M. Scott gives $15 million to Baltimore-based nonprofit
Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott gave the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service a $15 million donation, the Baltimore-based national nonprofit announced Monday.
The gift from the ex-wife of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is the largest single donation the organization has ever received, said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, its president and CEO.
The money will go toward programs like a workforce initiative that matches refugees and immigrants with Baltimore employers, creating better access to higher wages and greater career mobility. Other initiatives supported by Scott’s donation include support for unaccompanied migrant kids in foster care, refugee resettlement services and welcome centers for families seeking asylum.
Vignarajah said a consulting firm initially reached out to her organization on behalf of an anonymous philanthropist. After requesting information on their work and interviewing her, the consultants said Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service would hear back within a few months. About a month ago, Vignarajah said she got a call from a member of Scott’s team, giving her the news that the resettlement nonprofit would be receiving $15 million with no strings attached.
“I was floored,” Vignarajah said. “It usually takes a lot to render me speechless, but I was stunned into silence and then got quite emotional. It meant a lot to us that she would invest her resources and faith into our organization.”
Vignarajah said it’s rare to see a philanthropic gift without restrictions on how it must be spent.
“It’s empowering that her team was crystal clear: They believed in us. They believed we’re the experts and they believed in us to make the decisions,” she said.
Founded in 1939, as World War II started, the organization is the nation’s largest faith-based nonprofit focused exclusively on serving asylum-seekers, refugees and other vulnerable immigrant communities. In the past year, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service has resettled about 14,000 Afghans following last year’s U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, as well as serving people displaced from Ukraine, Venezuela, Syria, Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Since 2019, LIRS has grown from a staff of about 70 people to more than 350 employees, Vignarajah said, with a budget that has increased from $47 million to more than $200 million.
“It’s an exciting time to receive this contribution,” she said. “It comes at a perfect time as we re-imagine immigration services.”
Over the past seven months, Scott has contributed nearly $2 billion to 343 organizations supporting people from “underserved communities,” the philanthropist wrote in a Medium post. In 2020, she gave Morgan State University $40 million, more than doubling the historically Black institution’s endowment at the time.