AP
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Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has donated $70 million to the UNCF, because the nation’s largest non-public supplier of scholarships to minority college students works to increase $1 billion to strengthen all 37 of its traditionally Black faculties and universities.
The present is one in every of Scott’s largest single donations ever and among the many first to be publicly disclosed in 2025. Famously non-public, Scott solely discusses her donations by her website and doesn’t affirm them till after the recipients do.
“This extraordinary gift is a powerful vote of confidence in HBCUs and in the work of UNCF,” the nonprofit’s President and CEO Dr. Michael L. Lomax advised The Associated Press in an announcement. “It provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity for our member institutions to build permanent assets that will support students and campuses for decades to come.”
Lomax mentioned Scott’s donation could be used for UNCF’s pooled endowment, which goals to set up a $370 million fund — $10 million for every UNCF member HBCU. That fund can be invested and designed to pay out about 4% yearly, which is able to then be divided among the many HBCUs to assist stabilize their budgets. Increasing HBCU endowments is a precedence since they path endowments at non-HBCUs by 70%, in accordance to the UNCF.
The broader $1 billion fundraising effort is an try to assist HBCUs deal with the funding disparity they face compared to different faculties and universities. A 2023 examine by philanthropic analysis group Candid and ABFE, a nonprofit that advocates for investments in Black communities, discovered that the eight Ivy League faculties obtained $5.5 billion from the 1,000 largest US foundations in contrast to $45 million for the 99 HBCUs in 2019.
Since Scott, a novelist who obtained the majority of her fortune after divorcing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, signed the Giving Pledge in 2019, promising to donate greater than half her wealth, HBCUs have been amongst her favourite grantees. She beforehand gave UNCF $10 million in 2020.
Though Scott hasn’t addressed HBCU donations particularly, she wrote in 2020 that her funding selections have been “driven by a deep belief in the value different backgrounds bring to problem-solving on any issue.”
Scott hasn’t made any bulletins about her giving since she acknowledged $2 billion in presents in 2024, bringing her whole to $19.2 billion. According to Forbes, Scott’s net worth is at the moment round $34 billion.
Her uncommon donations — that are a lot bigger than most foundations give at one time and carry no restrictions on after they can be utilized or what they can be utilized for — financially strengthened the nonprofits that obtained them, mentioned Phil Buchanan, president of The Center for Effective Philanthropy, which studied Scott’s giving over three years.
“We didn’t see the fears people predicted come to pass,” mentioned Buchanan, who disclosed that The Center for Effective Philanthropy obtained a one-time $10 million grant from Scott. Though some apprehensive that the massive presents would trigger the recipients to improve staffing an excessive amount of or damage their fundraising efforts, Buchanan mentioned their examine of two,000 nonprofits noticed little proof of that. “Folks are pretty prudent,” he mentioned. “This shows that if you carefully vet nonprofits, we can trust them to make good use of funds.”
It’s a lesson that UNCF hopes different funders will be taught, following Scott’s instance.
“We are deeply grateful for MacKenzie Scott’s continued support,” Lomax mentioned. “By entrusting UNCF to decide how best to use these funds, she affirms that HBCUs merit investment at this scale and her generosity will strengthen our member institutions and provide pathways to success for tomorrow’s changemakers.”