College Board of Trustees ‘Disappointed’ by ‘Unauthorized Use’ of MacKenzie Scott’s $20M Donation

A California community college received a $20 million gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott — but officials say part of the donation was spent without proper authorization.

Santa Barbara City College Board of Trustees President Jonathan Abboud said in a statement late last month that the board was “concerned” by the “unauthorized use” of the 2021 donation, the largest in the school’s 112-year history.

The Santa Barbara City College Foundation said the donation “effectively funded a large portion of” its Promise Program, which provides tuition assistance, books and other supplies for local high school students.

Bobbi Abram, CEO of the SBCC Foundation, told SFGATE that about $10.5 million of the gift was used for the program from 2021 to 2024. She said the spending was done without approval from the foundation’s board, Santa Barbara City College officials, or the school’s board of trustees. About $13 million remains from Scott’s original donation.

Abboud said the board of trustees was “disappointed” to learn what happened, but thanked the foundation’s current leadership for identifying the issue, launching a comprehensive review of past accounting practices, and strengthening internal controls.

The college noted that its board of trustees has opened its own investigation, since the SBCC Foundation is a separate legal entity. Abboud added that the board will continue working with the foundation to address the matter and ensure transparency and accountability for how the gift funds are used.

Abram said the foundation does not believe the funds were “misused,” emphasizing that the Promise Program supports more than 1,800 local students each year and is intended to make higher education more accessible for families in the area. She described the problem as an accounting and authorization failure — not a misuse of funds — and said the foundation discovered the issue in 2025 and has since corrected it.

SBCC’s student newspaper The Channels and SFGATE reported that Abram became the foundation’s CEO in May 2024 and ordered an audit after noticing inconsistencies in accounting records. Abram said the misstatement occurred at the fund level and fell outside the scope of a previous audit, and that prior management was responsible for reporting it.

The foundation has said it is tightening oversight of its accounting systems to prevent similar issues in the future.

Scott has made numerous large donations to educational institutions and other organizations nationwide. In 2020, a Rutgers University report said she donated more than $560 million to 23 historically Black colleges and universities. Rutgers researchers found that schools receiving funds saw a median increase of more than 300 new students compared with schools that did not receive funding.

SFGATE also reported that Scott donated $38 million to the University of California, Merced shortly after giving $50 million to California State University, East Bay. In 2025, she gave more than $7.1 billion to nonprofit organizations.

Scott has said she intends to give away most of her wealth during her lifetime. Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index estimates her net worth at nearly $40 billion. Since her divorce from Jeff Bezos was finalized in 2019, she has become known for large, unrestricted gifts that a Center for Effective Philanthropy study described as reshaping modern philanthropy.