Long Beach City College receives $30M donation
Long Beach City College has received a $30 million donation, the largest in the school’s 95-year history, to promote racial equity and increase support services for its most vulnerable students.
The donation comes from author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, the community college said in a Tuesday statement announcing the gift.
The $30 million is part
$2.7 billion in donations Scott is donating to 286 “high-impact organizations in categories and communities that have been historically underfunded and overlooked,” Scott announced in an online post.
Other schools in Southern California also received donations, including Cal Poly Pomona, Cal State Fullerton, Cal State Northridge and Pasadena City College. Pomona, Fullerton and Northridge received $40 million each. Pasadena City College received $30 million. Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga was given $25 million.
“Higher education is a proven pathway to opportunity,” Scott, who was married to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos before the couple divorced in 2019, wrote, “so we looked for 2- and 4-year institutions successfully educating students who come from communities that have been chronically underserved.”
The donations also went
to nonprofits that focus on minority communities, including Homeboy Industries, a Los Angeles gang rehabilitation organization, and Arts for Healing and Justice Network in Long Beach.
The unrestricted grants will go to a range of other organizations, including many in Southern California.
Scott’s wealth, estimated by Forbes at roughly $60 billion, has grown since her divorce that included a 4% stake in Amazon. Shortly after the split, the 51-year-old signed the Giving Pledge, a commitment to get the world’s richest people to give a majority of their wealth during their lifetimes or in their wills.
Scott said in her Medium post that she is troubled by the increasing concentration of vast wealth among a small proportion of individuals.
“In this effort,” she said, “we are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others.”