MacKenzie Scott Gave Away $2.1B Last Year

MacKenzie Scott donated $2.1 billion in the past year, she said in an online post, bringing her total reported giving to more than $16 billion since 2019. While previous announcements have included detailed essays about the reasons for her donations, Scott offered only a short post titled "Giving Update" this year, writing, "Excited to call attention to these 360 outstanding organizations, every one of whom could use more allies," per the AP.

• Three notable gifts: The gifts include three donations of $25 million each to affordable-housing nonprofit Mercy Housing, reproductive care organization Upstream USA, and youth training group Year Up. It's not known if those are the largest gifts made in the past year, as the database of gifts on the website withheld the amount donated to more than 100 of the recipients in 2023.

• Housing: A significant portion of her donations this year appear to focus on housing organizations, including community land trusts, advocates for affordable housing, and legal aid societies that often represent tenants, among other clients. The Hawaii Community Foundation received a second donation from Scott, this time of $5 million to support its Maui Strong Fund, which it started to benefit the survivors of the wildfire that wreaked havoc on the island in August. The foundation said the donation was supporting evolving needs like child care, connecting people to jobs, and finding short- and long-term housing.

Scott declines to comment about her donations—often the largest a nonprofit has ever received—beyond blog posts, now published on her website. For the first time in March, she opened an application process to receive funding, promising to grant $1 million to 250 organizations. Some 6,300 nonprofits applied, per Lever for Change, the organization overseeing the application process, which has said it will announce the winners in early 2024. Scott has promised to give away more than half of her wealth, which largely comes from her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

(More MacKenzie Scott stories.)