MacKenzie Scott’s millions boost Native American nonprofits – CityNews

Sep 13, 2024

The billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott’s no-strings, no-hassle giving approach has proven particularly valuable to Native American nonprofits, whose history with private philanthropy has long been marked by a lack of trust and paltry funding.

Although Scott’s donations to Native American nonprofits are a small subset of the billions she has donated since 2020, they are unique because they have gone to groups led by Native Americans.

“For a long time, we saw a lot of the money that was going to Native causes and concerns was going to non-Indigenous-controlled museums and art foundations and education funds, so it’s really good in that context to look at (these gifts) and see it’s almost all Native-controlled organizations,” says Miriam Jorgensen, who studies the flow of philanthropy into Native American-led organizations and is research director of Harvard’s Project on Indigenous Governance and Development. “That’s an important contrast of this giving.”