MacKenzie Scott is taking a break from the headline-grabbing posts about multi-billion-dollar gifts she’s given to charity the past couple years to instead offer a lesson in what philanthropy truly means.
In an essay Wednesday titled “No Dollar Signs This Time,” Scott gets to the meaning of the word that has come to describe her and other extremely wealthy individuals who demonstrate generosity by giving away large sums of money.
Scott has been doing just that since divorcing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2019 and becoming one of the richest people on the planet. As part of her commitment to the Giving Pledge, in which wealthy people publicly pledge to give the majority of their wealth to philanthropy, Scott gave $1.67 billion in July 2020; $4 billion in December 2020; and $2.7 billion this past June.
But as she now says, enough with the dollar signs, and she goes out of her way in her essay to not even use them when offering up monetary figures related to such things as giving, wages or labor.
Instead, Scott wants readers to find value in the true definition of philanthropy and how it applies to many, many more of us than just the humanitarian impulses of the 1%.
The actual dictionary definition, which she calls “inclusive and beautiful,” defines philanthropy as “love of humankind”; “the desire to promote the welfare of others”; “generous donation of money to good causes”; and “work of practical beneficence.”
“When did the rich become the only people with a ‘desire to promote the welfare of others’?” Scott asked. “Which is a more ‘generous donation of money to good causes’ — 100 dollars from someone who earns 50,000 a year, or 100,000 from someone with 50 million in the bank? How did the only ‘work of practical beneficence’ worth acknowledging become writing checks?”
It does seem that Scott is finishing the year with gifts to perhaps dozens or hundreds of organizations as she has done three other times. But she’s leaving it to those organizations to call attention to themselves and any amount they received.
How much or how little money changes hands doesn’t make it philanthropy. Intention and effort make it philanthropy. If we acknowledge what it all has in common, there will be more of it. That’s why I keep referring to what I’m doing as “giving”, a word still being used to describe what humans have been doing with their time, focus, food, cash, and trust to lift each other up for thousands of years. It’s also why I’m not including here any amounts of money I’ve donated since my prior posts. I want to let each of these incredible teams speak for themselves first if they choose to, with the hope that when they do, media focuses on their contributions instead of mine.
Scott said that financially wealthy people and their contributions to the welfare of others don’t merit the disproportionate attention they are given. She totals up more than $1 trillion in charitable giving in the U.S. alone that “far exceeds contributions by the tiny segment of the population still being acknowledged and colloquially called ‘philanthropists.'”
What’s being lost in the focus on the ultra-rich is the informal person-to-person giving, or humanitarian speech and demonstration which both have “gigantic” social and economic value, Scott said.
She concluded that her “approach to philanthropy is not the only way. It’s just the one my resources and opportunities inspired in me.”
