MacKenzie Scott’s millions boost Native American nonprofits

abcnews.go.com:

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

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.”

Scott gave 37 grants totaling $132.5 million to Native American-serving nonprofits over the past four years. That’s 0.8% of the $17.3 billion she has given to more than 2,300 charities so far and reflects philanthropy’s sparse giving to Native American-led organizations. Less than 0.5% of funding from large U.S. foundations goes to Native American nonprofits, according to a 2019 report by Candid and Native Americans in Philanthropy.

Scott is not the biggest funder of Native American groups. The Bush, Kellogg, and