MacKenzie Scott Makes $84 Million Donation to Girl Scouts Amid Divorce

Scott’s gift to the Girt Scouts’ comes seven months after the billionaire philanthropist donated a combined total of more than $700 million to nonprofit organizations Planned Parenthood and Habitat for Humanity. 

She previously explained why she prefers the use the word “giving” instead of “philanthropy” to describe what she’s doing with her money, insisting that the focus shouldn’t be on a dollar number, but rather the good the organizations do.

“We tend to give more focus to things we can tally, and to rank everything else,” Scott wrote in an essay posted to Medium in 2021. “Why does one form of compassionate action, one group of beneficiaries, one group of givers have to be more important than the others? Financially valuable versus socially valuable.”

The novelist added that she prefers to leave it up to groups who’ve received her money to “speak for themselves first if they choose to, with the hope that when they do, media focuses on their contributions instead of mine.”