Ex-wife of Jeff Bezos Amazon CEO, MacKenzie Scott Sets Record By Giving Away $6 Billion In Six Months

Author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott’s announcement of a $4.2-billion charitable donation not only places her as a top donor in the U.S., but also sets a new standard of philanthropy: giving strategically and quickly, experts say. Ex-wife of Jeff Bezos Amazon CEO, MacKenzie Scott Sets Record By Giving Away $6 Billion In Six Months

Scott, 50, ex-wife of Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos, announced on Tuesday that she has given away more than $4 billion to 384 organizations in the last four months.

Many of the organizations are focused on basic needs, including Covid-19 relief programs.

“This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Americans already struggling,” Scott wrote in a post on Medium Tuesday. “Economic losses and health outcomes alike have been worse for women, for people of color, and for people living in poverty.”

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In July, Scott disclosed that she had donated $1.7 billion after pledging to give the majority of her wealth back to social-good causes in 2019. She has an estimated net worth of nearly $60 billion.

“We talk a lot about giving while living, giving money away quickly, not letting it sit in endowments, but this is really an unprecedented speed in my knowledge and experience,” says Jeannie Sager, director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.

Sager says it’s difficult to compare Scott’s donations with other gifts, since most gifts represent one donation to one organization, or to a handful of organizations. By comparison, the Gates Foundation gave away $5.1 billion in 2019.

“Only the very largest foundations will give away anything near $4 billion in a year, much less $6 billion in six months,” Sager says.

Traditionally, women philanthropists tend to give anonymously, the Women’s Philanthropy Institute research shows. “Scott explicitly lists all the causes she supports—a balance between basic needs and systematic change—based on research and data. She’s really leading the way as a woman philanthropist,” Sager says.

“I hope this becomes the best practice, setting a standard and modeling behavior for others to follow.”

Scott did not specify the amount she donated to each organization, but some of the recipients quickly celebrated their grants after her announcement. Goodwill Industries International, which provides a breadth of services that range from job training and placement to housing and child care, and YMCA of the USA each received $20 million.

Several historically-black colleges and universities received their largest single-donor gift in history, according to their news releases. Those include Texas’s Prairie View A&M University, which received $50 million; Virginia’s Norfolk State University, with a $40 million grant; and Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, with a $20 million grant.

Scott, who could not be immediately reached for comment, said she will share her wealth “until the safe is empty.”

“In addition to whatever assets life has nurtured in me, I have a disproportionate amount of money to share. My approach to philanthropy will continue to be thoughtful,” she wrote when she signed the Giving Pledge in 2019.

Updated: 12-24-2020

A Christmas Tale: Goodwill Is Training The Jobless For Digital Careers

Gifts from MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, are the biggest in the nonprofit’s 118 years.

Ready for a feel-good Christmas tale? Consider Goodwill, which was founded in 1902 in Boston by the Reverend Edgar J. Helms, a Methodist minister.

He collected used clothing and household goods, sold them in stores, and used the money for what he called “employment, training, and rehabilitation for people of limited employability, and a source of temporary assistance for individuals whose resources were depleted.”

That’s still pretty much the vision, except it’s now on a continental scale. Goodwill has stores in all 50 states and Canada employing about 140,000 people. It estimates that last year it helped 1.5 million people “build competencies, earn jobs and advance in their careers.”

The Christmas angle is that on Dec. 15 MacKenzie Scott, a novelist who became one of the world’s wealthiest people through her divorce settlement with Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeffrey Bezos, announced she was including Goodwill in a shower of philanthropy.

A spokeswoman for Goodwill Industries International Inc. in Rockville, Md., said Dec. 23 that grants to the Rockville organization and 39 local, independently operated affiliates total $360 million. The number will grow a bit as seven other local affiliates that received grants from Scott reveal how much they got.

Scott’s holiday-season announcement culminated four months in which she gave away more than $4 billion to food banks, Meals on Wheels, tribal colleges, historically Black colleges and universities, Easterseals, YMCAs, and YWCAs, among other recipients.

The donations to Goodwill will accelerate efforts to equip people for digital careers, says Steven Preston, chief executive officer of Goodwill Industries International, the Maryland-based umbrella organization, which alone received $20 million.

Covid-19 has killed a lot of jobs in hospitality and food service that Goodwill alumni have traditionally filled, making it even more important for Goodwill to transition toward digital, he says.

Some clients require training in “foundational” skills, such as how to write an email and search for information online. Others learn office apps such as word processing and spreadsheets. The most advanced are learning Python, a programming language, and Tableau, data analysis software. Goodwill has formed a partnership with Google for five levels of training, Preston says.

Before the pandemic, employers had so many unfilled jobs that they snapped up people from Goodwill even if they didn’t meet their traditional qualifications, says Preston. The employers were willing to set aside requirements for bachelor’s degrees, for example.

“There’s a lot of research, if you have Job A, you’ll develop a set of skills that should lead you to be competent in Job B,” he says. Preston says he’s hoping that employers don’t fall back on old hiring practices now that the pool of applicants has grown.

Preston worked as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers Inc. and later ran the Small Business Administration, then served as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President George W. Bush.

He was also chief financial officer of ServiceMaster Co. LLC and Waste Management Inc., among other jobs. “I love running companies, I love running organizations,” he says.

The Goodwill job fell into his lap when he got a call from a recruiter—just as the gift from Scott, which he calls “transformational,” was unsolicited.

Unlike many nonprofits, Goodwill raises most of its funds through its thrift stores, but with sales at those down because of Covid-19, the donations from Scott and others are welcome. Says Preston: “Americans are extremely, extremely generous, and I know many people have stepped up their giving this year, which is enormously affirming.”

Updated: 2-14-2021

MacKenzie Scott’s Remarkable Giveaway Is Transforming The Bezos Fortune

As MacKenzie and Jeff Bezos, the couple’s donations were mostly unremarkable. Then came a divorce and her $6 billion gift—a true feat—which upstaged her ex-husband, who has pledged big numbers but has been slower to spend.

Jeff Bezos’ decision on Feb. 2 to step down as chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc. could shake loose a lot of money. The second-richest person in the world—he’s worth almost $200 billion—says he plans to spend more of his time on philanthropy.

If he does so, he’ll be following the model of John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Bill Gates, all of whom got serious about their giving only after they stepped back from their businesses.

Bezos has been a billionaire since the late 1990s, and people have been asking for almost as long how he’d give some of that wealth away. “Long term, I have a responsibility to be a philanthropist,” he said on the Charlie Rose show in 2000.

“Assuming we can make Amazon.com a lasting company, which we’re not done with yet.” He was in no hurry: His first public gift wasn’t until 2011, at which point he opened a trickle of philanthropy from what was starting to look like a bottomless fortune.

Now about $7.2 billion of the Amazon fortune has been given away, but the largest chunk of that has come from Bezos’ ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott. Since their divorce in 2019, she’s become one of the most consequential philanthropists of her generation.

Scott, who now controls one-quarter of the former couple’s combined wealth of more than $250 billion, gave away almost $6 billion last year to working charities—organizations that do good on a daily basis, rather than just steward philanthropic money.

That’s probably a record annual distribution for a living person, says Melissa Berman of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. As notable as the size of that pile was where it went: to small charities and institutions such as historically Black colleges that are often passed over by big givers.

Meanwhile, Bezos made a commitment in 2020 to give away $10 billion to fight climate change. There’s no particular deadline for spending that money, but in November he announced the first $791 million worth of grants to outside organizations.

Over his lifetime he’s distributed about $1.4 billion, including about $200 million donated as a couple with Scott.

Bezos has indicated that he wants to give the money away thoughtfully to maximize the impact, though one could argue, and many do, that the problems his billions could help to address leave no time to waste.

The Amazon Fortune’s Inexorable Rise

Bezos and Scott’s split shows how the personalities and priorities of the very rich affect how charities work and who gets help. Complicating it all is the source of their wealth. Amazon’s labor and environmental record has been harshly criticized by some of the same activists that Bezos and Scott have funded.

Meanwhile, their wealth is compounding even faster than they’re giving it away: Last year the combined Bezos and Scott fortune, held largely in Amazon stock, grew by $97 billion as the world reeled from the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns threw millions out of work.

Here’s a look at how Bezos and Scott have approached their philanthropy as they’ve gone from mere billionaires to owners of one of history’s great fortunes. The annual tally of public gifts is based on money distributed and does not include larger multiyear commitments.

Phase 1

A Slow Drip

From 2000, when Bezos acknowledged his responsibility to give, until the late 2010s, the couple’s philanthropy builds gradually, with public gifts in the millions of dollars eventually going to a grab bag of different causes.

Bezos tells a television interviewer what he thinks about the Giving Pledge, a commitment by billionaires to give away the majority of their fortunes.

He says he’s not ready to share his ideas on charity. “The pledge is an interesting idea. For me the most important thing is to figure out where—which models work the best. So for one thing, I’m convinced that in many cases for-profit models improve the world more than philanthropy models if they can be made to work.”

One world-changing for-profit project on his mind: space exploration and colonization. He’s spent years building private rocket maker Blue Origin LLC.

2011

Public Gifts: $25m

Bezos donates $10 million to the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle, creating the Bezos Center for Innovation.

A $15 million gift to the Princeton Neuroscience Institute establishes the Bezos Center for Neural Circuit Dynamics. Both Bezos and Scott went to Princeton. It’s the first major donation in both their names. (She’s MacKenzie Bezos at this time.)

It’s unclear through the years of their marriage how much Scott was involved in giving decisions, says Elizabeth Dale, assistant professor of nonprofit leadership at Seattle University: “We really don’t know a lot about what their philanthropic conversations might have been together.”

2012

Public Gifts: $2.5m

July

Some $2.5 million goes to Washington United for Marriage, a group working to uphold the state’s law allowing same-sex marriage.

2013

Public Gifts: $0.5m

January

Bezos gives $500,000 to Worldreader, an organization co-founded by former Amazon executive David Risher that provides e-readers, including the company’s Kindle devices, to schoolchildren in developing countries.

August: Bezos buys the then-struggling Washington Post. As with the space venture, it shows he has passion projects beyond philanthropy.

Remainder Of Philanthropy Mission

Updated: 6-3-2021

Billionaires Are Giving Away Their Money. Here’s Where It’s Going

What You Need To Know

The breakups of two of the most powerful couples in the world have sparked conversations and concerns about their philanthropy, at a time when it seems billionaires can’t give their money away fast enough.

The impending divorce of Bill and Melinda Gates may already be affecting their $50 billion foundation, one of the most influential in history. After her divorce in 2019, MacKenzie Scott gave away almost $6 billion to hundreds of charitable groups, while her ex, Jeff Bezos, pledged $10 billion for an “Earth Fund” to fight climate change — by far the largest amounts given or pledged by either of them.

(Bezos has only committed a fraction of the money.) Still, Bezos and Scott’s enormous fortunes have only grown, outpacing their donations.

Relatively new billionaires are even giving away astonishing amounts of money. One of the creators of cryptocurrency Ethereum donated Shiba Inu coins — a meta-meme cryptocurrency — worth, at the time, about $1 billion to a Covid aid fund for India.

Meanwhile, the gulf between the ultra rich and the not-so-rich deepened dramatically during the Covid-19 pandemic, fueling the debate about the role of philanthropy in society.

“Philanthropists get far too much positive attention in ways that deserve more scrutiny right now,” said Linsey McGoey, director of the Center for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation at the University of Essex. “We’re starting to suspect that the people who have billions of dollars don’t have a true interest in solving these problems.”

The Gates couple, along with pal Warren Buffett, transformed the public’s expectations of billionaires with the creation of their “Giving Pledge” in 2010. They promised to give away the majority of their fortune, either while they are alive or after their death, and enticed hundreds more of the world’s wealthiest to do so as well.

The Pledge, however, has no enforcement mechanism. It’s a moral and public pledge, and the people who sign up can change their mind at any time, with or without telling anyone.

By The Numbers

* $10 Billion Amount Jeff Bezos Pledged To Give Away In 2020 For “Earth Fund”
* $76.9 Billion Increase In Jeff Bezos’s Net Worth In 2020
* $309.66 Billion U.S. Charitable Giving By Individuals In 2019

Why It Matters

It’s not necessarily easy to decide how to give away a ton of money. Elon Musk asked publicly on Twitter for ideas about how to give away his $172 billion fortune. Bezos did the same in 2017.

Scott has taken a different approach than some, spreading out her money among hundreds of smaller charities and institutions often overlooked by large donors. She said she was going to be thoughtful in her giving and yet “won’t wait” to empty her safe.

Many give money to their own foundations, and then use that vehicle to figure out how to distribute the money. Indian tech billionaire Azim Premji in 2019 pledged to transfer about $7.5 billion in shares of his company to his foundation.

Last year, Nike co-founder Phil Knight gave $900 million to his own foundation. Knight also gave $300 million to his alma mater, while former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy gave $150 million this year toward the study of biology and machine learning.

Some choose to use structures, called donor-advised funds, that allow them to park money and get the immediate tax benefits of giving, and decide later where to send the gifts.

What is certain is that billionaires will continue to try to varnish their reputations through their philanthropic deeds. Bill Gates’ charitable giving helped overhaul his reputation from the ruthless CEO of a company whose products dominated the marketplace to a geeky dad-philanthropist eager to solve the world’s problems.

Updated: 6-15-2021

Billionaires Are Tapping Skyrocketing Fortunes To Fund Record Giving

MacKenzie Scott and Jack Dorsey, along with foundations, helped boost charitable donations in a year when it was sorely needed.

Americans gave a record $471.4 billion to U.S. charities in 2020, much of it stemming from fortunes made in technology.

The philanthropic total — about 70% from individuals — was an estimated 3.8% higher than in 2019, after adjusting for inflation, according to an annual survey by Giving USA released Tuesday.

The biggest increase came from foundations, which made charitable donations of $88.6 billion — a 15.6% jump in 2020 — as the pandemic threw millions of people out of work. Individuals gave about $324.1 billion, a 1% increase.

Corporate giving — which tends to track corporate earnings and wider economic growth or decline — was down an estimated 7.3%, to $16.9 billion.

“It was an unprecedented year in many ways,” said Una Osili, associate dean for research and international programs at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. “

By March, we had record unemployment, but as we moved toward the end of the year, it became one of the best periods on record for financial markets, and that has implications for charitable giving because people give when they feel financially secure.”

One of the most notable bursts of giving came from MacKenzie Scott, the novelist and former wife of Amazon Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, who funneled $6 billion to a wide range of educational and community institutions. On Tuesday, she said she’d given away another $2.7 billion.

“We are all attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change,” she said.

In a post on Medium in July 2020, Scott had announced $1.7 billion in gifts to non-profits that included historically Black colleges and universities, as well as groups supporting racial equality, gender equality and economic mobility.

Scott then asked a team of advisers to help her “accelerate immediate support to people suffering the economic effects of the crisis” and in December 2020, announced gifts of nearly $4.2 billion to 384 organizations.

Twitter Inc. co-founder and Square Inc. founder Jack Dorsey also made waves in the philanthropy world in 2020 when he pledged to put up to $1 billion of his Square stake into a limited liability corporation to fund global Covid-19 relief.

More recently, Dorsey donated $2.9 million he raised by selling his first-ever tweet as a non-fungible token to GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that helps the world’s poorest.

In 2021, the biggest impact in the world of philanthropy could stem from the impending divorce of Bill and Melinda Gates, depending on how the $50 billion Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is affected.

French Gates announced in 2020 that Pivotal Ventures, her investment and incubation company, would partner with Scott to launch the Equality Can’t Wait Challenge, which will give a $30 million award to organizations coming up with ways to advance women’s power by 2030.

Efforts are also underway in Congress to nudge the rich to provide cash to charities faster. Wealthy people often take advantage of a tax break that lets them put money into investment funds and push off decisions about where to eventually give the money.

The tax breaks for using so-called donor-advised funds can equal as much as 57 cents on the dollar.

Updated: 6-18-2021

An Historic Gift For Black Preservation

Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott’s $20 million gift to the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund is one of the largest ever received by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

In the aftermath of the 2017 white power rally and fatal terror attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, the National Trust for Historic Preservation launched a campaign to create a more accurate accounting of the full diversity of preservation-worthy U.S. buildings and places.

With $25 million in funding, this new African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund set out to identify and save scores of sites important to Black history and American culture.

This week, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott nearly doubled that fund. Included in the $2.7 billion in charitable giving that she announced on Tuesday was a $20 million gift to the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.

It’s the largest non-capital gift ever received by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and one of the largest donations in the history of the U.S. preservation movement.

Brent Leggs, the executive director of the Action Fund, described the gift as transformational. “It’s an affirmation that historic preservation contributes much to our society, and that it’s a pathway for equity,” he says.

Since its founding, the Action Fund has pledged to identify and preserve 150 places that are critical to African-American history but are sensitive or threatened.

The fund has drawn leaders to steer this effort from across the arts, business, government and academic sectors, including filmmaker Ava DuVernay, Smithsonian Institution secretary Lonnie Bunch and South Carolina Representative Jim Clyburn.

This new focus for preservation is a long time coming. The preservation movement has always followed the social values of the day, which has generally meant sites associated with white men who held political or cultural power.

Only recently has the field expanded to consider important cultural assets associated with Black history. Nina Simone’s childhood home in Tryon, North Carolina; Paterson, New Jersey’s art-deco Hinchcliffe Stadium (home to the New York Black Yankees of Negro League baseball); and the Pullman National Monument in Chicago are just a few examples.

“Our nation may be rich in diverse history, but it has often been poor in representation of that history and in funding its protection, conservation and recognition,” Leggs says. “We have an opportunity with the Action Fund to broaden the American story.”

Last year, the Action Fund awarded its largest gift yet ($150,000) to the Vernon AME Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the only Black-owned structure from the Black Wall Street-era that was still left standing after the Race Massacre in 1921.

Members who survived the massacre and rebuilt the church inscribed their names in the stained-glass windows, which badly needed restoration work. Leggs says that Reverend Robert Turner was able to leverage the gift to garner $750,000 in donations.

The gift from MacKenzie Scott and her husband, Dan Jewett, will boost the Action Fund’s partnerships with organizations around the country to safeguard Black heritage, according to Leggs, and he hopes that the work that it facilitates will inspire other philanthropists to step up.

The gift is also a validation of the diverse leadership assembled for the Action Fund, he adds: Historic preservation is changing, and practitioners must adapt too. For example, when the National Trust for Historic Preservation issued a June 2020 statement supporting the removal of Confederate monuments, some Trust members resisted the decision. “We stood strong in our commitment,” Leggs says.

He considers the work of restoring Black cultural sites to be in line with efforts to uproot the symbols of white supremacy and to recontextualize American history.

“Preservation is a form of education and commemoration,” Leggs says. “I see them as being one and the same.”

Updated: 7-29-2021

MacKenzie Scott, Melinda French Gates Give $40 Million To Gender Equality Groups

Philanthropists MacKenzie Scott and Melinda French Gates joined forces Thursday to give $40 million to four organizations that promote gender equality.

The recipients were part of the Equality Can’t Wait Challenge, which was announced last year by Scott and French Gates and also funded by billionaire Lynn Schusterman’s family foundation.

The projects winning $10 million each were selected from a pool of more than 500 applicants working in fields including technology, education, care-giving and indigenous communities. An additional $8 million was split between two finalists.

“The awardees are strong teams working on the front lines and from within communities to help women build power in their lives and careers,” Scott said in a statement. French Gates said she hoped the funding would help “break the patterns of history and advance gender equality.”

Scott is the world’s third-richest woman, with a fortune of $64.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, while French Gates has a net worth of $3.2 billion.

Both women have renewed control over the directions of their fortunes after separating from their husbands in recent months and years. They’ve also made supporting gender equality a centerpiece of their charitable efforts.

Record Giving

The challenge, launched the year after Scott and Amazon.com Inc. co-founder Jeff Bezos divorced, was one of Scott’s first major philanthropic efforts, only to be overshadowed a month later when she announced that she’d given away $1.7 billion to 116 nonprofits.

Since then, Scott distributed more than $6.8 billion to hundreds of other organizations in what is likely an annual record for a living person. The beneficiaries include groups that focus on women’s health and education.

Earlier this year, French Gates announced a divorce of her own, throwing into question the future of the largest private family foundation on the planet.

She and Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates initially insisted their split wouldn’t affect the foundation, but since the May announcement there have been several major changes. Those include a plan to add more trustees and an agreement that French Gates might leave in two years if the ex-couple can’t work together.

In a show of commitment, they promised an additional $15 billion to the foundation’s endowment and launched a $2.1 billion gender equity-focused campaign. French Gates has also pledged to spend $1 billion to support gender equality through Pivotal Ventures, which hosted the joint challenge with Scott and Schusterman.

The $10 million recipients announced Thursday are Building Women’s Equality through Strengthening the Care Infrastructure, Changing the Face of Tech, Girls Inc.’s Project Accelerate and The Future is Indigenous Womxn. The $8 million recipients are FreeFrom, which fights intimate-partner violence, and IGNITE, which trains women to enter political activism.

Updated: 8-12-2021

MacKenzie Scott’s Money Bombs Are Single Handedly Reshaping America

A Bloomberg News survey accounting for $4.3 billion in 375 grants to nonprofits reveals for the first time how the philanthropist is directing her charitable might.

One email about a $15 million gift, suspected of phishing, sat unopened for a month. Several others about a $20 million pledge went ignored by an assistant, who thought the nondescript sender was fake. The recipient of another memo, promising millions more, turned to their lawyer, who said it was likely a scam.

All of those big-fortune messages, and hundreds more like them, were not only legitimate, they came from the same source: a team working on behalf of MacKenzie Scott, fourth richest woman in the world — and, increasingly, the most powerful and mysterious force in philanthropy today.

With almost $8.6 billion in gifts announced in just 12 months, Scott has vaulted to the tippy top of philanthropic giving, outspending the behemoth Gates and Ford Foundations’ annual grants — combined.

But, for someone who is single handedly reshaping nonprofits, Scott, who declined to comment for this story, has only given the public glimpses into the thinking driving her decisions. These days, she shares little more than the list of lucky organizations and an inspirational quote.

To get a better sense of which causes are benefiting from Scott’s coffers — and where she might turn her attention to next — Bloomberg categorized, by location and type, all 786 gifts she has given so far.

We then tracked the money, using a survey and reporting, and found at least $4.3 billion distributed in 375 grants. The recipients of the remaining 411 haven’t disclosed the size of Scott’s gifts.

The groups that shared information are largely representative of the cross section of overall recipients. Education and arts and culture organizations were more likely to disclose the size of their gifts.

The data collected — the largest accounting of Scott’s giving to date — reveals that she’s focused on propping up needy individuals and the nonprofit industry itself through historic donations to organizations that didn’t see it coming.

More than $1.6 billion has gone to education nonprofits and colleges and universities, with historically Black institutions, two year colleges and Hispanic Serving Institutions fielding most of the contributions.

Social assistance organizations, which feed, house and support those in need, like Goodwill and YMCA, got about $1 billion and another $1.2 billion went to philanthropy and grantmaking infrastructure nonprofits that focus on the business of fundraising, advocacy and philanthropy itself.

At least two of those, the Bridgespan Group and Lever For Change, have worked directly with Scott on her giving.

The vast majority of her gifts went to groups based in the U.S., but some of those distribute funds globally.

For nearly 90% of organizations that responded to a Bloomberg survey, Scott’s gift was the largest they’ve ever received, with donations ranging from $750,000 to $60 million. “Transformational” was the word used over and over by recipients.

“You dream about these things, right?,” said San Antonio College president Robert Vela, who found out about a $15 million gift in May after initially ignoring an email he’d thought was a scam for a month. “You don’t really think they’re going to happen.”

It’s hard to say whether higher education and philanthropic infrastructure will continue to be the work that she’s known for in the way the Gates Foundation has tackled global health or Jeff Bezos has made his charitable name with a $10 billion promise to fight climate change.

For one, she hasn’t been at it for that long. Scott only gained individual control over her fortune after her divorce from Bezos in 2019. Shortly after, she signed the Giving Pledge, promising to donate the majority of her wealth in her lifetime or will.

At last count, she and her new husband, Seattle science teacher Dan Jewett, had $58 billion yet to give away. Her ex-husband, the second richest person in the world worth $191 billion, has yet to commit to that pledge.

One notable characteristic of Scott’s giving so far is the variability of her interests. Unburdened by expectations and a track record, Scott and her team have acted nimbly, changing the targets of their grants along with the news cycle.

Just as things seem to be at their worst in one corner of society, MacKenzie Scott shows up, deus ex machina, with her money cannon.

In July 2020, following George Floyd’s murder, of the $1.7 billion Scott announced she’d given away, the biggest chunk — $587 million — went to racial equity organizations.

Five months later, as the pandemic recession dragged on, straining food banks that more and more Americans had begun to rely on, Scott made expansive gifts to groups like Meals on Wheels and Feeding America.

“When the Mackenzie Scott gift came, it was a miracle,” said Eric Cooper, chief executive officer of the San Antonio Food Bank, which saw demand double to 120,000 people a week after the pandemic hit.

In her most recent round of giving, she gave to several Asian American and Pacific Islander-centric groups as hate crimes spiked across the U.S. “She’s working her way through all the different kinds of organizations,” said Elizabeth Dale, an associate professor of nonprofit leadership at Seattle University. “We might see her giving to environmental organizations in the next round.” (So far, climate focused nonprofits make up less than 1% of the pool of recipients.)

For nonprofits, which largely survive off much smaller donations, the guesswork can be frustrating.

“Her style of giving, which has emphasized that these gifts kind of come out of nowhere, manna from heaven, underscores that the grantees or potential grantees aren’t really in control of their own fate,” said Benjamin Soskis, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute’s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy. The Urban Institute received a gift from Scott in her June round of giving.

Graciela Sanchez, director of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, which received a $1 million gift from Scott, said she and her team are always trying to make connections and get noticed by big donors. In the end, though, she’s mostly left crossing her fingers.

“You just do the work ultimately and you hope somebody is watching it,” Sanchez said, adding that she’s already thinking about where to turn once the center burns through Scott’s donation. (Scott has given to some organizations more than once, but her team has told recipients they can’t request more funding, according to two recipients of gifts.)

Some of the roughly 1.5 million nonprofits in the U.S. that haven’t received a gift from Scott are asking, “Why not me?” Many of the organizations Scott has given to are small — half of survey respondents have fewer than 50 employees, excluding colleges and universities — and don’t often attract the attention of big name donors. Dozens have commented on Scott’s blog posts, hoping they might be next.

“It’s literally an act of utter desperation on our behalf,” said Scot Orban, human resource director at the Community Action Agency in Sioux City, Iowa, who appealed to the billionaire in the comments of her most recent Medium post — the only way he could find to get in touch with her. His organization usually fields gifts of, at most, a few thousand dollars. “In Iowa, it’s difficult for us to find large donors,” he said.

The mystery surrounding Scott and her team has caused issues for recipients. Palo Alto College president Robert Garza said his assistant thought several emails from the philanthropist’s team about a $20 million gift were fraudulent. (After reports of real scams, Scott has added a warning about impersonators in her bios on social media.)

“It didn’t have a phone number, it didn’t have a logo, it didn’t have an address,” Garza said of legitimate emails from Scott’s team. After a handful of ignored messages, Scott’s people finally got in contact with Garza through another email address, he said. The donation was the largest single gift of its kind in the college’s history. (Most schools selected by Scott have relatively small endowments.)

The fact that Scott does her giving as a private individual, as opposed to through a foundation, means that she can disclose as much or as little as she pleases about her team. Foundations like the Gateses’ have rigorous reporting requirements.

The Gates Foundation also shares information on its website about its leadership and more than 1,700 employees scattered across the globe. Scott offers up little more than the list of grantees in her blog posts.

Not much is known of the team working on Scott’s behalf, either. She has said that her advisers have “key representation from historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups,” and that they pick grantees “through a rigorous process of research and analysis.”

This lack of transparency isn’t just a practical barrier, but makes it hard to research her philanthropic power, said Soskis of the Urban Institute.

Nonprofits told Bloomberg they’ve worked with people from the philanthropic consultant Bridgespan and the National Philanthropic Trust, which bills itself as the largest national, independent donor advised fund sponsor. Both declined to comment for this story.

Notably absent from the process is Scott herself. None of the more than a dozen recipients Bloomberg spoke with said they ever interacted with or heard from her.

Her philanthropic counterparts, like Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, on the other hand, are active public and private facing stewards of their giving. The most publicized giving Scott has done was a $40 million competition she ran in partnership with French Gates.

Even Bezos, who hasn’t given away nearly as much as his ex-wife, has a more overt presence, sharing photos and videos of meetings with the beneficiaries of his gifts and students at his Bezos Academy preschools on social media.

Scott’s choice to share so little is the reason many recipients told Bloomberg they wouldn’t disclose the size of their gift. Some said they interpreted the language in their grant agreement to mean they couldn’t share how much they received. Many others worried that publicizing such an outsized grant would discourage others from supporting their causes.

“Our concern is that other funders will not prioritize funding for our organization assuming that our financial needs are taken care of,” the Oakland-based Greenlining Institute said, sharing that the gift was between $5 million and $10 million. Another organization, Sanku, didn’t share an amount at all, citing “concerns about donor perception.”

Still, only one organization out of the 270 that responded to a Bloomberg survey said funding decreased following Scott’s gift. To be sure, some received her grants just two months ago.

Another unusual aspect of Scott’s record-setting year of giving, is that her grants largely come without restrictions on how to use them. Many people who responded to the survey said their nonprofits didn’t know yet what to do with the gifts.

Others, however, were taking advantage of the freedom to fund day-to-day expenses and upgrades—88 said they have plans to hire more staff and 62 are investing in technology.

“It definitely helped our mental health,” said Celia Turner, acting director of philanthropic partnerships at Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, which received a $4 million gift in the July 2020 round.

That seems to be just what Scott was aiming for.

“What do we think they might do with more cash on hand than they expected?” Scott asked in her June blog post. “Hire a few extra team members they know they can pay for the next five years. Buy chairs for them. Stop having to work every weekend. Get some sleep.”

Inside MacKenzie Scott’s Record Setting Year of Philanthropy

In June, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, one of the richest women in the world, announced $2.7 billion in donations. But over the course of a few hours in July — thanks to Amazon Inc.’s ever-rising stock price, which Scott’s fortune is tied to — she added $2.9 billion to her net worth, more than replenishing her bank account.

The numbers and the scale are hard to wrap one’s mind around. Scott’s giving, as well as her gains, show how much power is and will continue to be concentrated in the hands of the very richest among us.

Given the speed and scale of Scott’s giving — $8.5 billion in just 12 months — she has offered little insight into her process, the vehicles she’s using, and how much, exactly, she’s sending individual organizations. “She owes her fellow citizens greater transparency over the power she’s wielding,” said Rob Reich, a Stanford University professor and author of “Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better.”

Scott’s mode of giving is particularly mysterious, but Reich thinks there should be laws requiring more disclosure and transparency around all philanthropic activity.

“Scrutiny does not mean condemnation,” he added. “It just means we deserve to ask questions.”

This week, my colleagues did just that of Scott, offering a comprehensive view into how she has directed her charitable might.

They spent weeks surveying the 786 gifts she has graced nonprofits with in the last year and managed to account for $4.3 billion in donations in 375 grants. They also found that such unprecedented giving has not put any meaningful dent in Scott’s coffers.

So far, the investigation found, educational organizations have been the biggest beneficiaries of Scott’s gifts, reaping $1.6 billion. Religious and environmental organizations have seen the least, at $14 million and $25 million, respectively.

Scott still has, at last count, worth $58 billion at last count, still has much to distribute if she intends to follow through with the Giving Pledge, a promise to donate the majority of her wealth in her lifetime or will.

The project is the largest accounting of Scott’s giving to date, and demystifies some of her decisions. But it’s still not a full picture and many of the nonprofits Bloomberg News spoke with say they still have little clarity into the process.

Updated: 8-17-2021

Billionaires Are Giving Away Their Money. Here’s Where It’s Going

What You Need To Know

The impending divorce of Bill and Melinda Gates may already be affecting their $50 billion foundation, one of the most influential in history.

After her divorce in 2019, MacKenzie Scott gave away almost $6 billion to hundreds of charitable groups, while her ex, Jeff Bezos, pledged $10 billion for an “Earth Fund” to fight climate change — by far the largest amounts given or pledged by either of them.

(Bezos has only committed a fraction of the money.) Still, Bezos and Scott’s enormous fortunes have only grown, outpacing their donations.

Meanwhile, the gulf between the ultra rich and the not-so-rich deepened dramatically during the Covid-19 pandemic, fueling the debate about the role of philanthropy in society.

“Philanthropists get far too much positive attention in ways that deserve more scrutiny right now,” said Linsey McGoey, director of the Center for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation at the University of Essex. “We’re starting to suspect that the people who have billions of dollars don’t have a true interest in solving these problems.”

The Gates couple, along with pal Warren Buffett, transformed the public’s expectations of billionaires with the creation of their “Giving Pledge” in 2010. They promised to give away the majority of their fortune, either while they are alive or after their death, and enticed hundreds more of the world’s wealthiest to do so as well.

The Pledge, however, has no enforcement mechanism. It’s a moral and public pledge, and the people who sign up can change their mind at any time, with or without telling anyone.

Why It Matters

It’s not necessarily easy to decide how to give away a ton of money. Elon Musk asked publicly on Twitter for ideas about how to give away his $172 billion fortune. Bezos did the same in 2017.

Knight just gave $500 million to his alma mater, in addition to previous multi-million dollar gifts in the past few years, while former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy gave $150 million this year toward the study of biology and machine learning.

Some choose to use structures, called donor-advised funds, that allow them to park money and get the immediate tax benefits of giving, and decide later where to send the gifts.

Updated: 12-8-2021

MacKenzie Scott Keeps Donations Secret In New Giving Spree

* Philanthropist Says She Wants Groups To Speak For Themselves
* Three Earlier Donation Sprees Totaled $8.6 Billion In Gifts

MacKenzie Scott has upended philanthropy in the past 18 months with three blog posts announcing a total of $8.6 billion in donations — among the biggest giveaways in history — and providing the names of each recipient.

With her latest announcement, she’s changing course.

“I’m not including here any amounts of money I’ve donated since my prior posts,” Scott said Wednesday in her latest Medium entry, which was long on reflection and short on details. “I want to let each of these incredible teams speak for themselves first if they choose to.”

The former wife of Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos has typically used the website to share information on the hundreds of organizations that received gifts as well as the total amount donated since her last announcement. This time she didn’t share the names of the organizations either.

Scott, who is worth about $60 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. While surprising the philanthropy world with the pace and magnitude of her giving, Scott has only offered the public glimpses into the thinking driving her decisions, typically sharing little more than a list of the lucky organizations.

In the new post, Scott, 51, rejects the attention that’s been paid to her as a philanthropist because of the eye-popping amounts that have garnered her so much praise.

“We tend to give more focus to things we can tally, and to rank everything else,” she said. “How much or how little money changes hands doesn’t make it philanthropy.”

Elizabeth Dale, associate professor of nonprofit leadership at Seattle University, has mixed feelings about Scott’s new approach.

“It seems she really wants to step out of the limelight and I think there’s something beneficial about that in the way it gets back to the root of philanthropy,” Dale said. “But it cloaks the transparency and the accountability that has been present in her previous announcements.”

Poetic Reflection

Without information about the amount of money dispersed or where it’s headed, Scott’s blog posts serve as nothing more than a poetic reflection from an uber-powerful person, Dale said. “I don’t know if it will have her intended effect,” she said.

Benjamin Soskis, senior research associate at the Urban Institute’s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy, praised Scott’s attempt in her blog post to expand the focus beyond mega-donations to a broader definition of philanthropy.

“The problem is it also undermines norms about the accountability of our wealthiest citizens and their philanthropic endeavors,” Soskis said. “The rationale that she’s offering could easily be offered by any donor that seeks to avoid scrutiny.”

Some details of the latest spree have emerged. Scott gave a $12 million grant to Global Citizen Year, which announced their gift in October. Another, Public Allies, announced receiving $10 million in early December.

They were told that they could share the news after Scott published her blog post or after a certain period of time from when they received the gift, a spokesperson from Public Allies said.

Scott has said in the past that she was initially hesitant to share details about her giving. In her first blog post in July 2020, Scott said she decided to share the organizations she had donated to in an attempt to encourage others to give to them, too.

She realized she had “a dividend of privilege I’d been overlooking: the attention I can call to organizations and leaders driving change.”

Another new West Coast philanthropist, Jack Dorsey, who committed $1 billion of his Square Inc. shares to charity last year, has opted for transparency, saying, “It’s important to show my work so I and others can learn.”

Dorsey, who’s the co-founder of Square and Twitter Inc., has given away about $430 million in more than 240 gifts in less than two years. That’s roughly 5% of Scott’s known giving over the same period.

Scott has been vague on other details of her giving, including how many people she has working on it and how they operate. She has said that her advisers have “key representation from historically marginalized race, gender and sexual identity groups,” and that they pick grantees “through a rigorous process of research and analysis.”

Organizations that have received gifts from Scott have shared similar stories in interviews with Bloomberg News. Typically there’s a call or email out of the blue from an unknown person saying something along the lines of “Congratulations, you’re the recipient of a gift from MacKenzie Scott.”

Most of the time it’s the largest donation the organization has ever received and they’re told to keep it a secret until Scott makes her blog post.

‘Ripple Effects’

Before today’s announcement, more than $1.6 billion of Scott’s $8.6 billion in gifts have gone to education nonprofits, colleges and universities, with historically Black institutions, two-year colleges and Hispanic Serving Institutions fielding most of the contributions, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News.

Social assistance organizations, including Goodwill and YMCA, got about $1 billion, and another $1.2 billion went to nonprofits that focus on the business of fundraising, advocacy and philanthropy itself, including the Bridgespan Group, which Scott works with to pick and vet organizations.

Brian Mittendorf, an Ohio State University professor who studies nonprofits, said there are “lots of negative potential ripple effects” of Scott’s new lack of transparency.

“Scott is presumably getting a tax deduction for her gifts,” he said, which “raises the question: What is her obligation of transparency to the public that is helping to subsidize these donations?”

Her innovative approach to giving has also been hugely influential on other wealthy donors, Mittendorf said. Without details, “it’s a lot harder for people to follow that lead.”

Scott signed the Giving Pledge, a non-binding promise to donate the majority of her fortune in her lifetime soon after divorcing Bezos, the world’s second-richest with a fortune of more than $200 billion. Scott ended up with a quarter of the ex-couple’s Amazon.com Inc. shares following the divorce.

Bezos, who recently went to space for the first time, has picked up his philanthropy since stepping down as Amazon CEO. This year, he’s given more than $1 billion in gifts, including a pair of $200 million gifts in July and a $100 million donation to the Obama Foundation, as well as the latest rounds of giving tied to his multibillion dollar pledges to fight family homelessness and climate change.

Updated: 1-28-2022

MacKenzie Scott Cut Amazon Stock Worth $8.5 Billion Last Year

MacKenzie Scott’s stake in Amazon.com Inc shrunk by 2.5 million shares last year, according to a regulatory filing, as the world’s fifth-richest woman set records with the pace of her philanthropy.

Those shares would be worth as much as $8.5 billion based on the average of Amazon’s share price between the dates of the two disclosures. The stake would total $7.3 billion based on Amazon’s current $2,879.56 stock price.

Scott still holds 14.9 million shares, according to the filing. It details Jeff Bezos’s holdings, including stock that Scott ended up with following their 2019 divorce and which Bezos retains voting power over.

Scott is worth $48.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. It would be considerably more but she’s donated more than $8.6 billion since their split to hundreds of charities across the U.S.

Scott announces her donations in blog posts that explain her motives and concerns over inequality in society. In 2021 she gave at least $2.7 billion, according to a June 2021 post. In a December post, she opted to keep the amount she gave secret.

Scott’s philanthropy is overseen by her Seattle-based family office Lost Horse, though she uses the Bridgespan Group to pick and vet organizations.

Bezos is the world’s second-richest person with a $168.9 billion fortune.

Updated: 3-22-2022

MacKenzie Scott Donates $436 Million To Habitat For Humanity

* Gift Is Aimed At Helping Address The Affordable Housing Crisis
* It’s Her Largest Known Donation Since Signing Giving Pledge

In her biggest known gift, MacKenzie Scott donated $436 million to Habitat for Humanity as the housing crisis across the U.S. intensifies.

The gift was disclosed Tuesday in a statement from the Greater San Francisco chapter of the home-building nonprofit, which is among the 84 Habitat affiliates that will share the contribution.

“This incredible act of generosity and investment in our work will make an impact throughout our region for decades to come,” said Maureen Sedonaen, head of Habitat for Humanity Greater San Francisco.

Scott, 51, the philanthropist and former wife of Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, has a fortune of $54.4 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. She is single-handedly reshaping nonprofits with her giving, donating to organizations tackling social welfare, education, arts, health and more.

With a team of consultants and donor-advised fund sponsors, she has proven nimble in her philanthropy, seemingly switching the target of her gifts as needs arise around the country.

The vast majority are to domestic causes, though some have gone to internationally focused organizations. Since promising to donate the majority of her wealth via the Giving Pledge in 2019, she has made more than $9 billion in grants.

‘Never Wavered’

Scott initially told organizations to keep her gifts secret until she made her own announcement in the form of Medium blog posts, where she shared the cumulative amount of all her gifts. Late last year she pivoted, saying it was up to the organizations to share their grants.

In her most recent blog post, Scott said her team was working on a website that would launch sometime this year and would include more information about her giving, including a searchable database of her grants.

“My commitment to sharing information about my own giving has never wavered,” Scott wrote. “I will continue to post updates twice every twelve months or so.”

A spokesperson for Scott didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Last year, a Bloomberg analysis of her giving — which totaled closer to $8.6 billion at the time — found more than $1.6 billion had gone to education nonprofits, including historically Black universities.

She’s also contributed to social assistance organizations like Goodwill and YMCA. For almost 90% of groups that responded to the Bloomberg survey, Scott’s gift was the largest they’ve ever received, with donations ranging from $750,000 to $60 million.

Her gift to Habitat for Humanity will help address historic inequities in homeownership rates in the area around San Francisco, Sedonaen said in the statement. Affordable housing has been a critical issue in Northern California, where wealthy Silicon Valley workers have contributed to skyrocketing home values, pushing out working-class residents, particularly those of color.

The donation will help build homes for more than 250 working families in San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin, according to the statement.

“Investing in affordable homeownership is a tangible and effective response to California’s housing crisis,” Sedonaen said. “I see every day the impact this has on families enduring overcrowded living conditions or undertaking horrifically long commutes.”

Updated: 4-5-2022

MacKenzie Scott Is Expanding Her $12.4 Billion Giving Spree Globally

The billionaire philanthropist has increased her donations to nonprofits based outside the U.S., in countries ranging from Brazil to Micronesia.

MacKenzie Scott has transformed American philanthropy in the past three years by giving record amounts of money to often overlooked causes. She’s now stepping up her donations outside of the U.S., where her billions could have even greater impact.

Scott’s latest giving spree — $3.9 billion — included about 60 nonprofits based outside the U.S., out of a total 465 that received grants since last June, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

They serve causes across five continents, from the small Pacific island nation of Micronesia to the slums of Rio de Janeiro. There was also an uptick in donations made to U.S.-based organizations that distribute funds globally, including to Ukraine relief efforts.

Scott, 51, has given away about $12.4 billion in 1,257 grants since she signed the Giving Pledge in 2019, a promise to donate most of her vast fortune to help solve social issues.

The most recent grants are nearly double all of Scott’s past gifts to internationally based groups. Before March 23 announcement, fewer than three dozen of her nearly 800 grant recipients were based internationally, mainly in India and Kenya, according to data collected by Bloomberg.

What remains unchanged is Scott’s propensity for mystery and dropping transformative money bombs at organizations that didn’t see them coming.

“Never in our wildest dreams we imagined it was MacKenzie Scott,” said Catherine Kyobutungi, an executive director at the African Population and Health Research Center, a Nairobi, Kenya-based nonprofit that got a $15 million grant, its largest-ever individual donation.

The APHRC, founded two decades ago, supports promising researchers working on African development issues. It often receives requests for information from people representing anonymous rich individuals, Kyobutungi said, but it is still trying figure out which contact led to Scott’s donation.

“That kind of unrestricted donation is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that will keep us going long term,” she said. “We’ve never seen anything like it.”

Scott, who didn’t reply to multiple messages seeking comment, said in a March 23 blog post that she and her team “seek a portfolio of organizations that supports the ability of all people to participate in solutions.” Her focus “included some new areas, but as always our aim has been to support the needs of underrepresented people.”

The former wife of Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos is worth $53 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Brazil Donations

Just like her U.S. donations, Scott’s global targets cover a wide array of causes. Her fortune now funds efforts as diverse as improving public health in India, propping up young feminists in Latin America and protecting the Amazon rainforest.

She also gave a $6 million gift to the Micronesia Conservation Trust, which manages biodiversity protection efforts in places like the Republic of Palau and the U.S. territory of Guam.

“We still don’t know how we got on her radar,” said Lisa Andon, deputy executive director at the MCT.

Out of the donations made to non-U.S.-based nonprofits, about a quarter went to Brazilian organizations. In Brazil, like in other emerging markets with weaker currencies, her dollar-denominated grants carry an extra punch.

Vera Cordeiro, 71, is a doctor who started a project in the 1990s to improve health care to Rio de Janeiro’s poorest families with nothing but a medicine cabinet and some food. Her Instituto Dara got a $1 million grant from Scott.

Scott’s first contact came through the Bridgespan Group, Cordeiro said, a nonprofit consultancy that advises philanthropists and has itself received a grant from Scott. The whole diligence process took about four months, she said.

Cordeiro hopes Scott’s donations will motivate wealthy Brazilians to get more involved in philanthropy. The country is the largest economy in Latin America but also one of the most unequal, with the richest 1% holding almost half of all the wealth in the nation, according to the World Inequality Database. It also has only a single signatory to the Giving Pledge.

“If our organization was created in the U.S., I wouldn’t have to be begging for money year after year,” she said. “MacKenzie Scott’s donation is a landmark, but where are all the Brazilian billionaires?”

Updated: 5-24-2022

MacKenzie Scott’s Latest Donation Brings Total Giving To More Than $12 Billion

Philanthropist gives $122.6 million to Big Brothers Big Sisters of America.

Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott donated $122.6 million to Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the organization said Tuesday, in the largest donation from one person in the group’s history.

Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, a mentoring organization with chapters across the nation, said it will use the money to bolster mentoring programs, pair more children with mentors, increase staff and training resources, and create and improve relationships with other groups. The unsolicited gift benefits the national organization and 38 local chapters, the group said in a statement.

“We know that no one person, organization or gift can do this work alone, but one person—no matter their background—can make an incredible difference through positive and inspired action,” said Artis Stevens, president and chief executive of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. “MacKenzie’s investment and belief in Big Brothers Big Sisters shows this on a large-scale.”

Ms. Scott is one of the richest women in the world, with a net worth of $31.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. She was formerly married to Amazon Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, with whom she played an instrumental role in creating the retail giant. She received 4% of the company’s shares as part of their divorce settlement.

Ms. Scott vowed to give away the majority of her wealth in 2019, signing the Giving Pledge created by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chief Executive Warren Buffett to encourage the world’s richest people to give more than half of their wealth to philanthropic and charitable groups and causes.

“I have a disproportionate amount of money to share,” she wrote at the time.

Since then, Ms. Scott has given away more than $12 billion to more than 1,000 organizations, relief efforts and other causes, according to her Medium posts.

She said in a Medium post in March that she gave $3.86 billion to 465 groups over nine months, with the goal of supporting the needs of underrepresented groups through supporting organizations that work in education, climate change and criminal justice.

Earlier this year, she donated $436 million to Habitat for Humanity, which said it will use a portion of the gift to increase affordable housing in communities of color.

Mr. Stevens, of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, said he received a call informing him of Ms. Scott’s gift while in his kitchen.

“My jaw dropped,” he said in a statement. “I actually got up and started dancing and my girls yelled to my wife that something was wrong with dad.”

He said the gift will allow the organization to expand mentoring options and find more volunteers. One in three youths “don’t have access to a positive adult mentor in their lives,” he noted.

A number of organizations that received donations from Ms. Scott described them as the largest single gifts given in their history. The Boys & Girls Clubs of America and various affiliates received their largest gift ever from Ms. Scott, who donated $281 million to the group.

Ms. Scott’s $275 million donation to Planned Parenthood Federation of America was also the organization’s largest gift from a single donor.

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