$25M for Bowie State among billionaire’s gifts
Record-breaking donations from Amazon founder’s former wife have ‘no strings’
Bowie StateUniversity saidTuesday that it has received a $25 million gift from philanthropist and author MacKenzie Scott, marking the largest single private donation in the university’s history.
It was one of several massive donations to Maryland institutions, including a $40 million gift to Morgan State University as well as money for the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland, the Y in Central Maryland and United Way of Central Maryland.
Bowie State President Aminta Breaux said most of the funding will be used to grow the school’s endowment, which was just over $9 million before Scott’s gift.
When Breaux first heard the donation from Scott, the former wife of Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, she admited she was a little skeptical of its legitimacy, what with all of the hacking and misinformation running around these days. So to see it come to fruition?
“It’s huge. Huge,” she said. “I can’t thank Mackenzie Scott enough for her generosity, for her commitment to making a difference in our country and with the organizations she is supporting.”
Bowie State, Maryland’s oldest historically Black university, has 5,227 students this semester. It offers 22 undergraduate degree programs as well as graduate programs offering master’s and doctorate degrees.
In an interview with The Baltimore Sun, Morgan President David Wilson said his school — Maryland’s largest historically Black university with an enrollment of more than 7,700 — received this “transformative” gift aroundtwomonthsago andhas had the difficult task of keeping it under wraps since then.
Scott’s donation more than doubles Morgan’s endowment, which Wilson said was $18 million when he arrived at the school about a decade ago. It mostly will be used to seed the university’s first-ever unrestricted endowment fund, which Wilson said will be used to support research and faculty development initiatives and bolster the university’s efforts to serve as a “transformational institution” in Baltimore.
“I had to collectmyself,” Wilson said. “I was quite emotional upon hearing this because I wasn’t expecting someone would be on the other line, validating what I’ve known about Morgan since I’ve been here.”
In a post onMedium announcing the gifts, which totaled over $4.16 billion, Scott said her team started with a list of nearly 6,500 organizations, which they culled to about 822. Then they dug into evidence of impact, management and other factors before choosing 384 organizations.
“We do this research and deeper diligence not only to identify organizations with high potential for impact, but also to pave the way for unsolicited and unexpected gifts given with full trust and no strings attached,” Scottwrote.
Franklyn Baker, president and CEO of the United Way of Central Maryland, said Scott’s $20 million gift was the largest individual donation the organization ever received. He highlighted the significance of the unrestricted nature of the gift.
“We can literally use our best assessment basedondata of gapsandneedto determine where we park the investment. So, we are the arbiters of determining where that goes,” he said. “That’s awonderful thing.”
Scott was married to Bezos from1993 to 2019. His current net worth of $182 billion makes him the wealthiest person on Earth. Theformer couple’s record-making divorce settlement left Scott with $35 billion, which she promised last year to thoughtfully and carefully give away “until the safe is empty.”
In July, Scott announced she had donated $1.7 billion to 116 organizations, including the historically Black institutions Howard University, Spelman College and Morehouse College.
Jacqueline Ackerman, associate director of research at the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, said the speed, transparency and careful research of Scott’s giving habits is like nothing she’s seen before. Thinking of what Scott’s donations will mean to nonprofits — which were stretched thin even before the pandemic — made Ackerman emotional while reading her latestMedium post.
“To be able to take a deep breath and know that you really can do what you need to do to help people in your community— I mean, the note that she wrote said there were tears on the phones when she and her teamwould call these nonprofits,” she said. “If I’m crying reading about it, it has to be really incredible for these organizations.”
Phil Buchanan, president of the Center forEffectivePhilanthropy and author of the book “Giving Done Right,” echoedWilson’s hope that Scott’s approach to giving will inspire other multi-billionaires to follow her lead.
Oftentimes, when philanthropists give to institutions of higher learning, Buchanan said they turn to their alma maters or the universities with the greatest name recognition — many of which cater disproportionately to the privileged — rather prioritizing the institutions that are the “real engines of equity and mobility.”
“There are also all of these institutions that are out there … that have just quietly been doing a really good job with limited resources in attracting and graduating students who might not come from a lot of advantages, and yet somehow, they’re not on the map of the elite donors,” he said. “If she can help put them on the map and attract other donors that recognize them for the good work they do, that would be fantastic.”
In the meantime, though, Howard said it’s a “great, great, great, great” feeling to know that Morgan will have the sort of undergirding that such an endowment will provide, allowing the school to maintain stability and enhance its students’ success.
“It’s just meant a lot, particularly now with the times thatwe’re in and all theways we’ve been struggling and our students have been struggling,” she said. “It’s just a ray of hope.”