The billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott’s no-strings, no-hassle giving approach has proven particularly valuable to Native American nonprofits, whose history with private philanthropy has long been marked by a lack of trust and paltry funding.
Although Scott's donations to Native American nonprofits are a small subset of the billions she has donated since 2020, they are unique because they have gone to groups led by Native Americans.
''For a long time, we saw a lot of the money that was going to Native causes and concerns was going to non-Indigenous-controlled museums and art foundations and education funds, so it's really good in that context to look at (these gifts) and see it's almost all Native-controlled organizations,'' says Miriam Jorgensen, who studies the flow of philanthropy into Native American-led organizations and is research director of Harvard's Project on Indigenous Governance and Development. ''That's an important contrast of this giving.''
Scott gave 37 grants totaling $132.5 million to Native American-serving nonprofits over the past four years. That's 0.8% of the $17.3 billion she has given to more than 2,300 charities so far and reflects philanthropy's sparse giving to Native American-led organizations. Less than 0.5% of funding from large U.S. foundations goes to Native American nonprofits, according to a 2019 report by Candid and Native Americans in Philanthropy.
Scott is not the biggest funder of Native American groups. The Bush, Kellogg, and Northwest Area foundations are among the grantmakers that routinely support Native American-controlled nonprofits. But her multimillion-dollar gifts to Indigenous groups have been highly publicized, resulting in a kind of seal of approval that charity leaders say has increased their groups' visibility.
''It made a big difference in how we were perceived by individual donors and foundations and corporations,'' says Robert Martin, president of the Institute of American Indian Arts, a public tribal land-grant college in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that received $5 million from Scott in 2020. ''Since this all occurred, we've established (student employment) partnerships with Nike and NBCUniversal and a number of others.''
Unrestricted and simple
Misconceptions about Native American-led nonprofits and Native Americans are commonplace and have hurt fundraising, says Michael Roberts, who leads First Nations Development Institute, an economic development organization. His group, which received $8 million from Scott, conducted a study in 2016 that found Native Americans are largely invisible to the public and grantmakers.