Planned Parenthood Gets Donation of $275 From Billionaire And Ex-Wife of Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Scott

MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos donated nearly $3.9 billion over the past nine months to 465 organizations. According to Bloomberg, she most recently donated $275 million to Planned Parenthood and 21 of its affiliates, making it the largest financial gift from a single donor in Planned Parenthood history. "We are incredibly grateful for Ms. Scott's extraordinary philanthropic investment," Planned Parenthood Chief Executive Alexis McGill Johnson wrote in a statement on Twitter. "As we face the most serious attacks on access to abortion that we've seen in a generation, PPFA is proud to play a vital role in ensuring access to essential health care." 

While explaining her choice of organizations to donate to, Scott wrote on Medium, "Our team's focus over these last nine months has included some new areas, but as always our aim has been to support the needs of underrepresented people from groups of all kinds," she wrote. "We don't advocate for particular policies or reforms. Instead, we seek a portfolio of organizations that supports the ability of all people to participate in solutions." According to Scott, her team is working on a website that will include more information about her donations and a searchable database of her grants: It "will go live only after it reflects the preferences of every one of these non-profit teams about how details of their gifts are shared.

"We look forward to sharing the work of these remarkable organizations through this database of their gifts, 1257 to date since my pledge to give away this money with steadiness and care," Scott continued her explanation in her article. "Each non-profit it will list was selected through a rigorous process and has a strong track record of serving under-supported needs. If you are looking for a way to serve humanity’s common cause, every one of them is a great candidate. Helping any of us can help us all."

According to Popsugar, over the last nine months, Scott has donated a $436 million gift to Habitat for Humanity affiliates, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, the Climate Justice Resilience Fund, Achieving the Dream, the National Equity Project, and many more such organizations. 

Since her high-profile divorce from Bezos in 2019, Scott has made a number of secret donations to nonprofits and charitable organizations. Forbes reported in February that she had donated "$8.8 billion in less than two years to more than 780 organizations – more than four times what her ex-husband has donated so far in his lifetime." She made the largest donation, $133.5 million, to Communities in Schools, a non-profit that helps keep at-risk children in schools. Scott’s gifts come in the form of unrestricted grants, meaning that nonprofits can spend the money however they want rather than on particular programs. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Scott's current net worth is an estimated $22.4 billion.