MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and one of the richest women in the world, promised to keep giving her fortune away. Over the past year, Scott has donated some $6 billion to more than 500 nonprofit organizations. Furthermore, she has announced a new round of grants worth a combined $2.7 billion which will be distributed to 286 higher education, social justice, and arts organizations working to support marginalized and underserved communities.
Scott avoided making donations to the big budget institutions and museums that are often favored by mega philanthropists, opting instead to promote local organisations. “Arts and cultural institutions can strengthen communities by transforming spaces, fostering empathy, reflecting community identity, advancing economic mobility, improving academic outcomes, lowering crime rates, and improving mental health,” Scott wrote in a blog post which, in addition to quoting the Sufi mystic poet Rumi, listed all 286 organisations.
Among the scores of arts organisation that received funding were El Museo del Barrio in New York, which got $8m; the Dance Theater of Harlem ($10m); the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco ($6m); the Mosaic Network & Fund, a collaborative of 19 foundations investing in New York City-based arts and culture groups led by people of colour ($5m); and the Museum of Chinese in America in New York ($5m); Souls Grown Deep, a foundation advocating on behalf of Black artists from the American South ($2m); United States Artists, a Chicago-based grant-maker ($7m); the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago ($8m).
Scott said in a statement: “Arts and cultural institutions can strengthen communities by transforming spaces, fostering empathy, reflecting community identity, advancing economic mobility, improving academic outcomes, lowering crime rates, and improving mental health, so we evaluated smaller arts organizations creating these benefits with artists and audiences from culturally rich regions and identity groups that donors often overlook.”
Scott’s gift is “not only an investment in the arts”, said Deborah Cullinan, the CEO of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in a statement, “It is a game-changing new approach that upends traditional philanthropy and puts resources into the hands of people who are doing the urgent work of now.”