MacKenzie Scott Announces $4.2 Billion More in Charitable Giving

And smaller organizations like a nonprofit affordable housing lender in Minnesota and a group that helps people pay off their medical debt also received funds.

Ms. Scott’s post did not include the amounts paid to the individual organizations, but it did say the entire sum committed is paid up front and is unrestricted, or “no strings attached,” as she put it.

Morgan State University, a historically Black university in Baltimore, announced that it had received $40 million, the largest private gift in the institution’s history. Ms. Scott said the money went to groups in all 50 states, Washington and Puerto Rico.

Chuck Collins, director of the Charity Reform Initiative at the Institute for Policy Studies, said that, at least in terms of publicly announced grants, he could think of no one who had given away more this year. “She’s responding with urgency to the current moment,” Mr. Collins said.

“You think of all these tech fortunes, they’re the great disrupters, but she’s disrupting the norms around billionaire philanthropy by moving quickly, not creating a private foundation for her great-grandchildren to give the money away,” Mr. Collins added.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/business/mackenzie-scott-donations.html