MacKenzie Scott’s millions boost Native American nonprofits

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.

“When they do think we exist, they have all sorts of wonderful misconceptions about who we are — everything from being very impoverished to being spiritual children of nature to being casino-rich Indian tribes,” Roberts says. “Most of that is grounded in what folks learned from outdated K-12 textbooks or from public media.”

His organization interviewed foundation executives about their views of Native Americans and found their answers largely mirrored the public’s.

“I was a little miffed when I saw that, because this is a group of folks who are probably more highly educated than the general public and say they are more racially and socially aware,” Roberts says.

Getting a Scott donation differed from his experience with foundations, Roberts says, not only because the money was unrestricted but also because the process was so simple. There were two phone calls from Scott’s advisers to talk over the group’s work and a third saying the money was on its way.

“There’s no private foundation that I have dealt with in the 20 years I’ve been at the helm of First Nations where the process for getting $8 million, if it was available, came that easy,” Roberts says.

Scott’s money doubled First Nations Institute’s endowment, launched its Tribal Lands Conservation program, helped purchase a new building, and tripled the amount of grants it awards to other Native American-led organizations.

There was another unexpected benefit.

“All of a sudden, foundations feel comfortable giving us million-dollar grants as opposed to a quarter of a million-dollar grants,” Roberts says.

The National Urban Indian Family Coalition used a $2 million gift from Scott to hire more staff, provide employees better health insurance and raises, and increase grants. The Seattle nonprofit provides grants to about 55 human service organizations that serve Native Americans living in more than 40 cities nationwide.

Executive director Janeen Comenote says Scott’s money freed her up to focus on mission instead of worrying about meeting payroll, and as with other groups, the grant made other funders take notice.

Enhancing government money

U.S. Census data shows 75% of American Indian and Alaska Native people live in urban and suburban areas. Comenote says charities need to boost their presence in these places. Her group’s increased grantmaking has enabled nonprofits to forge stronger relationships with local and state governments, and this has resulted in many grantees getting more or first-time government funding.

But government grants come with many restrictions, says Erik Stegman, CEO of Native Americans in Philanthropy. Charities can’t use that money to build endowments, hire staff, or fund nonprogrammatic work, so unrestricted gifts like Scott’s enhance government support because charities can use it as they wish.

“You can spend your entire life chasing after heavily siloed parts of federal money, and that tends to build a deficit mindset,” Stegman says. “When an infusion like this comes along, it makes government dollars work better because it fills in the gaps.”

Fundraising bump

Native American charity leaders say Scott’s gifts are influencing individual donors. Average individual giving has gone up at the Native Forward Scholars Fund since it received $20 million from Scott, says Angelique Albert, CEO of the fund.

Before Scott’s gift, most donors gave $5 to $25, Albert says. Now the fund is attracting more donors giving $1,000 or more. Albert says that increase stems from using some of Scott’s money to hire four more fundraisers and expand marketing efforts.

The attention-grabbing power of Scott’s gifts has also helped small, locally focused charities. The Carolina Panthers football team gave the Boys & Girls Club of the Lumbee Tribe, in North Carolina, a $5,000 donation. The charity’s youth services director, Rose Marie Lowry-Townsend, doesn’t think that would have happened without the $1.25 million grant it received from Scott in 2022.

“Folks don’t write us checks for $1,000, and they definitely don’t write us checks for $5,000,” Lowry-Townsend says. “That one was very unusual for us.”

Whether Scott’s giving to Native American-controlled nonprofits will continue to influence private donations remains to be seen, says Native American philanthropy scholar Jorgensen.

She views Scott’s giving as the second phase in a recent push to increase Indigenous philanthropy. Jorgensen notes that the NDN Collective (also a Scott grantee), a regranting nonprofit founded in 2018 that works to empower Indigenous communities, was the first to increase the flow of charitable dollars to Native American-led groups.

Will there be a third wave? “Indian country and Native communities are calling for this. They’re saying, ‘Stop giving money to the museum and start giving money to us,’” Jorgensen says. “MacKenzie Scott’s giving shows that Native-controlled organizations can manage this kind of money.”

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Maria Di Mento is a senior reporter at the Chronicle of Philanthropy, where you can read the full article. This article was provided to The Associated Press by the Chronicle of Philanthropy as part of a partnership to cover philanthropy and nonprofits supported by the Lilly Endowment. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.