Yield Giving

Yield Giving is the grantmaking vehicle of MacKenzie Scott, the novelist and philanthropist who received roughly a quarter of the Amazon stock held jointly with Jeff Bezos in their 2019 divorce. Scott signed the Giving Pledge in May 2019 committing to give away the majority of her wealth in her lifetime; she then began an unusually large and unusually unrestricted grantmaking sequence — $1.7 billion to 116 organisations in July 2020, $4.15 billion to 384 organisations in December 2020, $2.7 billion to 286 organisations in June 2021 — well before Yield Giving existed as a named project. The Yield Giving website launched in December 2022 and the name was retroactively applied to the entire arc of Scott's post-Giving-Pledge philanthropy. As of December 2025 Yield Giving reports over $26 billion distributed across more than 2,700 gifts, making it by total dollars one of the largest single-donor grantmaking efforts in modern US philanthropy.

The vehicle's distinctive features — its grantmaking philosophy, operational design, and explicit refusal to behave as a conventional private foundation — define what Yield Giving offers the broader non-profit ecosystem that the foundations and pooled funds in this corpus also resource.

Grantmaking philosophy and operational model

Yield Giving's site frames the project around the conviction that "value is added by giving up control" — that gifts to non-profits should be unrestricted, the recipient organisation's leadership trusted, and the act of giving "for use however they choose." Operationally that conviction translates into two pathways. The first is "Quiet Research": a deliberately anonymous candidate-identification process run by a "small internal giving and operations unit" supplemented by a "large network of advisors (practitioners in the field, consultants, non-profit leaders, and other givers)" who evaluate organisations against criteria "tailored to size, geography, and mission for indicators of high potential for sustained positive impact" — financial stability, track record, outcome measurement, and community-representative leadership. The anonymity is principled rather than coy: Yield Giving explicitly cites burden-minimisation as the rationale, meaning recipient non-profits are spared the typically heavy upfront engagement of a foundation cultivation cycle.

The second pathway is the public Open Call completed in 2024. Yield Giving partnered with the MacArthur-Foundation-incubated Lever for Change to administer the process: the call launched on 21 March 2023 for "community-led, community-focused" organisations advancing the voices and opportunities of individuals and families of meagre or modest means and groups facing discrimination and other systemic obstacles; the registration deadline was 5 May 2023, the application deadline 12 June 2023, and awards were announced on 19 March 2024. 6,353 organisations applied. The original plan called for 250 awards of $1 million each; the donor team expanded that based on evaluation results, ultimately disbursing $640 million across 361 organisations — 279 in a top scoring tier at $2 million each, and 82 in a second tier at $1 million each. The methodology pushed evaluation outwards: applicants were first rated by peer organisations, top-scoring candidates advanced to a round-2 external panel of subject-matter experts, and the donor team performed final due diligence — a structurally different shape from conventional foundation programme-officer review.

Recipients are now publicly listed in a searchable database on Yield Giving's site, filterable by focus area, US geography (states, counties, cities) plus a "Global" option, keyword, and essay tagging. That transparency, building over the project's life from no public list at all in 2020 to a fully filterable database by 2024, has progressively allowed recipients and observers to map what kinds of work Yield Giving actually supports.

Scale and the December 2025 round

Through 2024 Yield Giving disbursements were sizeable but had slowed relative to the 2020-2021 surge. The December 2025 round reversed that pattern sharply: $7.1 billion in 2025, a roughly 250 percent year-on-year increase on the $2 billion granted in 2024 and Scott's largest annual total since 2020. Panorama Global's analysis of the December 2025 round counted 186 grants in that single tranche — fewer but much larger gifts than in earlier rounds — and identified four top thematic clusters in 2025: Education, Equity and Justice, Funding and Regranting, and Environment. The Funding-and-Regranting prominence reflects a strategic shift toward intermediary organisations that then sub-grant onward, and the Environment prominence reflects a first-in-six-years tilt (environmental grantmaking rose from roughly 12 percent cumulatively across all prior rounds to approximately 31 percent in 2025). The 2025 portfolio also tilted markedly more global — CBS News reports that 43 percent of grants supported internationally focused groups, with sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America especially well represented.

Position in the AI-good landscape

Yield Giving does not appear in this corpus the way the topical foundations do. It has no AI-governance programme, no digital-rights initiative, no internal cyber or platform-accountability frame; its self-presentation runs entirely through the donor philosophy and the community-led recipient pool rather than any topical lens. The 2024 Open Call recipients are concentrated in equal-opportunity education, disability rights, immigrant and refugee services, healthcare access, criminal-justice reform, housing, and economic-mobility work — the AI-good movement's adjacent terrains rather than its core. Where Yield Giving connects to this corpus is therefore mediated through three feminist or democracy intermediaries that have themselves become substantial AI-good resourcers.

Mama Cash — the Amsterdam-based women's fund that co-seeded the Numun Fund for feminist tech in the Global South — received a MacKenzie Scott direct grant in March 2022 (pre-dating the formal Yield Giving brand) and a subsequent Yield Giving grant in December 2025, making it one of the corpus's clearest examples of a returning recipient across both pre- and post-formalisation rounds. The African Women's Development Fund — the continent's foremost pan-African feminist fund and an institutional supporter of African digital-rights organising — received a March 2022 MacKenzie Scott grant included in the same series. And the Tides Foundation, via its Healthy Democracy Fund, received a $10 million MacKenzie Scott contribution earmarked for democracy and civic-engagement work, one of the largest single donor commitments to that pooled US democracy infrastructure since its 2019 launch. Through these three intermediaries Yield Giving capital flows onward into the feminist-tech, digital-rights, and democracy-infrastructure work the corpus tracks directly; the relationship is therefore second-order but resourcing-load-bearing.

Relationship to the broader AI-good movement

Yield Giving sits structurally apart from the cluster of large US private foundations — the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, the Hewlett Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Omidyar Network — whose AI-good grantmaking is by contrast deeply topical, programme-officer-led, and pooled into vehicles such as the European AI & Society Fund or the Public Interest AI initiative. Yield Giving co-funds none of those vehicles. Its model contribution to the funding landscape is not topical capital but a different funding shape: very large unrestricted general-support grants, decided by a small team with minimal grantee burden, that recipient organisations can deploy against the field strategy they themselves judge most urgent. For the AI-good movement specifically, this matters because the unrestricted general-support shape is exactly what allows the corpus's feminist and democracy intermediaries to fund the under-resourced edges of digital-rights organising — the small Global South organisations, the early-stage campaigns, the cultural and movement-building work that conventional programme-officer grantmaking under-serves. The funded_orgs field on this entry is left empty pending direct grant-to-corpus-entity records; the indirect-but-load-bearing relationships are documented in body prose only.