofits over the past five years.
While Scott’s charity has encompassed a variety of causes ranging from education to health care, her latest batch of donations, totaling $2 billion, focus largely on economic and financial well-being. Approximately 75 percent of the beneficiaries support areas like affordable housing, job stability and child development and provide “financial counseling, business coaching and low-interest rate loans,” said Scott in a Dec. 18 update on her philanthropic website Yield Giving. The remaining 25 percent support well-being in other ways, such as natural resources conservation or human rights work, according to the philanthropist.
Scott, 54, is one of the world’s richest women with an estimated net worth of $40.7 billion. Her wealth primarily stems from shares in Amazon, the tech company founded by her ex-husband Jeff Bezos. The philanthropist currently owns 139 million Amazon shares after recently offloading 45 million shares valued at $8 billion in September.
Scott’s philanthropic approach over the years has become differentiated by Scott’s trust-based giving, which offers nonprofits unrestricted gifts with little reporting requirements. Scott also gives organizations the power to decide when and how they share details about their gifts—Yield Giving’s database of Scott’s donations lists nearly 600 gifts that don’t include a dollar amount but instead read: “Disclosure delayed for benefit of recipient.”
Scott is also a repeat donor. Nearly three dozen recipients of her donations in 2024 had previously received funds from the philanthropist, while some nonprofits—like Undue Medical Debt and the education-focused CAMFED International—received their third donation from Scott this year.
"I'm frankly astounded by this most recent gift from MacKenzie Scott," said Allison Sesso, Undue Medical Debt's CEO and president, in a statement announcing a new $50 million gift following a previous $80 million granted throughout 2020 and 2022. "Unrestricted giving, certainly of this magnitude, gives nonprofits room to take risks to tackle modern, complex problems and prove why we are subject matter experts when it comes to the causes we champion," added Sesso.
Scott's recent donations include some of her largest to date. The two biggest gifts in 2024, $65 million each, were granted to the Enterprise Community Partners and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, which work to bolster affordable housing and community support. The third largest gift of $60 million went to Self-Help Ventures Fund, a nonprofit loan fund.
As Scott continues to establish herself as one of the most prominent figures in philanthropy, her charitable work has increasingly incorporated experiments in grant giving. Her most recent $2 billion in donations, for example, comes on the heels of $640 million offloaded in March to 361 nonprofits through an open call administered through Lever for Change, an organization that hosts philanthropic challenges.
Now, Scott is looking to invest in for-profit solutions to the same challenges she's previously used philanthropy to further. According to Yield Giving, her investment team is looking to back companies focused on causes like affordable housing, women-focused health platforms and culturally-sensitive teletherapy. Drawing from these investments—instead of Scott's bank account or stock portfolio, "the money can help address these issues twice," said Scott.
