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Jeff Bezos' ex-wife MacKenzie donates about $6 bn in pandemic year

MacKenzie's team donated $4 bn in gifts to 384 organisations in just 4 months

MacKenzie Bezos [File] Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Bezos | Reuters

MacKenzie Scott, who rose to become the world's fourth richest woman after her expensive divorce with Amazon founder and world's richest individual Jeff Bezos, is on a donation spree giving away almost $6 billion this year. It "has to be one of the biggest annual distributions by a living individual" to working charities, Bloomberg reported citing Melissa Berman, chief executive officer of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Scott has donated more than $4 billion in four months after announcing $1.7 billion in gifts in July. She believes that there has been no better time to donate to food banks, emergency relief funds, and support services for those most vulnerable than a pandemic. "This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Americans already struggling," she wrote in the post on Medium. "Economic losses and health outcomes alike have been worse for women, for people of color and for people living in poverty. Meanwhile, it has substantially increased the wealth of billionaires," the world's 18th richest person wrote in her Medium post. 

"After my post in July, I asked a team of advisers to help me accelerate my 2020 giving through immediate support to people suffering the economic effects of the (pandemic) crisis. They took a data-driven approach to identifying organisations with strong leadership teams and results, with special attention to those operating in communities facing high projected food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates, and low access to philanthropic capital," she says. 

Scott, who always lived in the shadow of Bezos while they were a couple, was catapulted to the world's richest list as the Amazon founder gave 4 per cent of the online retailer to her during her dicorce. She ended up with a $48-billion fortune.

In the last four months, Scott has donated $4 billion in gifts "to 384 organisations across all 50 states of the US, Puerto Rico and Washington DC." "To select these 384, the team sought suggestions and perspective from hundreds of field experts, funders, and non-profit leaders and volunteers with decades of experience. We leveraged this collective knowledge base in a collaboration that included hundreds of emails and phone interviews, and thousands of pages of data analysis on community needs, program outcomes, and each non-profit’s capacity to absorb and make effective use of funding," Scott writes. 



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