As MacKenzie Scott donates $3.9B, one grantee expresses ambivalence

Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott and her husband, Dan Jewett, have given away nearly $3.9 billion in grants to 465 organizations — including several that are providing humanitarian aid for the Ukraine crisis — since June, according to an announcement Wednesday.

Scott and Jewett’s team focused on “some new areas” with this round of grantees, but “as always our aim has been to support the needs of underrepresented people from groups of all kinds,” Scott said in her latest Medium blog post, entitled “Helping Any of Us Can Help Us All.” The list includes U.S. domestic and international nonprofits and brings her giving to around $12 billion in the past two years.

But the response of one of the grantees highlights the concerns some social justice-oriented organizations might have about receiving money connected to Amazon, which has been accused of ignoring workers’ rights and harming the environment.

FRIDA, The Young Feminist Fund — a nonprofit registered in the U.S. and Canada that supports feminist organizations in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Caribbean — said in a statement that it was “humbled and excited” to have received a $10 million grant from Scott.

But the group also spoke about the conflicts it saw in receiving its largest-ever-grant from someone who “has chosen to use her power and privilege towards something meaningful and tangible” but who also continues to benefit from a business that the group described as “one of the most exploitative companies in the world.”

Scott, who is currently worth an estimated $55.7 billion, received 4% of Amazon’s shares as part of her divorce settlement with the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos. FRIDA remains concerned about the source of Amazon’s billions of dollars in profits and “vehemently reject the oppressive, racial, capitalist, and exploitative systems that have enabled this wealth to grow,” the group said.

“With this clear position, FRIDA commits to using these funds as part of our larger reparative approach to wealth redistribution, shifting resources back to the hands of our communities, who Amazon and other governments as well as corporations have harmed and stolen from,” the group said.

With this latest round of grants, Scott further cements her reputation as an nontraditional philanthropist among the wealthiest U.S. individuals. She has given out large sums in unrestricted funding to nonprofit organizations since divorcing Bezos in 2019 without establishing a foundation.

Her style of giving has won her acclaim from many in the philanthropy sector who see her as leading the way for philanthropists to give more away during their lifetimes and to lean into “trust-based giving,” which allows nonprofits to spend grant funding as they see fit.

Scott has often spoken of her desire to shift the attention and the power away from wealthy donors to nonprofits working in communities. She has said that she would like to see more funding go to organizations representing communities that are “historically underfunded and overlooked.”

In Wednesday’s blog post, Scott said her team has developed “a portfolio of organizations that supports the ability of all people to participate in solutions. This means a focus on the needs of those whose voices have been underrepresented.”

Additionally, she said that approximately 60% of this new batch of grantee organizations are women-led and 75% are led by “people with lived experience in the regions they support and the issues they seek to address.”

Scott and Jewett’s list of grantees includes African Population and Health Research Center; African Women’s Development Fund; ClimateWorks Foundation’s Drive Electric Campaign; Conectas Direitos Humanos, in Brazil; Fondo Centroamericano de Mujeres, in Costa Rica; Fondo de Mujeres del Sur, in Argentina; Fund for Global Human Rights; and Global Health Corps.

Additionally, it includes Kenya Community Development Foundation; LEAP Africa; Micronesia Conservation Trust; SAJIDA Foundation, in Bangladesh; Samdhana Institute, in Indonesia and the Philippines; and Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa.

Scott and Jewett provided several grants to support groups providing humanitarian aid for the Ukraine crisis as well. Those groups are: CARE, the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, Choose Love, HIAS, Norwegian Refugee Council, OutRight Action International, and Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights.

Per Scott’s standard practice, no dollar amounts were listed for individual grants in her blog post. However, in addition to FRIDA, some other groups have disclosed grant amounts on their own. For example, Habitat for Humanity International said Tuesday that it had received $25 million from a total $436 million in grants given to it and 84 of its U.S. affiliates.

“This incredibly generous gift will allow us to dramatically increase capacity and implement programs that will have a multi-generational impact on communities around the U.S. and our global mission for many years to come,” wrote Jonathan Reckford, CEO of Habitat for Humanity International, in a statement.

The Fund for Global Human Rights said that it received a $10 million grant from Scott, which it said would be spent on “climate justice, legal empowerment, and the protection of embattled activists, while increasing staff capacity and strengthening our ability to serve local groups.”

Landesa — a lands rights advocacy organization with offices in the U.S., China, India, Liberia, Myanmar, and Tanzania — said it had received a $20 million unrestricted grant that will be used to “accelerate its work to strengthen gender-equal land rights and arrest the climate crisis.”

Climate Justice Resilience Fund said it received a $7 million grant from Scott.

Scott had previously said that she would no longer post total dollar amounts for grants given, citing the immense media attention the lists garnered for her instead of the organizations themselves. But she reversed course after some in the philanthropy sector criticized the idea of providing less transparency about philanthropic donations.

Scott has since said that she and her team would share details about the first two years of their work and recent gifts through an online database that has not yet been made public. There have been 1,257 gifts to date, she said.

“Each non-profit it [the database] will list was selected through a rigorous process, and has a strong track record of serving under-supported needs,” she said.