Here’s What You Need to Know About MacKenzie Scott’s 2023 Giving

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on December 14, 2023.

On December 6, an inconspicuous blog post titled “(Giving Update)” appeared on MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving site.

“Excited to call attention to these 360 outstanding organizations, every one of whom could use more allies,” she wrote. “Grateful to everyone in the extended team who made it possible to give them gifts, $2,153,000,000 delivered since my post last December. Inspired by all the ways people work together to offer each other goodwill and support.”

And that was it.

Previously, Scott would pair her grant announcement with a thoughtful essay, and usually a couple of times a year. This time, however, she let her 54-word statement and a spreadsheet listing the 2023 recipients do the talking, reflecting, I suspect, her oft-stated intention to de-center herself in the grantmaking process. Those of us who have come to enjoy Scott’s essays will be disappointed this time around, but thanks to Yield Giving’s move toward a user-friendly database of gifts — the site went live practically a year ago to the day — we can dig into the spreadsheet and create our thematic frameworks (albeit without Scott’s lyrical panache).

A review of 2023 data suggests that Scott didn’t deviate too far from the script. Top priority areas include affordable housing, job training and health, with a substantial number of organizations providing direct services with a focus on racial equity. Unlike previous rounds, arts organizations and colleges and universities did not garner significant funding. Nonprofits focused on environmental issues also received minimal support, and I didn’t see a sizable bump in gifts for organizations engaged in muscular power-building in the electoral arena.

With her latest tranche of gifts taken into account, Scott has disbursed more than $16.5 billion in unrestricted funding to more than 1,900 nonprofits since vowing to give “until the safe is empty” in 2019 — although as we’ll see, she hasn’t made much progress on that front. Here are a few takeaways from her latest grant drop.

Over a third of total funding is undisclosed

First off, it’s important to note that we don’t have a full picture of where all the money flowed in 2023, as the spreadsheet only lists dollar amounts for 248 grants totaling $1.37 billion. As for the remaining 112 grants, the spreadsheet says, “Disclosure delayed for benefit of recipient.” This is consistent with the presentation of past giving data, reflecting one of Scott’s goals to “trust nonprofits to decide when and how to share information about their gifts.” So while we can deduce that the $728 million — or 34% of total funding — was disbursed to those recipients, we don’t know who got what.

Since Scott gives through a donor-advised fund instead of a foundation, she isn’t legally required to report the recipients to the IRS, and the omission of the 112 grant amounts for this round suggests that organizations don’t feel comfortable with making those figures public, at least for now. The decision to allow grantees to make that call is something of a compromise that emerged following the December 8, 2021, letter aptly titled “No Dollar Signs This Time,” which listed recipients and let the nonprofits decide if they’d publicize the grant amount. That move sparked some backlash, as Scott navigated her way between philanthropic transparency and deferring to nonprofits.

But alas, that means we’re still missing a good chunk of data, and it means there’s a possibility that Scott gave grants that eclipsed the three largest gifts on record for 2023, which, at $25 million each, flowed to affordable housing organization Mercy Housing, youth job training provider Year Up, and reproductive care organization Upstream USA.

Grantees see themselves through an intersectional lens

The Yield Giving database includes the organization’s mission statement, self-reported priority areas and geographies served. Organizations can select from 10 priority areas, including Arts and Culture, Education and Health, and each area has its own set of what I’ll call “sub-priority” areas. For example, the Education area has five sub-priority areas, including “early learning” and “vocational development.” There are 52 sub-priority areas in total.

This granular taxonomy is useful because it underscores organizations that view themselves through an intersectional lens. According to my calculations, a convincing 292 of 360 nonprofits — 81% — self-reported as having a footprint in more than one priority area. But by allowing organizations to subjectively self-report multiple sub-priorities, the methodology makes it difficult to determine exactly how much money is flowing to one field compared to the others. It would be a more empirically precise exercise if, for example, Yield Giving ascribed a single well-defined priority area to each grantee.

We can’t complain too much (though we always try). Most foundations don’t have online grants databases and we usually have to wait two years before recipient organizations turn up on a Form 990. Given the fact that Scott isn’t legally required to provide any information on grantees, her willingness to accede to requests for more transparency is refreshing, even if it means combing through Yield Giving’s complex and multicolored spreadsheet.

Housing, job training and health are top priority areas

The top 20 gifts ranged from $12 million to $25 million, totaling $343 million. While this sample size only accounts for 25% of the total disclosed funding for the year, having reviewed the full grantee listing, I think it provides an accurate snapshot of Scott’s priorities.

Sixteen of the top 20 gifts flowed to organizations focused on affordable housing (nine), job training (five) and health (two). Eight self-reported “racial equity” as a sub-priority and all but three organizations are exclusively based in the U.S. Other gifts include $15 million to Global Fishing Watch, which “seeks to advance ocean governance through increased transparency of human activity at sea” and $20 million to CAMFED, which empowers young girls in Africa. Most grantees can be broadly classified as direct service providers.

Further data-crunching corroborates these trends at the broader level. Using the spreadsheet’s sorting functionality, I determined that 84% of all recipients cited the U.S. as their sole geographic area of service. I also sorted grantees by self-reported sub-priority and ranked them accordingly.

Of the 360 recipient organizations, 134 of them — or 37% — self-reported as having a footprint in the “race and ethnicity” sub-priority area, followed by “access to healthcare” (112), “livelihoods and workforce development” (91), “access to housing and housing development” (71) and “chronic diseases” (62). Again, this approach doesn’t precisely illustrate where the money is flowing as much as it provides a look into the mission-oriented complexion of 2023’s grantees.

Support for “power-building” remains moderate and incidental

Last March, Scott announced her latest tranche of grants. The inclusion of what my colleague Philip Rojc called a “higher-than-typical number of policy shops” was tempered with Scott’s contention that “we don’t advocate for particular policies or reforms.” “Instead,” she wrote in Medium, “we seek a portfolio of organizations that supports the ability of all people to participate in solutions.”

Two months later, IP Editor David Callahan penned an open letter to Scott and her then-husband Dan Jewett encouraging them “to build the kind of power that can do the most to change people’s lives: electoral power.” Scott, Callahan argued, should take a firmer stand on specific policy proposals centered on improving the lives of low-income Americans in fields like economics, taxes and budgets, and voting rules.

A review of the 2023 grantees’ self-reported missions suggests Scott hasn’t radically altered her philosophy. A majority of organizations provide direct services, with an intersectionality-oriented subset engaging in what we can broadly describe as “power-building” activities, although not at a level that one could describe as critical mass.

For example, Oakland Starting Smart and Strong ($1 million) “advocates for changes in public policy” primarily in the Education priority area, although it also focuses on “child development and welfare,” which falls under Health. A more overt example of a “power-building” recipient is the Clean Slate Initiative ($20 million), which seeks to pass legislation that expands and automates record clearance.

For what it’s worth, there is no “power-building” sub-priority in Yield Giving’s taxonomy and searches on related terms like “advocacy,” “policy,” “movement building” and “building power” generate 32, 26, 12 and 2 results, respectively. All of this suggests that like previous rounds, Scott’s top priority is getting money in the hands of organizations serving communities in the here and now and that her relatively tepid “power-building” grantmaking continues to involve supporting policy shops amplifying underrepresented voices while not personally lobbying for specific legislative action items.

There are second acts in Scott’s philanthropy

Scott’s 2023 giving dispels F. Scott Fitzgerald’s adage “there are no second acts in American lives,” as she provided gifts to four organizations that received support in previous years. These gifts also happened to be abnormally large. Upstream USA, which received $25 million, netted a $30 million gift in 2022, and Clean Slate Initiative received its $20 million gift on the heels of a $15 million donation in 2022.

It’s always been something of an open question as to whether we’d see many renewals, given the large, unrestricted nature of Scott’s giving. At this point, I’d humbly encourage previous grantees to temper their expectations for a follow-on gift since only four organizations received a second grant this round. That said, this is MacKenzie Scott we’re talking about, so we shouldn’t be all that surprised if that figure increases over time.

The safe is still quite full

This takeaway is more of a reminder, and it’s never to underestimate how compounded interest — or, more specifically, Amazon’s share price — can flummox the best-laid plans to die broke.

When Scott made her November 2022 grant announcement, her paper net worth was down to a precarious $30 billion. A little over a year later, however, her fortune now stands at $34 billion — even after, presumably, moving $2.1 billion out the door throughout 2023. Bottom line? Extreme wealth always yields more extreme wealth, which makes it challenging to empty the safe.

More Scott-related developments on the horizon

Scott’s latest announcement came a little over a month after the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) published its second study looking at how her giving is transforming grantees. The CEP’s most trenchant finding was that while surveyed funders remain skeptical that organizations can handle large unrestricted gifts, surveyed recipients of Scott’s largesse reported no such difficulties. A follow-up piece will take a closer look at this cognitive dissonance since it’s nearly impossible to analyze Scott’s giving without considering the extent to which other funders have declined to emulate aspects of her approach, like providing unrestricted support.

And if readers still aren’t convinced Scott’s norm-shattering project is, appropriately enough, the gift that keeps on giving, we can expect Yield Giving and its partner organization, Lever for Change, to announce the winners of its first open call sometime in 2024. Stay tuned.

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