JUST SAY NO

Ask and ye shall receive. But even major donors have their limits. A guide to the polite decline.

- MIKE ALBO

As you’re reading this, someone is probably asking MacKenzie Scott for money. Ever since she divorced Jeff Bezos, winning $38.3 billion in the settlement, Scott has given away $14 billion to some 1,600 nonprofits, selecting each one herself with input from advisors. But for her latest round of monster-size charitable giving, she announced an open call for applications to receive $1 million in unrestricted operating gifts from her personal foundation, Yield Giving. Think of it as America’s Next Top Do-Gooder. Of the 6,353 entries received for the peer review process, 250 will be selected early next year.

“Peer review is the most legit process, but now everyone is reading everyone else’s application, and it’s kind of like Squid Game,” says a grant writer for an arts nonprofit. In other words, it’s tough out there for a grant seeker, and also, conversely, for the funders setting the dollar figures. The difference between a yes and a no is a fine line that’s undergoing yet another evolution as more high-net-worth individuals enter the arena. Households with at least $1 million in investments gave an average of $34,917 to charity in 2022, rising 19 percent from $29,269 in 2017, according to this year’s Bank of America Study of Philanthropy. And that’s to say nothing of those much higher up the food chain. “It’s a different landscape. There are a lot of very wealthy people,” says Esther McGowan, director of development at Aperture, who has worked in fundraising for more than two decades. “There wasn’t as much access to billionaires as there is now.”