Ramstad: As MacKenzie Scott doles out Amazon fortune, Minnesota charities juggle windfall

Henry Jiménez, who leads Propel Nonprofits, was cleaning out his email after some time off last summer when he noticed a message from Yield Giving, the public face of philanthropy megadonor MacKenzie Scott.

At first, he thought it was a test from Propel’s tech team.

“Our IT guy had just sent around a warning about being careful with email fraud. And I thought, ‘He’s not going to get me,‘” Jiménez said. Eventually, he added, “I did respond to the email.”

A phone call soon followed, with the caller telling Jiménez that Scott wanted to give $8 million to Propel, a Minneapolis nonprofit that trains leaders of nonprofits and runs a community development financial institution.

Propel has helped other Minnesota nonprofits manage donations from Scott. Suddenly, they had their own.

“Even when I was on the call, I still didn’t think it was real,” Jiménez said. “I was really surprised.”

He immediately called Propel’s development director, Garrett Backes, who was taking a day off at the Minnesota State Fair. “I had to sit for a little bit, just kind of process it, before we went on enjoying the fair with our kids,” Backes said.

Since 2020, moments like this have accumulated at more than 2,000 nonprofit groups around the country, to which Scott has given a total of $19 billion with no strings attached.

In Minnesota, she has given about $200 million to 40 organizations, according to a list on the Yield Giving website and a database kept by Kelly Smith, a reporter and editor at the Minnesota Star Tribune.

For perspective, St. Paul-based Otto Bremer Trust, one of the largest and most consistent givers in the state, in recent years has distributed about $60 million annually to Minnesota charities.

Scott’s fortune is estimated at around $60 billion. She took control of it in her 2019 divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to whom she was married for 25 years.

She hasn’t spoken to the media about her philanthropy — saying she is “respecting the autonomy and role of journalists by doing nothing to try to influence or control what they report” — and I didn’t try to reach her.

However, with nearly each round of distributions (she makes two or so a year), Scott has written a short essay on the Yield Giving website.

In the first, when she joined Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge in 2019, she described the importance of distributing money now rather than waiting. “Something greater rises up every time we give,” Scott wrote. “These immediate results are only the beginning. Their value keeps multiplying and spreading in ways we may never know.”

There have been a handful of efforts to assess Scott’s impact on the nonprofit world. The most thorough has been by the Center for Effective Philanthropy, a Cambridge, Mass.-based group, that has surveyed Scott recipients each of the last three years.

In its final report on the surveys, called “Breaking the Mold” and published last month, CEP reported nearly 80% of recipients experienced no significant negative effect from a Scott windfall. Only 2% experienced a major negative effect, such as a drop in gifts from other donors.

The leaders I spoke to at Minnesota recipients told me Scott and her team have a knack for choosing an amount that will be impactful but that doesn’t change fundamental finances.

Only once has Scott sought requests for gifts. For a brief period early last year, Yield Giving gave nonprofits a chance to submit 90-second videos that described who they were, what they did and how they would use a donation from Scott.

One local organization that did was Twin Cities Rise, the job-training nonprofit organization in north Minneapolis started by former General Mills executive Steve Rothschild in 1991. It asked for $1 million, was quickly rejected and moved on, said Emma Corrie, its chief executive.

Then, a few weeks after the rejection, Corrie got a call from a Yield Giving representative who said Scott wanted to give $3 million to Twin Cities Rise.

“I burst into tears,” Corrie said. She immediately called Rothschild, who retired from Twin Cities Rise in 2018 at age 73.

“What I admire most about MacKenzie Scott is she knows us,” Corrie said. “There was clarity in that call they had done their homework on us. From the time we did the video, in which we asked for $1 million, there was several months when they learned about us and came back and said they wanted to put in $3 million.”

Over three decades, Twin Cities Rise has trained 29,000 people who are underemployed or unemployed, often due to racial or socioeconomic barriers. After a “Riser” works for a year, the organization invites them back for a special honor. The Riser rings a bell in the building lobby and is feted by their former trainers and current co-workers.

In late January, I watched Missy Agee return for her ceremony after a year-plus of working in the public works department of the city of Minneapolis. Agee described turning to Twin Cities Rise not long after completing nine years in prison. She was living in a halfway house when she decided to enroll in the organization’s training program.

“I gotta do something with this downtime,” Agee recalled thinking.

With a portion of Scott’s money, Twin Cities Rise modified its classes so they could be taught inside Minnesota’s prisons. It recently tested the idea at the Minnesota women’s prison in Shakopee.

“We couldn’t take that leap without financial stability that we got from MacKenzie Scott,” Corrie said. “I have every intention to send her some of the letters that came from the women we graduated in our first cohort.”

At the Hmong American Partnership in St. Paul, the email asking for a phone conversation on behalf of an unnamed donor arrived for CEO May yer Thao in early 2023. When she accepted, the caller surprised her by asking questions that showed an impressive amount of research about HAP.

“She did introduce herself from Yield Giving and I was like, ‘Oh my god, this could be it,’” Thao said.

A few weeks passed and then another call came with word Scott wanted to give the organization $2 million. That amount represented a historic boost but not a transformation for HAP, which has a staff of more than 100, an annual budget of $16 million and two dozen outreach programs.

“If you are not intentional with it, and you start creating programs with that money, you have no way to sustain them after the money is gone. And then what, right?” Thao said.

The group spent a year writing a new strategic plan and is only now starting to use Scott’s money. First, it will update its technical infrastructure. Then, it will expand financial literacy courses for Hmong teens and adults.

“We do economic development, micro-lending to businesses and we have direct social services,” Thao said. “I’m envisioning we just do the basics and thread [funds] through all our programs. It’s simple enough. I’m not thinking anything glamorous or sexy.”