By Steven Bonifazi
(DENVER, Colo.) Nonprofit organization, American Indian College Fund, has received a financial gift from billionaire novelist and philanthropist Mackenzie Scott as she announced Tuesday that she has provided 286 organizations across the country with $2.7 billion.
Scott stated in a Medium post titled Seeding by Ceding on Tuesday that individuals who battle with inequities face obstacles when social structures currently in place inflate wealth. She also stated that she spent the first three months of this year identifying "equity-oriented non-profit teams" that have been mistreated to receive the $2,739,000,000 in gifts.
"Higher education is a proven pathway to opportunity, so we looked for 2- and 4-year institutions successfully educating students who come from communities that have been chronically underserved. Discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities has been deepening, so we assessed organizations bridging divides through interfaith support and collaboration," Scott wrote in her Medium post. "We chose to make relatively large gifts to the organizations named below, both to enable their work, and as a signal of trust and encouragement, to them and to others."
Among the 286 organizations that Scott refers to as "high-impact" in areas within the country that have been underfunded and overlooked over the course of history, thirty of them are colleges, including Broward College, El Paso Community College and Lee College to name a few. Along with American Indian College Fund, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) also received unrestricted gifts, according to Forbes.
The American Indian College Fund works to support Native American students and tribal colleges and universities through scholarships and funding for higher education. The nonprofit has invested a total of $237.1M into Native Communities and has awarded 143,281 scholarships over the course of the last 32 years.
Currently, the national college attainment gap for Native Americans is less than half of that of other groups, sitting at 15% as compared to 32.1% of all other groups, as reported in a press release from the American Indian College Fund. The COVID-19 pandemic increased already present barriers for Indigenous people regarding access to education, limited access to health care or insufficient health care services and heightened rates of poverty that produce greater rates of food and housing insecurity among Native students, according to the Tribal Colleges and Universities #RealCollege Survey.
The nonprofit is devoted to abolishing the college attainment gap that exists for Indigenous people and making certain that each and every American Indian and Alaska Native student that wishes to obtain higher education can do so. Their work would not be possible without their supporters and donors such as Scott.
“This gift is timely and pivotal because, in combination with the generosity of our network of current and future supporters, we now have the capacity to grow greater opportunities for American Indian and Alaska Native communities and to create lasting change," said Cheryl Crazy Bull, President and CEO of the American Indian College Fund. "MacKenzie Scott and Dan Jewett’s acknowledgment of our work is a testament to the important role of education to transform the lives of our students, their families, and communities.”
For more information regarding the American Indian College Fund, click here.