How to do it if it must be done

Nobody should have the kind of wealth that Mackenzie Scott currently possesses (and, to be fair, she seems to recognize this.) But not only is she actually giving huge sums away, it’s being targeted with unusual efficacy:

“Women-led, Black women-led organizations tend to be at the very bottom of the pile for philanthropists,” Ms. McWhorter said. Ms. Scott “has a recognition that the organizations are doing the good work and let us be the stewards of those dollars.”

In the course of a few months, Ms. Scott has turned traditional philanthropy on its head. Whereas multibillion foundations like Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have fancy headquarters, Ms. Scott’s operation has no known address — or even website. She refers to a “team of advisers” rather than a large dedicated staff.

By disbursing her money quickly and without much hoopla, Ms. Scott has pushed the focus away from the giver and onto the nonprofits she is trying to help. They are the types of organizations — historically Black colleges and universities, community colleges and groups that hand out food and pay off medical debts — that often fly beneath the radar of major foundations.

“If you look at the motivations for the way women engage in philanthropy versus the ways that men engage in philanthropy, there’s much more ego involved in the man, it’s much more transactional, it’s much more status driven,” said Debra Mesch, a professor at the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University. “Women don’t like to splash their names on buildings, in general.”

I hope this will encourage more rich people to understand that giving money away to already massively wealthy elite universities is one of the least valuable forms of philanthropy, while giving to schools that actually serve disadvantaged populations give you a lot of bang for your buck. Everything about Scott’s donations — the low overhead, the lack of self-aggrandizement, the well-selected targets — is such a striking contrast to so many (mostly male) egomaniacs among the .1%.