The BOMA Project, a nonprofit formerly based in Manchester, Vt., has received a $10 million donation from billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott.
BOMA works with women in the rural drylands of Africa to give them the resources to escape and stay out of extreme poverty.
The gift was “a total surprise,” said John Stephens, BOMA’s chief executive.
BOMA typically must seek out gifts by submitting a proposal to a foundation or other possible funder, Stephens said. In this case, the organization received a call a couple of weeks ago, saying it would receive the donation from Scott.
The gift is the largest donation the organization has ever received “by far,” Stephens said. It’s unrestricted, meaning Scott has not earmarked it for any specific purpose within the organization.
“In terms of what it means for a nonprofit, it’s just unbelievably liberating and allows you to do things that were never possible before,” Stephens said.
Beginning in 2018, BOMA pivoted its strategy for addressing extreme poverty in Africa, focusing on teaching their methods to other nonprofits and working with governments. Stephens said the new donation will help BOMA expand those efforts.
BOMA enrolls groups of 50 to 60 women in its 24-month Rural Entrepreneur Access Project, where they receive business training from a mentor in their community. The program also sets them up in a new business.
“They could be running a small convenience store. It could be even as simple as owning some goats, but it’s something that starts to bring in some income,” Stephens said.
After six months, the program connects them with a savings group composed of other women in the program, he said. Members of these groups “meet monthly to withdraw or deposit savings,” according to the description on BOMA’s website.
In a Medium post titled “Seeding by Ceding,” Scott, who was formerly married to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, wrote that she and husband Dan Jewett worked with a team to identify organizations during the first quarter of this year, then gave a total of $2.7 billion to 286 organizations.
Scott wrote that the donations went to “high-impact organizations in categories and communities that have been historically underfunded and overlooked.”
“What do we think they might do with more cash on hand than they expected?” Scott wrote. “Buy needed supplies. Find new creative ways to help. Hire a few extra team members they know they can pay for the next five years. Buy chairs for them. Stop having to work every weekend. Get some sleep.”
This is not the first time Scott has given to an organization founded in Vermont. In late 2020, Scott gave $9 million to the Vermont Foodbank in a round of giving that included 384 organizations. The gift was the largest in the Foodbank’s history.
Though BOMA was founded by Kathleen Colson who was living in Dorset and had an office in Manchester, Stephens said the organization is now primarily based in Washington, D.C. — though much of BOMA’s work is conducted virtually. The organization also has several offices in Kenya, Stephens said.
Since BOMA’s efforts involve bringing groups of people together, the organization had to adapt its work during the pandemic. Stephens said every woman enrolled in the Rural Entrepreneur Access Project receives a cellphone, so communication shifted from in-person to phone calls. Though he feels face-to-face communication is best, Stephens said he was proud that modifications allowed all the women to remain enrolled in the program.
“We kept them all moving forward, and women who were supposed to graduate this year have been graduating,” he said.
As for his future goals, Stephens said he wants people to think about poverty in the way that they thought about the pandemic and the search for a vaccine — as something that can be fixed, and fixed quickly.
“If we take that same kind of focus and dedication that we took for Covid and the vaccines and apply that to poverty, I think we could end poverty in a decade around the world, and that would be phenomenal,” he said.