The MacKenzie Effect: How Billionaire MacKenzie Scott Is Changing the Giving Game

October 29, 2024

A $36 billion fortune made Scott one of the richest women in the world. How she’s giving it away makes her fascinating.

By Andrew Zucker & Styled by Jaclyn Bloomfield | Town & Country Magazine

Yolonda Marshall thought she had received a prank call.

Money dangled by an anonymous donor felt like a possible scam. And the fact that the call came to Marshall’s personal cell phone, not her work phone, made the CEO of Student Leadership Network, an organization helping underserved students reach college, further question the caller’s authenticity. “I’m like, ‘How weird is that?’ ” Marshall recalls. “But the next day I called back. I said to myself, ‘What if it’s real?’”

It turned out to be a multimillion-dollar decision. After weeks of due diligence and back-and-forth with the benefactress’s representatives, one of the world’s richest people made a $7 million gift to Student Leadership Network. And unlike many gifts from big-ticket donors, it was unrestricted, meaning Marshall and her team could use the money as they saw fit.

From left: Philip Chong, Yolonda Marshall, Layla Zaidane, Cecilia Conrad, and Suzanne McCormick. None of the five leaders from MacKenzie Scott-backed nonprofits who gathered in July for a *Town & Country* photoshoot had met or spoken to her, but her gifts have changed their work enormously.

“When you’re running a nonprofit, you’re so busy doing the work of ensuring that you’re making a difference in the lives of so many individuals who need it most, making sure they feel seen,” Marshall says. “Receiving the MacKenzie Scott gift made my leadership team and me feel seen.”

Most of the time, when well-to-do couples call it quits they must split assets like real estate, jewelry, and artwork. For MacKenzie Scott and Jeff Bezos, their 2019 divorce meant divvying up ownership of one of the world’s largest companies. Scott walked away from the marriage with four percent of Amazon (worth about $36 billion), instantly becoming America’s third-wealthiest woman.

**PHILIP CHONG, President and CEO of QARI.** Chong arrived in the U.S. at the age of 16 from Hong Kong, eventually settling in Massachusetts. After a lengthy career as a business consultant, the 28-year-old joined the immigrant-focused nonprofit Quincy Asian Resources Inc. (QARI) seven years ago. Last year the group was one of the 361 organizations to receive a gift from Scott’s Open Call initiative. “It’s not just bold, it’s that trust and that sense of, ‘It’s time really to make the change,’” he says.

She’s made good use of her new status. While Bezos has pledged $10 billion to tackle climate change, the 54-year-old Scott, an American Book Award–winning author, has doled out more than $17 billion to thousands of charitable organizations, oftentimes surprising them with the gifts. The scale of Scott’s no-strings-attached giving is unheard of even in the high-flying world of gazillionaires.

“There’s a sort of mystique around it,” says Cecilia Conrad, whose organization, Lever for Change, which matches philanthropists with nonprofits, received a grant from Scott in 2021 and helped her dish out $640 million to charities in 2024. Conrad acknowledges that many people worry that small organizations aren’t well equipped to absorb large donations, but the former economics professor views it as a “solvable problem.”

**YOLONDA MARSHALL, CEO of Student Leadership Network.** When Student Leadership Network received a $7 million gift from Scott in 2022, it was unrestricted. “We were able to think innovatively and creatively about how we could actually leverage the gift,” Marshall says. Before the donation, the organization had worked primarily with its own schools to help students apply to college. The gift accelerated a pilot initiative with the Buffalo Public School District that trained staff in how to replicate the organization’s model. “That means we could drive systemwide change by teaching entire school districts how to do this work,” she says. “And it was MacKenzie Scott’s dollars that allowed us to do that.”

“It’s kind of a vicious cycle, because you say, ‘Well, they’ve never had a grant that big, so therefore they can’t absorb a grant that big.’ Then they never get a grant that big,” she says. “You have to allow them the space to build the infrastructure they need.”

While Conrad doesn’t expect every Giving Pledge signer to adopt Scott’s “trust-based” philanthropic style, which emphasizes each non-profit’s role in allocating a gift, she does believe megadonors are listening more to organizations’ needs.

**SUZANNE McCORMICK, President & CEO of YMCA of the USA.** It’s McCormick’s job to make Americans aware of the YMCA beyond the Village People song. She oversees the YMCA in the U.S., and when she started she already knew the MacKenzie effect firsthand, having come from United Way, to whose chapters Scott had donated in 2020. Although Scott has been hands off with her donations, one YMCA in Boise, Idaho, kept her in mind upon receiving a $10 million gift. They assembled an eight-person group to determine how to distribute the money, but they always had nine chairs at their meetings. “They always left one empty to represent, ‘What would MacKenzie Scott want us to do with this money?’ ” McCormick says.

“There has been, in my mind, a slow movement—but it’s a movement—toward giving more freedom to organizations to define what the work will be,” Conrad says. “I think there’s an openness to recognizing that the expertise resides with the organizations and not necessarily with the very smart person who made lots of money.”

Early in Scott’s giving, some critics called on her to make her philanthropy less opaque, so that any charity could make its case. Because of her perceived secrecy, unlocking “MacKenzie bucks” felt like a game of chance. “There was all this buzz around, ‘Are you going to be the one?’” Marshall says. “But there wasn’t a whole lot of talk about how to [receive funding].”

**LAYLA ZAIDANE, President & CEO of Future Caucus.** For most Americans, political gridlock is disillusioning, but Zaidane remains hopeful. The Georgetown graduate oversees Future Caucus, a nonprofit focused on helping young elected politicians forge relationships across the aisle. In 2020 Scott gave the group $2 million, doubling its budget overnight. Despite the happy news, Zaidane worried that the donation could signal that Future Caucus was fully capitalized and “our philanthropy would dry up.” As a result, the board funded initiatives that it could use as a model for major long-term growth. “We still need support to do some of our core work,” she says. “That really is dependent on continued investment.”

That changed in 2023, when Scott’s philanthropic outfit, Yield Giving, partnered with Lever for Change to start the Yield Giving Open Call, which promised to give away $1 million gifts to 250 “community-led, community-focused” organizations. Since then Scott has more than doubled the amount to $640 million, which has been distributed (in $1 million and $2 million grants) to 361 organizations such as Dallas Afterschool, English for New Bostonians, and Justice for Migrant Women.

**CECILIA CONRAD, CEO of Lever for Change.** Scott turned to Lever for Change, a nonprofit dedicated to helping donors fund major philanthropic projects, to launch her yearlong Open Call initiative. It was the first time charities could apply for funding from the reclusive philanthropist. After the pool of applications turned out to be bigger than anticipated, Scott and Lever for Change decided to expand the number of awardees and add morethan $350 million to the prize pool. “She focuses so much on the organizations and elevating them,” Conrad says. “Not herself.” *On all photos: Hair by Steven Fernandes for R+Co Bleu, makeup by Claudia Lake for Chanel, hair and makeup for Conrad by Melissa Formica @melissaformicabeauty, shot on location at Pier 59 Studios.*

Scott herself has little interest in recognition. None of the five leaders from Scott-backed nonprofits who gathered in July for a Town & Countryphotoshoot had met or spoken to her. “We see male billionaires buy spaceships and female billionaires do incredible giving campaigns,” says Layla Zaidane, the head of Future Caucus, a non-partisan organization focused on young lawmakers that received a $2 million gift from Scott in 2020. “I hope to see more people follow their lead, because it really is transformative.”

This story appears in the November 2024 issue of Town & Country.

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