Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has donated $84.5 million to the Woman Scouts, the group mentioned Tuesday.
The reward from Scott, 52, who was beforehand married to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, marks the largest-ever single donation within the group’s historical past, the group mentioned.
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a day by day rating of the five hundred wealthiest folks on the planet, estimates Scott’s web price to be $27.6 billion, making her the forty first richest individual on the planet. After splitting from Bezos in 2019, she pledged to offer roughly half of her greater than $35 billion away to charities.
Scott’s reward will go to Woman Scouts of the USA and 29 native councils that Scott chosen, in response to a information launch from the group.
The cash will particularly go towards creating “extra equitable membership alternatives” in underserved areas; increasing programming on profession readiness, psychological well being and exploring STEM fields; bolstering analysis, workers and volunteer coaching; and upgrading Woman Scout amenities to be extra accessible and resilient to local weather change, amongst different issues, in response to the information launch.
Woman Scouts CEO Sofia Chang, the group’s first Asian American CEO, referred to as Scott’s reward “an awesome accelerator for our ongoing efforts to assist women domesticate the abilities and connections wanted to guide in their very own communities and globally.”
Based in 1912, the Woman Scouts host troops, service initiatives, camps and different occasions with the intention of cultivating management and different expertise — together with coding, robotics, monetary literacy and pc science — in roughly 2.5 million members, which embody transgender women, in response to its web site.
The group claims its well-known annual cookie sale is “the most important girl-led enterprise on the planet,” with Woman Scouts promoting practically $800 million price of cookies every season.
Scott’s donation marks not less than the second record-breaking donation she has made this 12 months to a company primarily centered on serving women and girls. In March, she donated $275 million to girls’s healthcare supplier Deliberate Parenthood, which went to the supplier’s nationwide workplace and 21 regional associates. That marked the most important donation from a single donor within the group’s greater than 100-year historical past, Deliberate Parenthood mentioned on the time.
In a Medium publish earlier this 12 months, Scott mentioned she had donated greater than $3.8 billion to 465 non-profit organizations since June 2021.
She has 4 kids with ex-husband Bezos, who she married in 1993. Their cut up left her with about 4 % of Amazon’s excellent frequent inventory, making her the third-biggest shareholder on the firm, CNBC reported.
Scott filed for divorce final month from her second husband, former trainer Daniel Jewett, whom she married in 2021.