MacKenzie Scott attends the 2018 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Radhika Jones at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on March 4, 2018 in Beverly Hills, California. (Credit: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic)
SAN RAFAEL, Calif. - Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott continues to live up to her pledge to donate her wealth to good causes. Scott this week offered a $42 million grant to the San Rafael-based nonprofit 10,000 Degrees, which provides college scholarships to low-income students.
The donation came through Scott's Yield Giving organization, and will further the organization's mission to "achieve educational equity and to support students from low-income backgrounds to and through college to realize their full potential and positively impact their communities and the world," as written on 10,000 Degrees website.
"This remarkable investment will deepen our impact and help even more students acheive their college and career dreams," Jin Choi, the scholarship director for 10,000 Degrees wrote on LinkedIn. "I'm truly grateful and proud to be part of an organization so deeply committed to supporting students to, through, and beyond college."
10,000 Degrees was founded in 1981 and since then it has, according to its 2024 annual report, awarded more than $105 million in scholarships to over 60,000 students.
Rather than requiring students to maintain a certain GPA or meet test score qualification levels, scholarship funds are paired with college and career mentors. The program boasts an 80% graduation rate for four-year college students.
The five-year plan, published on 10,000 Degrees website, states the organization plans to "significantly and efficiently expand, nearly doubling the number of students and families from low-income backgrounds that we serve annually."
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Oakland nonprofit among recipients of Mackenzie Scott donation
KTVU's Jana Katsuyama spoke with Denise Dunning about the donations' impact on a local Oakland nonprofit.
Return on investments
By the numbers:
MacKenzie Scott has built a strong reputation for charitable giving, and has become an example to many of how billionaires can help communities. The volume of her donations has also served to highlight the wealth inequality gap; despite giving away half her wealth, her net worth has stayed largely the same.
When Scott divorced Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2019, her net worth was $35.6 billion. Since then, she has donated $19 billion and is currently valued by Forbes Magazine at $32.5 billion.
Big impacts
The backstory:
Scott in 2019 signed the Giving Pledge, a charitable campaign founded by Bill Gates, Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett to encourage wealthy people to contribute more than half their wealth to philanthropic causes.
Her donations have been heavily focused on education. In September of this year, she gave $70 million to the United Negro College Fund, an organization that offers scholarships to Black students and provides scholarship money to 37 historically Black colleges and universities.
In the same month, she also donated $50 million to the Native Forward Scholars Fund, which offers educational support to Native American undergraduate and graduate students.
"Scott's giving continues to have profound effects on recipient organizations and... the fears many other funders express — whether about nonprofits' ability to handle grants of this size or unintended consequences — have not materialized," a study published earlier this year by the Center for Effective Philanthropy states.
The Source: 10,000 Degrees, Forbes, Yield Giving, Giving Pledge