MacKenzie Scott's sudden gift could have bombed. Here's how a Texas university made sure it didn't

Three years ago, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott made headlines by vowing to give away most of her $35 billion fortune in Amazon stock. Then she stunned the world a few months later by announcing a defiant vision of how she would do it.

Peel away decades of sunny rhetoric about America’s giving culture, and there’s a lot of swagger to mainstream philanthropy. Donors don’t just chisel their names into the sides of buildings. They chisel their agendas and their habits into each grant they make. Power relationships are one-sided; funding negotiations can drag out, and recipients don’t get money unless they play along. 

But that’s not the only way to operate, Scott maintains. In a series of Medium posts, she has argued that the right recipients can thrive without being micromanaged. Goodbye chisels. Goodbye to any patronizing overtones. Hello trust and humility. All year round, Scott now makes huge, unexpected gifts to organizations that don’t even ask for cash. Setting no conditions, her approach is to drop off the money and “get out of their way.”

Scott's plan took shape fast, after her 26-year marriage to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ended in 2019. Left with one-quarter of the couple’s wealth, Scott showed no hesitation about separating herself from all those billions. “We are all attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change,” Scott wrote in June 2021. 

So how’s it working out?

I’ve been on the hunt for the past eight months, trying to gauge the effectiveness -- or folly – of what Scott is doing. More than $12 billion of her cash already has been shunted to roughly 1,250 organizations. Recipients range from food banks to YMCAs; from women’s rights groups to community colleges. And a lot more will follow.

Such massive, sudden giving is daredevil stuff. Perils abound, starting with the risk of being too trusting. (Some groups' beautiful stories turn out to be mirages). Advisers such as Bridgespan Group help Scott with detailed due-diligence reviews, but even when everything checks out, the arrival of so much cash can create chaos.

Yet when I talk to grantees across the United States – whose voices fill in for Scott’s silence on all media requests (mine included) – the big surprise is how powerful the payoff from her generosity can be.  

To sense what can go right, come with me on a recent trip to Texas. We’ll head west from Houston, leaving big-city skyscrapers and elegant restaurants behind. After a 40-minute drive, we’ll pull into Prairie View A&M, one of America’s oldest and largest historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Today’s campus is built on the site of what used to be a slavery-era plantation. The timbers of those old buildings are long gone, as is the soul-crushing 1890s belief that female students should learn to “wash, iron and cook.”

Drive along the campus’s curving roads, and you’ll savor the soaring splendor of an elegant library, as well as the commotion of students getting ready for graduation. Prairie View has come of age in many ways during the past 25 years. Yet history’s burden still weighs heavy at a 146-year-old school where 92% of students are Black or Hispanic.

Setting the tone is Prairie View’s plain-speaking president, Ruth Simmons, who grew up in a Texas sharecropping family. When Simmons won a scholarship to Dillard University in 1963, her high-school teachers had to lend her the skirts and blouses she’d need to be college-ready. “I know the kinds of things that really poor students need,” Simmons told me.

The 77-year-old Simmons knows the tempo of America’s top universities, too. Highlights on her resume include a Harvard Ph.D. in Romance literature and an 11-year stint as president of Brown University. Now, however, her focus is 100% Prairie View. Minutes into our first conversation, she’s telling me about academic programs that must be expanded – and students’ dreams that cannot be left unrealized.

In late 2020, Simmons got word that Prairie View was about to become MacKenzie Scott’s largest grantee in a sweeping, 23-school push to support HBCUs. Usually unflappable, Simmons was slack-jawed at the size of the award. When the news came via a phone call from one of Scott’s aides, Simmons blurted out: “Did you say $15 million?”

“No, it’s $50 million,” the aide replied. “Five zero.” The new gift would be 20 times larger than any individual gift since Prairie View’s founding.

What do you do with that much money? Simmons worked quickly with Prairie View’s provost and chief financial officer to build a plan. They budgeted $10 million in emergency support for students whose finances had been shredded by the COVID pandemic. Roughly $35 million would help the university rise academically – building the endowment to support measures such as recruiting high-profile, transformative deans and professors.  A final $3 million segment would finance an ambitious writing program.

Sixteen months later, here’s how each of those initiatives has played out.

Extra student aid has been an instant win, helping more than 4,000 Prairie View students keep afloat. Mainstream financial aid does a lot to make the school’s $11,099 annual tuition affordable to students from all backgrounds. But unexpected tangles happen. Cars break down. A parent falls sick. For students living close to the edge, even a drop of bad luck can set off a crisis – and a decision to drop out.

In practically every conversation on campus, I heard about cash-strapped students who struggled to meet the demands of full-time class loads while working nights and weekends as bouncers, nannies or warehouse workers. Instantly, the new, Scott-funded grants created as much as $2,000 in credits for each of these students. And that kept hope alive.

Among those students was Lauryn Miller, a first-generation college student who hopes to become a nurse. A year ago, she was behind on her rent, behind on her car payment, and scrambling for cash as a $10-an-hour telemarketer selling solar panels. “It just didn’t add up,” Miller recalls, with a shudder. “I felt something had to give.”

Miller had turned down UCLA to attend Prairie View, feeling that a historically Black university would be the right choice. Yet without time to study properly, she was failing a crucial pharmacology class – and praying that she wouldn’t flunk out. A $1,500 grant in the autumn of 2021 changed everything.  “I got caught up on rent,” Miller recalls. “I could cut back on work. I could study. Now I’m going to graduate next May, and I’m so excited.”

Prairie View’s academic ambitions involve a longer, patience-testing journey. One department at a time, however, the HBCU is showing new energy. Drive to the north edge of campus, and you can hear jackhammers pounding as a multi-story engineering building rises from the earth. By mid-2023, the architect’s rendering nearby should be a reality, years ahead of schedule.

A temporary $7 million infusion of Scott money is letting Prairie View leapfrog its earlier, slower fundraising plans, and engineering dean Pamela Obiomon is thrilled. The interior will include sleek labs for mechanical engineering, as well as state-of-the-art cooling systems for the school research-computing grid.

Inspired by Scott’s example, other high-profile donors (from Texas grocery magnates to the Ford Foundation) are steering millions toward the school. Suddenly, Prairie View has a “school on the rise” story to tell. And that optimism becomes self-fulfilling. “We’re recruiting faculty that trained at Georgia Tech and MIT now,” Obiomon says. “That used to be impossible.”

At Prairie View’s school of nursing, similar ambitions are unfolding. Allyssa Harris, the new dean of nursing, joined about 10 months after the Scott donation was announced. She came from Boston College, where there’s a long tradition of training the next generation of nursing research leaders. By contrast, Prairie View traditionally has focused mostly on training bedside nurses, one by one.

“Bedside care is essential, but we’re ready to see the big picture here, too,” Dean Harris explained over a fried seafood lunch. African-American women have higher morbidity rates associated with pregnancy, and “we don’t know why,” Harris told me. “That’s true regardless of education levels. Famous people like Beyonce and Serena Williams had complications – and they really had to fight for the care they needed.”

Better care is needed, Harris says, and institutions like Prairie View can take the lead nationally. That means doing deep research into today’s failings; designing bold interventions to fix them – and masterminding the nationwide educational changes that will ensure lasting benefits. “That’s how you put the pieces together,” Harris says. 

Could Prairie View have moved as fast if these engineering and nursing visions had to be funded via traditional grants? Probably not. Scott's approach invites recipients to make the most of bold possibilities that could take years to pin down. The grant system is far more precise -- and constrained. It's almost like the difference between venture capital and a bank loan.

This "what could we try?" spirit is especially visible in Prairie View’s humanities department. “The communities that our students come from are literature-starved,” says university president Simmons. To make amends, she has allocated $3 million to develop a high-profile writing program named after Toni Morrison, the Black Nobel laureate.

“I know a writing focus isn’t in our DNA as an institution,” Simmons says. “But writing frees students to discover who they are, which is so essential in overcoming a lack of confidence.” This past academic year, a small slice of the MacKenzie Scott gift was used to host renowned poet Nikki Giovanni as a writer in residence, conducting master classes that drew hundreds of students.

As the nearby photo shows, students were thrilled by Giovanni’s public readings – and her hilarious life lessons. But they didn’t get as much feedback on their own writings as they had hoped for. There’s talk that next year’s writers in residence may come from disciplines such as screenwriting, which tie more closely to students’ potential career choices. Still, Simmons is undeterred.

 “My dream is that this will be a program that produces great writers,” Simmons told me. If that goal takes a decade or longer to come good, the university president is undeterred.

Check in with the other 22 HBCUs getting cash from MacKenzie Scott, and the top spending areas are remarkably similar. At schools such as Morgan State, Lincoln University and North Carolina A&T, long-starved endowments are being shored up in a big way. This “permanent capital” can beef up the faculty and the schools’ academic might for decades to come. Timely boosts to financial aid are a big priority, too.

At the edges, meanwhile, the HBCUs are green-lighting unique ideas aimed at making campuses more pleasant and energizing. Many of these schools have scraped by on tight budgets for so long that there’s a chronic need for dorm upgrades, student-friendly cafes and the like. Now, at last, these upgrades can happen – with a simplicity and ease that’s surprisingly rare.

For practically any organization in the social impact or nonprofit sector, getting funded can be a drawn-out, draining process. Donors may start with an understandable desire to build models and processes to guide their giving. But each initiative brings more bureaucratic friction.

The more that donors flex their power, the greater the strain for potential recipients to make their needs fit the funders’ model. Before long, alignment can involve months of grant-jockeying, odd periods of silence, and lots of constraints on how the money can be used. 

Add it up, and you’re looking at the numbing effects of “donor burden,” says Greg Baldwin, cofounder of VolunteerMatch. By the time money finally arrives, recipients' initial enthusiasm has been battered.

If there’s a secret power to MacKenzie Scott’s giving, it comes from her willingness to make the donor burden vanish. Instead, she offers sudden, unexpected applause – and the check. 

Recipients get outright tearful, talking about their first contacts with Team Scott, and the sudden realization that someone prominent believes wholeheartedly in their purpose. That first-day joy inspires a desire to push ahead. At last, recipients enjoy open room to run with their big bold ideas.

Nearly five years ago, Simmons met Scott in person for the first – and only – time in her life. Both women visited Princeton as invited speakers, paying homage to Princeton professor (and Nobel laureate) Toni Morrison. You can see all three of them in the photo at the top of this article.

When I ask Simmons if she’s tempted to reconnect personally with Prairie View’s benefactor, she waves away the question. “I’m not going to chat with MacKenzie, for goodness sakes!” she tells me.

Beneath that theatrical show of irritation is a curious dynamic that I’ve encountered with many other recipients of Scott’s support. If you’re in a nosy mood, it’s possible to peel back the veil by reading detailed journalistic accounts of her life, or browsing her two published novels. 

But most grant recipients don’t want to go there.

It’s more soothing – and inspiring – to keep a bit of mystery in the process. Once the money has arrived, and is being put to work, there’s an intense desire to make good on all the potential that Team Scott must have seen. It’s easiest for MacKenzie Scott to remain a faint, distant presence who’s defined entirely by her hands-off faith in the organizations she supports.

On the anniversary of each award, most recipients send Scott an update on how her money has been put to work. They’re free to structure these reports as they see fit. And so, there’s huge motivational energy – all year long – in the whispered question: “Will MacKenzie be proud of this?”