Updated June 23 to include a correction. See below.
This week, extremely rich human MacKenzie Scott leaned into her fairly new role as a philanthropic superhero by giving away $2.7 billion to 286 worthy organizations—many of them in the Bay Area.
Scott, who was born and raised in San Francisco, committed to donating at least half of her wealth after she was awarded a 4% stake in Amazon during her 2019 divorce from Jeff Bezos. The novelist, who was married to the Amazon founder for 25 years, gave almost $6 billion to nonprofits in 2020 as well.
This week, Scott made charitable contributions to a huge variety of Bay Area organizations: social justice collectives, healthcare providers, academic institutions and arts groups. In a Medium blog posted on Tuesday, Scott expressed her belief that “social structures that inflate wealth present obstacles to them.”
She also noted:
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.
San Francisco’s Women’s Audio Mission, a nonprofit dedicated to the advancement of women and girls in music production, was one of many local groups to receive a million dollars. Founder and executive director Terri Winston described the biggest single donation in the organization’s history as “transformational.”
