Billionaire philanthropist and author MacKenzie Scott announced Tuesday she is giving $640 million to 361 small nonprofits that responded to an open call for applications.
Yield Giving’s first round of donations is more than double what Scott had initially pledged to give away through the application process. Since she began giving away billions in 2019, Scott and her team have researched and selected organizations without an application process and provided them with large, unrestricted gifts.
In a brief note on her website, Scott wrote she was grateful to Lever for Change, the organization that managed the open call, and the evaluators for “their roles in creating this pathway to support for people working to improve access to foundational resources in their communities. They are vital agents of change.”
I know general consensus is fuck billionaires, and I’m not exactly desputing that, but I work in IT for a rural school district and a donation from her foundation allowed the district to set up a foundation and now 50 of our students can attend a local community College on full scholarship each year.
To be fair, she took a billionaire’s (Jeff Bezos) money and is now redistributing $38b of his wealth. She’s one of the good ones.
It was her money too, as she was a core founding member of Amazon, but until their divorce it was locked up in shares.
It does sure seem like she wanted to give a lot of it away, probably for a long time. I’m glad his midlife crisis is helping so many people.
If you look into the matter, she very much helped to earn that money. It’s hers, not taken from anyone.
Nobody actually earns that much, and I doubt that her labor directly created that much real value.
Well if we ignore all the exploitation of workers and public infastructure/resources we can say they earned their money.
The exception that proves the rule.
That’s not what that means.
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She’s strategically working on no longer being a billionaire.
And we could do the same without the billionaires. Since they don’t create value, we can skip the part where the money goes to them, and directly support our communities. Eliminate billionaires as a drain on our society.
I see both sides of this. I agree with you in principle, but practically the US can’t get its shit together. Would you trust the government with an influx of cash? They’d probably turn it into weapons.
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The thing I like most about what she is doing unlike other billionaire philanthropists is that her money is given with no strings attached.
Sure, it’s great, but I’d rather them not have to beg for it and instead take the money they’re leaching from society by force. They should just be forced to give that money in taxes, not have the schools beg for scraps.
This is the answer. Philanthropy is great and all. But how awesome would it be if philanthropy wasn’t needed. And who tends to make philanthropy necessary? The wealthy and billionaires taking far more than their share.
Whilst commendable, that is not the job of billionaires.
Other countries have free access to adult education. Some are even paid to attend
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