MacKenzie Scott
MacKenzie Scott announced on June 15 that she is giving away $2.7 billion to 286 organizations focused on promoting equity, alleviating poverty, and promoting education and the arts.
Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum is one of the beneficiaries of Scott’s latest round of donations—she has given away $8.5 billion since July 2020.
Scott, formerly married to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, ranks No. 22 on Bloomberg’s list of the world’s richest people. She made the gifts with Dan Jewett, a chemistry teacher at Seattle’s Lakeside School, whom she recently married.
“The Wing Luke Museum is honored and beyond grateful for the extraordinary donation from MacKenzie Scott and Dan Jewett,” stated a post on the Wing Luke’s Facebook page. “This donation not only reflects the recognition, affirmation, and investment in the powerful work we do with our community members, but also reflects the trust and confidence in us to determine the best impact of this grant to advance our mission and work.”
Other Pacific Northwest organizations that received donations include Renton Technical College, Oregon Arts and Culture Recovery Program, and the Western States Arts Federation.
In her announcement in a blog post on the website Medium, Scott wrote, “Arts and cultural institutions can strengthen communities by transforming spaces, fostering empathy, reflecting community identity, advancing economic mobility, improving academic outcomes, lowering crime rates, and improving mental health, so we evaluated smaller arts organizations creating these benefits with artists and audiences from culturally rich regions and identity groups that donors often overlook.”
She added, “We chose to make relatively large gifts to the organizations… both to enable their work, and as a signal of trust and encouragement, to them and to others…. These are people who have spent years successfully advancing humanitarian aims, often without knowing whether there will be any money in their bank accounts in two months.”