MacKenzie Scott’s Boldest Year Yet: Fewer Gifts, Massive Checks

MacKenzie Scott’s giving patterns are changing. The mega-philanthropist donated more than $7.1 billion last year — the most money she’s ever given to charitable causes in one year. A new analysis of those gifts shows that while she gave fewer gifts, they were for larger amounts and included many organizations affected by recent government cuts.

For the first time the majority of Scott’s gifts went to previous recipients, marking a shift away from providing one-time support to nonprofits, according to a report from philanthropic advisory firm Panorama Global, published today.

Scott awarded fewer gifts than in previous years, but the average gift size ballooned to $38 million among the103 groups that disclosed gifts amounts in 2025. It was a significant leap from her second highest annual average gift size of nearly $13 million in 2020, according to Panorama Global, which has been tracking Scott’s giving since 2020. 

The report is another attempt to make sense of Scott’s giving, which in some ways is more transparent than that of some other large donors since she publishes a database of her gifts on her Yield Giving website. But because she doesn’t make any public statements beyond her annual letters, it can also be hard to discern the intention and patterns of one of the most prolific philanthropists of our time. 

What is clear is that Scott wants to push other funders, both large and small, to do what they can to support nonprofit work, said Panorama Global CEO Gabrielle Fitzgerald. 

“I definitely feel that her whole design of giving, from her essays to the fact that the Yield Giving website exists, is encouraging people to find something they’re interested in,” Fitzgerald said. “All of these organizations have been heavily vetted, and they’re across such a wide range of issues and geographic areas that there should be no excuse for not giving away your philanthropic assets.”

Bigger Gifts and Repeat Support

One of the key trends in last year’s giving, according to the report, is a major shift toward previous recipients: About 65 percent of gifts went to organizations she had previously funded. That is the first time that Scott gave more donations to past recipients than new grantees. And these repeat contributions were large — on average, more than three times the size of initial awards. Third- and fourth-time gifts increased even more in size, Panorama Global said. 

For example, a $59 million gift to the nonprofit National Alliance on Mental Illness, was nearly twice as much as the $30 million gift she gave in 2022. She also gave $45 million to the Trevor Project in 2025 after having awarded the group $6 million in 2020. The gift to the Trevor Project — which was stripped of a $25 million federal contract last year — was not included in the donations that Scott disclosed on her website in December. However, it was announced by the Trevor Project last month. 

The gift sizes also increased in 2025. The largest share of awards were $11 million to $20 million last year but $1 million to $10 million in 2024, according to the report. In many ways, the latest round of giving shows that Scott has shifted toward more concentrated, high-impact gifts as well as sustained support rather than one-time funding, said Fitzgerald. 

With this kind of giving, Scott is dispelling some of the early misconceptions that her gifts might be too large for nonprofits to absorb, Fitzgerald said.  

“There’s always this perception that organizations would be oversaturated with the gifts,” she said. “But there are organizations that know how to program large amounts of money. And these are huge problems that people are trying to tackle, whether it’s human trafficking or community health work, and they need really big investments.”

Panorama Global’s findings align with research from the Center for Effective Philanthropy, a group that researches the nonprofit sector and also has been tracking Scott’s giving. The center’s research revealed that the recipients of  Scott’s gifts from 2020 to 2024 were on average much larger than the typical nonprofit and that Scott’s donations were also typically much larger than the grants of large foundations and mega-donors, said Elisha Smith Arrillaga, vice president of research at the Center for Effective Philanthropy.

“Our research shows that receiving these types of gifts can be a powerful tool for furthering the mission of nonprofit organizations, especially in this moment,” Smith Arrillaga said.

The center’s most recent report details the dire level of need among nonprofits today. It found that nearly two thirds of nonprofit leaders report increased demand for their services, while nearly 70 percent experienced reduced funding from at least one source. 

New Causes and Places

With this latest round of giving, Scott also signaled a willingness to address new issues, Fitzgerald said. Scott maintained her longstanding support for causes such as education, equity, and justice. But she also provided greater support for environmentally focused work as well as donor collaborative organizations and others that regrant dollars to nonprofits, Fitzgerald said. Environmental causes accounted for nearly 31 percent of gifts last year; Scott had given just 12 percent cumulatively to those causes in all previous rounds, Fitzgerald said. The Trump administration has frequently targeted climate investments for cuts. 

Scott’s portfolio was also more globally oriented than in previous years, with 43 percent of donations supporting internationally focused groups, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. She gave $60 million to Camfed International, a poverty relief group focused on sub-Saharan Africa. It was her fourth and largest gift to the organization since 2020. 

Over all, the analysis shows Scott’s latest round of giving prioritized scale, repeat support, and evolving priorities, Fitzgerald said. But, as is often the case with Scott, it also leaves some big questions unanswered, she said: For instance, why did Scott decrease her giving to groups focused on health after prioritizing them in earlier rounds?

“Does that now mean that she’s going to do more on the environment and she’s dropping health? Or was this just the environment year?” Fitzgerald asked. “We’re just kind of reading a lot into what little she has put out there.”