A growing body of evidence suggests that with the end of the year approaching, MacKenzie Scott has been ramping up her grantmaking and is poised to announce another large tranche of gifts.
On October 10, Forbes’ David Bowermaster reported that since the beginning of September, Scott had given approximately $100 million to eight nonprofits providing capital and financial services in low-income communities. This month, Bloomberg’s Sophie Alexander revealed that Scott had unloaded more than 45 million shares in Amazon stock worth nearly $8.4 billion as of September 30 — the “vast majority” of which is “so far unaccounted for.”
All the while, recipient organizations have been firing off press releases. On November 18, Columbia, Maryland-based Enterprise Community Partners (Enterprise) announced it received a massive $65 million gift from Scott. The windfall, which came four years after Scott gave the affordable housing nonprofit $50 million, “was a complete surprise,” said an Enterprise spokesperson in an email to IP. “We had no prior knowledge we were selected as recipients.”
Scott previously announced large tranches of grants on December 6, 2023, November 14, 2022 and December 8, 2021, so anticipation continues to build as the year winds down.
If another big Scott announcement does come down the pike, the philanthrosphere’s collective inboxes could simultaneously explode at any moment. But until then, here are five things we know about Scott’s low-key giving in 2024 so far.
MacKenzie Scott’s kept a low public profile — even by her standards
The notoriously publicity-shy Scott’s only message to the world in 2024 via her Yield Giving site came on March 19 when she named the 361 “community-led nonprofits” receiving a total of $640 million in funding through her inaugural foray into open grantmaking launched with Lever For Change.
Following that announcement, I laid out some of the open call’s key takeaways, noting how Scott and her team prioritized organizations galvanizing systems change around multiple intersecting issues like “health” and “education” instead of those focused on one area. Her strategic focus represented a moderate shift from her December 2023 wave of giving that emphasized direct services providers in fields like housing, job training and healthcare.
In early May, I spoke with Lever for Change CEO Cecilia Conrad, who provided an illuminating look into the Yield Giving Open Call’s grantmaking machinery. Scott, Conrad explained, adopted and modified Lever for Change’s open grantmaking architecture, which included a peer review process and an external evaluation panel. The Yield Giving website continues to characterize the open call as an “ongoing effort,” although at the time, Conrad stressed that Scott hadn’t committed to a second iteration.
More giving conducted than what’s listed on the Yield Giving grant database
I downloaded the gift spreadsheet from Yield Giving and noticed that the only gifts listed for 2024 were the 361 open call recipients.
The spreadsheet did not include the following 16 gifts from 2024 that have been reported in outlets like Bloomberg, Forbes and the Minnesota Star Tribune, and announced by recipients. Most of these organizations focus on affordable housing or provide loans and other financial services to small business owners in underserved communities and nonprofits.
- Local Initiatives Support Corp. ($65 million)
- Enterprise Community Partners ($65 million)
- Corporation for Supportive Housing ($40 million)
- Housing Trust Silicon Valley ($30 million)
- Nonprofit Finance Fund ($22 million)
- Opportunity@Work ($20 million)
- Coastal Enterprises, Inc. ($15 million)
- Craft3 ($15 million)
- PeopleFund ($12 million)
- Access to Capital for Entrepreneurs ($10 million)
- Entrepreneur Fund ($9 million)
- Propel Nonprofits ($8 million)
- West Philadelphia Skills Initiative ($4 million)
- Wind River Development Fund ($3 million)
- Basta ($4 million)
- Mni Sota Fund ($1.5 million)
The $65 million gifts to community development organization Local Initiatives Support Corp. (LISC) and affordable housing nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners were abnormally large. To put the figure in perspective, only one of the 2,307 gifts in Yield Giving’s spreadsheet exceeds that amount — 2021’s $75 million grant to Co-Impact Gender Fund.
At least one follow-up gift had no reporting requirements
Six of the organizations listed above received grants from Scott in 2020, raising the question of if and how Scott and her team, including consultants at Bridgespan Group, conducted due diligence before cutting a second check.
In an email to IP, a spokesperson for Enterprise Community Partners said that Scott’s original $50 million gift in 2020 “required Enterprise to share an annual report for three years with information on how we leveraged the funding and the impact it had on our work.” This second gift, meanwhile, “has no required reporting.”
Beyond her penchant for awarding unrestricted support, another hallmark of Scott’s trust-based giving is how rarely she asks recipients to fill out financial or narrative reports. Enterprise’s experience suggests this isn’t an iron-clad rule and that her team set parameters around the 2020 gift with an eye toward potentially providing follow-up support four years later.
“Communities across the country are experiencing the deep ripple effects the housing crisis has on our economy and the strain housing prices are putting on people already struggling to afford basic necessities,” said Enterprise’s spokesperson. “It’s promising to see leading philanthropists like Scott also recognize this urgent need and commit to financing community-based and supply-focused solutions so this work can continue and accelerate.”
Related Inside Philanthropy Resources:
For Subscribers Only
Her giving has become too extensive to easily categorize
A big theme in Scott’s giving is the extent to which she toggles between support for direct service providers and nonprofits focused on systems change. If we view her philanthropy with that dichotomy in mind, her big gifts for community development institutions across 2024 suggest that the pendulum has swung towards direct services.
But I’ve concluded that attempting to put Scott’s giving into buckets is a fool’s errand. Having moved over $17 billion out the door since 2020, her approach can best be described as “all of the above.” Not only has she showered support on a diverse range of organizations, many recipient nonprofit leaders view themselves through an intersectional lens, making efforts to pigeonhole her grants even more futile.
Her process runs the risk of becoming less transparent
Efforts to neatly characterize Scott’s giving are also hampered by the fact that for the time being, at least 16 grants issued in 2024 have yet to appear on the Yield Giving database.
That may change any minute now, but it’s a reminder that Scott, who has taken great pains to de-center herself from her grantmaking, defers to grantees when it comes to publicly announcing gifts.
“Information in this database is updated periodically, following consultation with the organizations themselves to afford them an opportunity to share it in the ways that best serve their efforts,” reads Yield Giving’s Gifts page. Moreover, an analysis of the Yield Giving spreadsheet shows that 547 grants — almost a quarter of all listed grants — do not have a dollar amount attached. Instead, each entry reads “Disclosure delayed for benefit of recipient,” even for grants dating back to 2020.
Again, deferring to an organization’s PR preferences comports with what my colleague Philip Rojc called Scott’s penchant to “give recipients a chance to share and take the spotlight off of herself,” but it also comes with a trade-off. If grantees opt to keep grants or grant amounts under wraps, Scott, who rolled out the Yield Giving database precisely to address concerns about transparency, runs the risk of giving the public less visibility into where the money is flowing. Her giving vehicle, an LLC called Lost Horse, isn’t required to report grantees to the IRS the way a private foundation would through a Form 990.
Bottom line? We may learn about a new tranche of Scott gifts sooner rather than later. The only open questions are whether the news will come from the organizations or in an essay from Scott, and if we can get anything resembling a full picture of how much money is moving out the door.
