Habitat for Humanity, a U.S. NGO dedicated to building, rehabilitating, and preserving homes for low-income individuals and families, just got a huge helping hand in its mission.
The help came in the form of a massive donation — $436 million in total — from billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott that will be disbursed to the Habitat for Humanity International organization and eighty-four of its United States affiliates. The money represents the largest publicly-disclosed individual donation from Scott.
According to Jonathan Reckford, CEO of Habitat for Humanity International, the donation will “allow us to dramatically increase capacity and implement programs that will have a multi-generational impact on communities around the U.S. and our global mission for many years to come.”
Reckford added that “Habitat works to break down barriers and bring people together – to tear down obstacles and build a world where everyone, no matter who we are or where we come from, has a decent place to live. This tremendous gift helps make that work possible.”
The non-profit already had plans for $25 million of the grant earmarked specifically for the central organization’s use. It indicated that part of the money would fund the organization’s advocacy and legislative policy proposal operations and bolster its ongoing “Cost of Home” advocacy campaign.
Habitat For Humanity also announced plans to use the funds to “advance research and measurement efforts to identify best practices in areas such as preserving home affordability and housing innovation and to explore how new and existing programs lead to better outcomes for individuals and families.”
The donation itself is a part of Scott’s 2019 pledge to give away the vast majority of her estimated $49.1 billion of wealth within her lifetime and is in keeping with her previous donations toward that end. In the first half of 2021 alone, she gave away at least $2.7 billion of the money to 286 separate groups dedicated to various causes.
In a bid to deflect attention away from her charitable giving and onto the causes she supports, she decided in December of 2020 to stop announcing donations, preferring instead for recipients to make such announcements if they wished. According to such reports, her contributions have exceeded $8 billion in the past two years alone.
For her part, however, Scott seems adamant that the economic system that enabled her and others to amass such large fortunes in the first place is in most need of change.
In an opinion piece Scott wrote for Medium, she remarked that “putting large donors at the center of stories on social progress is a distortion of their role. Me, (husband) Dan, and a constellation of researchers, administrators, and advisors — we are all attempting to give away a fortune enabled by systems in need of change.”