MacKenzie Scott's $70 Million to the American Indian College Fund Lands as the White House Proposes Zeroing Out Tribal College Funding for a Second Year

On October 29, 2026, the American Indian College Fund announced a seven-year funding plan built on a $70 million unrestricted gift from Yield Giving, MacKenzie Scott's philanthropic vehicle. It is the second gift the College Fund has received from Scott in five years, and the largest. About $20 million of it will go into a designated endowment. The rest will pay for expanded scholarships, student coaching, wellness programs, internships, mentoring, and a long list of investments in the country's tribal colleges and universities (TCUs).

The College Fund has been the largest charity supporting Native higher education for 37 years. It has provided more than $391 million in scholarships, programs and college support since 1989, and more than $23 million in student support in 2024–25 alone. So $70 million is roughly three years of its recent student-support spending, arriving in a single unrestricted commitment.

The timing matters as much as the size. Six months before the gift, the administration's FY2027 budget request proposed eliminating dedicated federal funding for tribal colleges for the second year in a row. Three months before it, a Brookings Institution study co-produced with the College Fund put a number on philanthropy's long neglect of Indian Country: 0.88% of foundation and corporate giving in 2024.

This analysis covers what the gift pays for, why it is not a substitute for federal TCU funding, and what tribal colleges, Native-serving nonprofits and their funders should do over the next 12 months.

What the $70 million buys

The College Fund says it wrote the plan after consulting Native students, TCU presidents, community members and its board of trustees. "We built this plan by listening first," said Cheryl Crazy Bull, the College Fund's president and CEO. "We know a teacher can change lives, and a health-care worker can save them."

The plan has two halves.

Student-facing investments:

• Expanded TCU scholarships
• College success coaching
• Wellness and academic resources, including culturally reflective wellness programs
• Internships, career assessment and mentoring
• College-to-career pathways
• A family-friendly campus initiative

Institution-facing investments in TCUs:

• Faculty development
• Institutional capacity
• Cultural and environmental programming
• Curriculum and research
• Governance training
• Public awareness campaigns

The roughly $20 million endowment is the structural piece. An endowment that size, at a typical 4–5% payout, would throw off something like $800,000 to $1 million a year indefinitely. That is our estimate, not a College Fund projection; the announcement does not publish a distribution schedule. Either way, the endowment is meant to outlast the seven-year plan. The other ~$50 million is spending money, which works out to about $7 million a year over seven years if spent evenly.

The design follows evidence the College Fund has been citing for years. Its own research finds that its scholars graduate and enter careers at 1.5 times the rate when they get support beyond the scholarship itself. That is why so much of the plan goes to coaching, wellness, mentoring and career pathways instead of simply raising award amounts.

The number behind the gift: 0.88%

The College Fund framed the gift with the Brookings report it co-produced, Underinvestment in Indian Country: How federal and philanthropic funding to Native Americans falls short, and how to fix it, published August 11, 2026 by Robert Maxim, Glencora Haskins and Danika Grieser of Brookings Metro.

Its philanthropy findings are worth quoting in any proposal that touches Native communities:

The gap between the average and the median is the most useful finding for grant seekers. A $111,200 average with a $20,000 median means a small number of organizations receive most of the dollars. The typical Native-serving nonprofit is working with grants that rarely cover a full staff position. A single $70 million commitment to one intermediary is a big outlier in that distribution, and the College Fund will regrant much of it to students and TCUs through its own programs.

Brookings also finds that Native Americans have never received philanthropic funding in proportion to their population share. Its recommendations for funders read like a checklist of what the Yield Giving gift does: long-term patient capital instead of one-time grants, support for Native-led organizations and intermediaries, capacity-building help, and flexible application processes.

Why philanthropy cannot replace the federal line

The federal side of the Brookings report explains why even a $70 million gift does not change the basic math for tribal colleges.

The four big Biden-era laws (the American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, CHIPS and Science, and the Inflation Reduction Act) provided roughly $62.2 billion to Indian Country. About $30.3 billion had been obligated in grants through FY2025, across nearly 300 programs and 23 agencies. Treasury's State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds alone accounted for $20 billion. After the pandemic spike, Brookings found federal funding fell back to the pre-pandemic baseline. Since 2025 the report documents cuts tied to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, canceled grants and contracts, and the March 2025 repeal of Executive Order 14112.

Tribal colleges rely on federal money far more than most institutions. They are chartered by tribes, often in places with little local tax base, and most of their students cannot pay high tuition. United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck gets about 70% of its funding from the federal government, according to its president, Russ McDonald. By one count, TCUs received about $196 million in total federal funding in FY2025.

Against that baseline, the FY2027 request is stark:

• The Interior Department's budget would cut more than $150 million (one report says $160 million) from TCUs, tribal technical colleges and Bureau of Indian Education postsecondary programs, taking dedicated funding to zero.
• Haskell Indian Nations University and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute are both targeted. The Institute of American Indian Arts would lose all federal support.
• The FY2026 request had sought about $105 million in cuts. Congress rejected them.

"If this budget was to pass, our TCUs would be forced to close within a year," Ahniwake Rose, president of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), said in April. For FY2027, AIHEC is asking Congress for $173.46 million for BIE Post Secondary Programs (forward funded), plus $38 million for TCU infrastructure.

The $70 million is also spread over seven years and goes through an intermediary to 34 accredited TCUs and thousands of students. Even if every dollar went straight to institutional operations, which it will not, it would replace only a small part of one year's federal support. The gift and the federal line do different jobs. The gift funds the student-success layer that federal formulas rarely cover. The federal line keeps the lights on.

Where FY2027 actually stands

Grant planners should read the FY2027 request as a proposal, not an outcome. As of November 1, 2026, the government is running on a continuing resolution through December 11, 2026, at prior-year levels. So TCU funding is flowing at FY2026 rates for now. The House reported its FY2027 Interior bill (H.R. 9171) on June 5, 2026. Members from both parties have said they will protect the TCU lines. Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) said he expects Congress to "continue to fund them again in the coming year," and Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) vowed to fight for IAIA's funding.

Last year's sequence is the best guide. The administration proposed cuts, Congress rejected them, and the Department of Education later redistributed additional discretionary funds toward TCUs and HBCUs. A repeat is plausible. But "plausible" is not a budget assumption a tribal college CFO can bank on in a year with a December 11 deadline, a midterm election on November 3, and a real risk of a full-year CR.

For more on the federal programs TCUs rely on, see our complete tribal college funding guide and our walkthrough of NSF's Tribal Colleges and Universities Program.

Strategy: what to do now

If you lead or work at a tribal college

1. Treat the College Fund as a near-term funder, not just a scholarship conduit. The plan names faculty development, institutional capacity, curriculum, research, governance training, and cultural and environmental programming as TCU investments. The College Fund already runs institutional programs; in August it was awarded $1.3 million for an environmental stewardship program with TCUs. Ask your College Fund program contacts now how the new money will flow: competitive cycles, cohort programs, or formula allocations. Then align your 2027 projects with the named categories.
2. Build a two-scenario FY2027 budget. Model a flat-funded year (CR or enacted at FY2026 levels) and a disrupted year (delayed or partial appropriations). Know which positions and programs sit on federal formula money, and set board-approved triggers for what happens if the December 11 CR is followed by another short-term extension.
3. Use the Brookings numbers in every private proposal. "Indian Country receives 88 cents of every $100 in U.S. philanthropic investment" is a sourced, current statistic that most program officers have not seen. Pair it with the AIHEC estimate that every dollar invested in TCUs returns $1.60 in tax revenue and public-sector savings, and with TCUs' $3.8 billion in economic impact in FY2022–23.
4. Do not reduce your federal advocacy because of the gift. Funders and appropriators may both be tempted to see $70 million as a sign that philanthropy is filling the gap. Your congressional testimony and member meetings should make the scale clear: a seven-year gift to an intermediary does not replace dedicated federal funding for 34 institutions.

If you run a Native-serving nonprofit

1. Ask for multi-year, general operating support, and cite the median. A $20,000 median grant is what keeps Native-serving organizations from building capacity. Brookings explicitly recommends patient capital and flexible processes. Put the recommendation in front of funders who have signed trust-based philanthropy pledges and ask them to follow it.
2. Pitch intermediaries. Much of the money in this space moves through Native-led intermediaries such as the College Fund, the American Indian Graduate Center, Native Forward Scholars Fund and Native-led community foundations. Scott's past gifts to Native organizations went to exactly this kind of entity. Smaller organizations should build relationships with intermediaries that regrant, not only with national foundations.
3. Track Scott's pattern, but don't apply to it. Yield Giving does not accept unsolicited proposals; its gifts come from its own research. The practical lesson is that organizations with clear outcome data, Native-led governance and a credible multi-year plan are the ones that get selected. The College Fund's "listening first" plan is a template.

If you are a funder

The Brookings report gives you a benchmark. If Native Americans are 1% to 2.7% of the population, and your portfolio is below 1% in Native-serving grants, you are below the national average, and the national average is already below parity. Co-investing alongside the Yield Giving plan through the College Fund is the lowest-friction way to change that. So are multi-year operating grants to TCUs directly.

The bottom line

The Yield Giving gift is the largest the American Indian College Fund has received from Scott. It is unrestricted and deliberately long-horizon, which makes it exactly the kind of capital Brookings says Indian Country almost never gets. It will strengthen the student-success layer at tribal colleges for most of a decade.

It does not change the federal question. Tribal colleges' operating budgets still depend on appropriations that the administration has now proposed to eliminate twice. The next date that matters is December 11, 2026, when the continuing resolution expires. Until Congress acts, every TCU should be planning for both outcomes, and every Native-serving organization should use this moment and the 0.88% figure to make a better case to private funders.