By Sofia Reyes
MacKenzie Scott has given America’s historically Black colleges and universities more than a billion dollars — with no instructions attached. This is a standing ovation, and then an invitation.
This fall, Morgan State University sat down and wrote a letter to 2,100 of its students. The letter made a simple offer: if money is the thing standing between you and the end of the semester, say so. Six hundred students said so.
Sit with that number for a moment. Six hundred people, most of the way to a degree, for whom the distance between finishing and stopping was not talent, not effort, not merit — just money. The letter was possible because weeks earlier Morgan State had received $63 million from MacKenzie Scott, the largest gift in its history, and President David K. Wilson put $60 million of it straight into the endowment and set $1 million aside for students in exactly that emergency. No program to fund. No building to name. No reporting schedule. The gift came with no instructions, from a donor who has made that absence the entire point.
This week the National Urban League’s Marc Morial published an assessment arguing that Scott’s method is a new model for American philanthropy. The numbers earn the argument. Since 2019 she has given $26.4 billion to more than 2,500 organizations — $7.17 billion in 2025 alone. More than a billion of it has gone to HBCUs, the institutions American philanthropy spent generations funding last and least. In one three-week stretch last fall, eight HBCUs announced gifts totaling about $387 million — Howard at $80 million, Prairie View A&M and Morgan State at $63 million each, Virginia State at $50 million — and nearly every announcement was the largest gift that school had ever received.
But ask the presidents what the gift was, and they do not reach for the number first. They reach for a word, and it is the same word every time. Wilson called Scott’s second gift to Morgan State “more than philanthropy — a partnership in progress.” Morial reached for it too: “This is not charity, it’s partnership, and it’s a blueprint.” Charity looks down, however kindly. Partnership looks across. That is the applause line, and she has earned it standing.
Here is what the trust bought, because trust turns out to be a superb investor. Bowie State received $25 million in 2021 and invested $22.5 million of it; an endowment that stood at about $8 million now stands at $49 million — and other donors followed her money in, because her gift told them the school was worth betting on. Morgan State expects its $60 million deposit to return $4 million to $5 million a year, every year, long after this fall’s 600 students have graduated. Howard’s $80 million arrived in the middle of a federal shutdown and could move at the speed of the emergency — reserves, relief for students whose parents had been furloughed — because nobody had to ask a donor’s permission to use it well. Spelman aimed its $38 million at juniors and seniors leaning on Parent PLUS loans, closing a gap just before federal caps make it wider. One of Bowie State’s own fundraisers said it plainly: unrestricted gifts are “the unicorn, the white whale of the fundraising industry.” Scott has been handing out unicorns by the herd.
And notice the most Scott detail of all. Told that her giving to HBCUs in the recent cycle topped $300 million, she called it “a vanishingly tiny fraction of the personal expressions of care being shared into the world this year.” The largest checkbook in the story insists on being the smallest part of it. That is not modesty as decoration. It is the thesis: the care was always out there, in the institutions and the communities. She just decided to fund it like she believed it.
In our house, this lands close to home. Our foundation’s research asks whether charitable capital — gathered openly, invested honestly, and trusted completely — can become permanent care: health, education, food, shelter, funded the way an endowment funds them, forever rather than once. We are still doing our math in public and keeping our designs our own. But the deployment question — what happens when you give real money to proven people and decline to supervise the goodness out of it — is no longer a question. It has a billion-dollar answer, and endowment statements to prove it.
So the invitation, because applause without imitation is just noise. You do not need $26 billion to give like this; unrestricted is a posture, not an amount. Fund the institution you already trust and skip the instructions. Endow something small and permanent instead of something large and temporary. Let your gift be the one that goes first, so others can follow it the way donors followed hers. Do your diligence before the gift — hers is famously rigorous — and then do the harder thing: trust after it.
Six hundred students are finishing their semester because somebody believed a university knew what its students needed. She was right. She usually is, because she picked people who were already right and let them work. Standing ovation, Ms. Scott. And the rest of us — when we can, as we can — let’s follow her lead.
— Sofia Reyes, Operations, The Library Media
From The Library — the estate of our family.