MDRC is honored to announce that it has received a $15 million gift from philanthropists MacKenzie Scott and Dan Jewett. MDRC is one of 286 organizations included in this set of grants totaling $2.7 billion to “high-impact organizations in categories and communities that have been historically underfunded and overlooked.” MDRC President Virginia Knox made the following statement:

On behalf of the MDRC Board and staff, I want to express my profound gratitude to Ms. Scott and Mr. Jewett for their trust in us and for their generosity in making an unrestricted grant, which gives a nonprofit like MDRC the freedom to make transformational changes.

We see this gift as an endorsement of our mission to bring the best evidence and implementation know-how to improving policies and programs so that they create real avenues of opportunity for people with low incomes. I want to thank our Board, our staff, our other funders, our many collaborators, and, most importantly, the participants in our projects—all of whom have helped us build an organization deemed worthy of this gift.

This grant will enable us to deepen our ability to develop actionable evidence to disrupt long-standing inequities in our society and to make our work even more useful to policymakers, practitioners, and participants in public systems. Thank you to Ms. Scott and Mr. Jewett for recognizing MDRC’s accomplishments to date by entrusting us with resources to build new solutions to reduce poverty and increase equity in the years to come.