American Indian College Fund receives $70 million from MacKenzie Scott and sets out a seven-year plan

The American Indian College Fund, which describes itself as "the nation's largest charity supporting Native higher education," has received a $70 million gift from Yield Giving, the organization MacKenzie Scott set up to share her fortune. The College Fund announced the gift on October 29, 2026, together with a seven-year plan for using it. The money is unrestricted, and $20 million of it will go into a designated endowment. The College Fund calls it "the second and largest investment" it has received from Yield Giving in five years.

Before deciding how to spend the money, the College Fund met Native students, presidents of tribal colleges and universities, community members and its board of trustees. For students, the plan expands programs for tribal college scholarships, coaching for success in college, wellness and academic help, internships, career assessment and mentoring, and it strengthens the path from college into a career. For the colleges themselves it pays for faculty development, governance training, research, curriculum and cultural and environmental programs, and it includes public education campaigns.

We built this plan by listening first.

A large sum for the College Fund

The gift is large next to the support the College Fund gives students in a year. It says it gave more than $26 million in scholarships and other help to students in higher education in 2025-26, and more than $434 million in scholarships, programs and support for communities and tribal colleges since 1989. If the $50 million outside the endowment were spent evenly over seven years, it would add about $7 million a year, roughly a quarter of the 2025-26 figure, by our arithmetic. The plan does not give a yearly schedule.

The funding gap the College Fund points to

The College Fund links the gift to a shortage of money for Native communities. In August, the Brookings Institution published a report, produced in partnership with the College Fund, that found that grants classified as serving Native communities or causes made up 0.88% of foundation and corporate philanthropic funding in 2024, based on grant data from Candid. Grants that Brookings could verify as serving only Native communities made up 0.51%. Native Americans make up between 1% and 2.7% of the population, depending on the Census Bureau estimate used, the report notes. It also discloses that Crazy Bull is a Brookings trustee.

The College Fund also cites Census data showing that 16% of American Indian and Alaska Native adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher, compared with 33% nationally, and a study by the American Indian Higher Education Consortium that found every dollar spent on tribal colleges and universities returns $1.60 to taxpayers. It says its own research shows that its scholars "graduate and enter careers at a rate 1.5 times higher with support beyond scholarships."

How Scott gives

Yield Giving's gifts come without conditions on how they are used. Yield Giving says on its website that its network of staff and advisors has given more than $26 billion in more than 2,700 gifts "to non-profit teams to use as they see fit for the benefit of others." The College Fund's plan spreads this gift across scholarships, support for tribal colleges and its own long-term finances rather than a single project.