The president of a tribal college in the US received $8 million from MacKenzie Scott and described how it felt.
Scott, the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is an American philanthropist and novelist who gives huge amounts of money for good causes, and one such cause is for Turtle Mountain Community College in North Dakota.
The college in Belcourt, which has around 500 students, is one of the first tribal colleges ever opened in the U.S.
Turtle Mountain Community College president Donna Brown described in an interview with Slate the moment she was informed that the college would be receiving a huge donation.
“When I first received an email, it just said, ‘There’s a donor who’s potentially interested in giving money to the college. Would you have time to have a conversation with me?’” Brown expressed.
“And that’s really all it said.point 364 |
So it was kind of, ‘Is this real? Is this fake? What’s the deal?’ But I did have a conversation with somebody doing some research for (Scott),” she continued.point 150 | “By the end of the conversation, she basically said that MacKenzie would be giving us $8 million.point 233 |
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Brown further said: “I happened to be driving at the time. I almost had to pull over the side of the road.
“My jaw dropped. The most we’d received prior to this was $300,000. So to get $8 million was mind-blowing. I didn’t know if it was real.”
Thanks to the hefty donation, the college can now get itself accredited to create its first masters-level program and invest a ‘portion of it’ to guarantee its future.
“We’ll always have some money available to spend to expand in ways that our community needs, and know that three years from now, we’re not going to be broke again,” Brown said, adding that Scott wanted the college to “fulfill our own mission, and in a way that we find appropriate, in the best way to serve our people.”
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Replaced!