MacKenzie Scott was born in San Francisco in 1970, trained at Princeton under the novelist Toni Morrison and has published two novels of her own. Following her 2019 divorce settlement she became one of the wealthiest women in the world and signed the Giving Pledge, committing to donate the majority of her wealth during her lifetime.
She has since made unrestricted gifts of more than $17 billion to thousands of nonprofit organizations — typically community-led, historically under-funded institutions — through a process that has deliberately stripped away the application and reporting overheads typical of large-scale philanthropy. The model has been widely studied as a structural alternative to the traditional foundation grant cycle.
Scott's writing on the philosophy of unrestricted giving has become a reference point for a generation of new philanthropists.