By Tarla Lambert
Over the past two years, billionaire philanthropist Mackenzie Scott has been anything but shy with her cheque book when giving donations.
Yesterday, she solidified her position as one of the world’s most generous people by announcing a further $2.7 billion donation to various charities deemed by Scott to be high impact, under-funded and overlooked. The figure takes Scott’s direct, no-strings attached charity donations in less than a year up to $8.5 billion.
Scott announced her latest donations via a Medium post, urging the media not to focus on her personally when covering the news but rather on the organisations supported.
“Putting large donors at the center of stories on social progress is a distortion of their role,” she wrote. “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.”
The 286 beneficiaries of Scott’s generosity include schools and organisations focused on equality, the arts, female empowerment, anti-discrimination, and global poverty. Direct amounts have not been disclosed, however the University of Central Florida announced it received $40 million from Scott while San Jacinto College received $30 million, which will supply free tuition to thousands of high school graduates from nearby school districts.
“We are all attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change,” Scott wrote.
In 2020, Scott donated $7.8bn to COVID-19 relief, gender equity, predominantly Black colleges and universities.
Since her divorce from Amazon chief Scott Bezos in 2019, Scott has given away a sizeable chunk in donations of her initial trust in three separate installments. However, due to the success of Amazon throughout the pandemic, Scott’s wealth has nearly doubled in the past 2 years– her divorce allocation of $38 billion growing to $60 billion.
