The ex-wife of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos donated $281 million to the Boys & Girls Club of America, the largest single donation in the nonprofit’s 160-year after-school history.
Mackenzie Scott, 51, donated $256 million to the Boys’ and Girls’ Club’s 62 chapters across the country on Thursday, with the remaining $25 million going to the organization’s national headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.
“Gifts like this are rare and have an incredible impact,” said Jim Clark, president and CEO of Boys & Girls Clubs of America, which serves more than 4.3 million children in more than 4,700 locations across the country.
The donation represents the latest in Scott’s ongoing charitable work, when she donated $9.2 billion of her estimated $42.5 billion fortune she received in her divorce, according to Fortune.
Mackenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, donated $281 million to the Boys and Girls Club of America, the largest single donation in its 160-year history.
The Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs of America, which serves more than 4.3 million children at more than 4,700 locations across the country, said the gift would have an “incredible impact.”
With gifts totaling $9.2 billion, Scott has donated about 6 times more over the past two years than her ex Jeff Bezos (left) has given in her lifetime, despite the Amazon founder’s pledge to donate $13 billion. Bezos is worth an estimated $188 billion.
MACKENZIE SCOTT’S LATEST DONATIONS
Mackenzie Scott has donated about $531 million this year, and over the past two years, she has donated $9.2 billion in cash.
Among her recent donations:
- Boys and Girls Club of America: $281 million
- Communities in Schools: $133.5 million.
- National Youth Council 4-H: $50 million
- Partnership for Gender and Reproductive Equality: $25 million.
- Meharry Medical College: $20 million.
- Guttmacher Institute: $15 million.
- Jed Foundation: $15 million
- Lead Educators: $10 million
- National Council on Aging: $8 million.
- Unbreakable: $5 million
- Young people in recovery: $3 million
Earlier this week, Scott, who no longer announces her donations, donated $20 million to Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee.
Last month alone, she donated more than $250 million, $50 million of which went to the 4-H National Youth Council, an agricultural youth organization that serves six million children in the US.
She also donated $133.5 million to Communities in Schools, a nonprofit organization that helps keep at-risk children in schools.
Leading Educators, another educational non-profit organization, has received $10 million in professional development for teachers in the United States.
Scott has also donated $5 million to Shatterproof and $3 million to Young People in Recovery to two addiction relief organizations.
She then donated to two reproductive rights groups, the Guttmacher Institute and the Collaboration for Gender and Reproductive Equality, receiving $15 million and $25 million, respectively.
The National Council on Aging, a non-profit advocacy organization for the elderly, received $8 million, and the Jed Foundation, a mental health non-profit organization, received $15 million.
In December alone, Scott donated about $4.1 billion to 384 organizations.
In less than two years, Scott has donated about $9.2 billion, more than six times the amount Jeff Bezos, who has an estimated net worth of $188 billion, has donated in his lifetime.
While the Amazon founder has pledged to donate $13 billion to charity, Forbes estimates that Bezos has only committed $1.5 billion, with the remainder due in the coming years.
Scott continues to remain silent on his donations after announcing in his December gift series that he would no longer publicly release them.
“I want each of these incredible teams to speak for themselves first if they choose to, in the hope that when they do so the media will focus on their contributions and not mine,” Scott said in a statement.
On the other hand, the recipients of the latest gift from the Boys and Girls Club of America were vocal about what they called a “generous” and “humble” gift.
Forbes has estimated that Bezos has donated only about $1.5 billion to charity.
The Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs of Northeast Florida, which serves 3,500 children, said their $6.8 billion gift will allow it to expand over the next three years.
Boys and Girls Club of Greater Milwaukee CEO Kathy Thornton-Bias, whose organization received $17 million, said in a statement: strategies we have developed to meet the needs of the adolescents and children we serve.”
Paul Martinez, president and CEO of the $6.8 million Northeast Florida Boys & Girls Clubs, said, “This generous, unlimited gift is a testament to the profound impact we’ve had on our youth over the past 60 years in Northeast Florida. Florida. ‘
Martinez added that the gift will help the Florida branch grow from 38 clubs to 55 by 2025, allowing the group to help hundreds of people rather than the 3,500 it serves today.
Scott said she said the team used a data-driven approach, identifying organizations with strong leadership and results, especially in communities with high levels of food insecurity, racial disparity and poverty rates, “and limited access to philanthropic capital.”