Updated: January 10, 2022
A vague email, a dummy bank account & a $5M surprise
Photo | Matt Wright
Tim Garvin and Naomi Sleeper from United Way (center) stand with members of the community organizations who benefited from MacKenzie Scott's $5-million donation.
It was the first Monday of November 2020. Halloweens across Massachusetts had just been canceled or modified due to the coronavirus pandemic, and national political tensions were at an all-time high as Americans braced for a forthcoming virus surge that would leave countless people alone for the holidays, unable to see friends and family.
The next day, after one of the most fraught years in many people’s memories and an election cycle that felt like a lifetime, voters would turn out to elect Joe Biden as U.S. president.
Amid all of that, Tim Garvin, president and CEO of United Way of Central Massachusetts received an email.
The short note was from a woman named Hillary.
“It said, ‘Hi, Tim, I work for a philanthropist who is interested in making a donation, can we set up a time to talk?” Garvin recalls.
The first thing he did was look up the name of the sender, trying all the usual sources – LinkedIn, Facebook, Google – to no avail. The name was too common.
Metaphorically, Garvin shrugged. The person who wrote didn’t seem to be asking for anything. He took the meeting.
“I thought, ‘Okay, nothing ventured, nothing gained,'” Garvin said.
The next day at noon, the two connected. The person on the other line asked if he had ever heard of philanthropist and author MacKenzie Scott.
Garvin remembers Googling – and misspelling – her name while on the call. But then, the dots started to connect. Of all the philanthropists in all the world, Scott was the billionaire author and former wife to Jeff Bezos, founder and then-CEO of Amazon – and someone who had publicly pledged to give away vast swaths of her wealth to charitable causes.
The person on the other end of the line – Hillary – explained to Garvin that Scott was in the process of donating a chunk of money, and she’d like to allocate some to the Central Massachusetts United Way. The gift, of a then-unspecified amount, Hillary said, would be unrestricted, a dream scenario for nonprofits. The only stipulations, she explained, would be Garvin not tell anybody until Scott announced the donation herself, and he needed to let Hillary know how United Way wanted to receive the money.
Garvin opted for receiving it all at once, through a bank transfer. This meant he needed to tell at least one other person: Jim Hayes, the United Way’s vice president of finance and operations.
Still, Hayes and Garvin didn’t have a way to verify that this impending financial gift was legitimate. So, out of an abundance of caution, Garvin and Hayes set up a new Bank of America account and placed $100 in it. If this all were a ruse, Garvin reasoned, that’s the most they’d lose.
Then, the pair waited. Garvin didn’t so much as tell his wife or United Way’s board about the phone call, or the bank account. Life, for a while, went on.
Two or three weeks later, Hayes pulled Garvin aside and told him the unthinkable: The new account they’d set up had $5 million in it. In one fell swoop, with the help of Scott’s charity, they’d nearly doubled United Way’s annual $5.5 million budget.
Sharing the news
Scott announced the gift to United Way, along with gifts made to 383 other organizations, in a Medium post on Dec. 15, 2020. In it, she described how she and her team poured through 6,490 potential recipient organizations, narrowing them down to the nearly 400 who, like Garvin, would receive an unexpected boost from Scott’s fortunes.
A pre-scheduled United Way board meeting was set to take place the following day. Garvin called AiVi Nguyen, then-chair of the nonprofit board and partner at Worcester law firm Bowditch & Dewey, that night to tell her what had happened, and announced the news to the larger board the following morning.
Immediately, the team got to work both sharing what had happened with the public and putting the money to work across their service region, looking for ways to spend nearly double the amount the United Way spends annually.
The first motion the board supported returned $500,000 to the United Way endowment fund, replenishing the same amount of money set aside in June 2020 to help cover, with the help of the Worcester Together Fund, a projected $1-million deficit across the city’s summer youth programs.
That pool of money, the largest the nonprofit had ever taken out of its endowment, supported grants given to the Summer Literacy Initiative, Recreation Worcester, and Youth Connect, which runs at local youth service agencies including the Boys & Girls Club of Worcester, Friendly House, You, Inc., Girls Inc. of Worcester, YWCA Central Massachusetts, and the YMCA of Central Massachusetts.
Another $500,000 was set aside to retroactively support the Worcester Remote Learning Hub Collaborative.
“The pandemic has really taken a lot away from kids, and I think the summer program, where we teamed up with the United Way and other Youth Connect partners, really helped them have a summer that felt a little bit more normal,” said Liz Hamilton, executive director of the Boys & Girls Club of Worcester.
After that first $1 million was allocated, spending the Scott donation has, for the United Way, been an exercise in identifying and supporting three core beliefs: the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion; the importance of early education not only for children but for parents and a functioning economy; and providing for basic needs and eradicating poverty. All of these ideas, from Garvin’s vantage point, are about authentically engaging with the community United Way serves.
Practically speaking, this has come in a variety of ways, including gifts distributed to organizations both through competitive and non-competitive processes.
On the competitive side of things, United Way announced in November it was distributing more than $1 million from the Scott donation to 14 different local nonprofits, selected after each pitched their programming through a 90-second video, and then again, before a panel of judges. Applicants’ organizational work was required to fall under one of the three major spending categories United Way had decided to prioritize.
Garvin and his team used this mechanism to connect with groups who may not be as well-known in the area.
“We wanted to make sure we were reaching out to people who had never been part of the United Way system before,” he said.
On the noncompetitive side, United Way decided at its annual meeting to announce $250,000 would go toward groups the nonprofit thought were making a difference in the community. Those selected were not asked to apply.
Among recipients was Rock of Salvation church, which runs a food kitchen in Worcester’s Main South neighborhood.
“The need is so great,” said Head Pastor Jose Perez. “People are hungry. The price of food is just astronomical, and it just keeps going up; and unfortunately people’s salaries don’t go up as fast.”
The funding from United Way went toward helping Perez and his team deliver hot meals, in large part to the city’s undocumented population, an effort begun when COVID first hit. They serve between 120 and 150 meals per week.
“It’s impossible for me not to say that the results were extraordinary,” Garvin said of the funding round, which also supported groups like Entrepreneurship for All, Worcester Green Corps, and 2Gether We Eat.
So far, through these funding initiatives and several other community donations, United Way has distributed roughly $2.5 million of Scott’s gift, and right now, the nonprofit is taking what Garvin called a chance to catch their collective breath, as a new year begins.
And what a year, for his team, it’s been, providing them an unprecedented opportunity to expand their support for partner organizations, as well as build relationships with new groups they hadn’t worked with before.
“These could have impacts that last forever,” Garvin said.
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