The former wife of Jeff Bezos has given more than $25 million to six Minnesota nonprofits, and one of those nonprofits was the Duluth Area Family YMCA, which includes the Cook County YMCA.
MacKenzie Scott announced that she had given $4.1 billion to 384 organizations in the last four months in a blog post.
She said it’s all part of a plan to give away most of her money in her lifetime.
Three of the six Minnesota gifts went to YMCA’s: the Duluth Area Family YMCA, the YMCA of the North, and the YMCA in St. Paul. Three other grants were given to Casa de Esperanza in St. Paul, an organization that works with Latino communities to end gender-based violence; Community Reinvestment Fund USA, a national community development financial institution based in Minneapolis, and the Greater Minnesota Housing Fund, the state’s largest nonprofit lender for affordable housing.
Organizations were picked for their strong leadership and their effective work with people of poverty in areas of high food insecurity and racial inequality.
What does this gift mean to the Duluth Area YMCA and its affiliates?
“We are extremely thankful for the amazing philanthropic gift from MacKenzie Scott.,” said Sara Cole, Executive Director of the Duluth Area YMCA.
“The gift will benefit all of our branches and communities, including Cook County. I was both deeply grateful and deeply humbled when I found out that we would receive this gift. It is not every day that an organization is analyzed for its operational efficiencies, its strong leadership capacity, and the overall positive impact on the communities in which it serves. We are grateful for this recognition and for the resources that will allow us to serve our community members. Our YMCA team across the Northland works hard each and every day to meet the needs of our community, and this year that work was both harder and more important than ever.
“The gift is a new one, and my team and I will take some time to determine how we can best and most effectively use the resources.”
Who is MacKenzie Scott?
In 1970, MacKenzie Scott was born in San Francisco, and her name was MacKenzie Tuttle. Her father worked in finance. MacKenzie graduated from Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, and then attended Princeton, where she earned high marks as an English major. She met Jeff Bezos in 1993 while she was working for D.E. Shaw, a quantitative hedge fund in New York. At that time, Bezos was a senior vice-president. The couple soon married and had four kids, one adopted from China. In 2005, MacKenzie published The Testing of Luther Albright, for which she won an American Book Award. She founded an anti-bullying organization in 2014 named Bystander Revolution and today serves as the organization’s executive president.
MacKenzie received a large settlement from her husband, Jeff Bezos, when they divorced. Bezos had founded Amazon and purportedly is the wealthiest person on the planet. As of December 2020, MacKenzie is allegedly worth 62 billion dollars, making her the most affluent women on earth and the 22nd richest person overall. As part of her philanthropy, in May 2019, she signed a Giving Pledge where she promised to give away at least half of her wealth during her lifetime, although it is not a legally binding document.
MacKenzie seems faithful to her word. So far, she has donated $5.8 billion during 2020, and the year isn’t over yet.
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