Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has donated $20 million to Vermont’s largest affordable housing owner and manager, Champlain Housing Trust.
Scott’s charitable giving organization, Yield Giving, contacted CHT in February with questions about the Burlington group’s mission and projects, CEO Michael Monte said. The callers said they worked with a philanthropic group in San Francisco but didn’t reveal which one.
Five months later, after researching CHT’s finances and programs, Yield Giving called back to tell Monte that the nonprofit housing agency will receive $20 million — the largest donation in CHT’s 40-year history and nearly as much as the group’s annual operating budget of $27 million.
MacKenzie Scott is the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Soon after their divorce in 2019, she announced a plan to give away her fortune, estimated at around $30 billion, in areas such as education, women’s health and affordable housing. Scott has donated more than $14 billion to at least 1,600 charities since 2020, with nearly half going to early childhood education and early childhood development, the Associated Press reported this month.
Scott has made three other gifts that affect Vermont directly, according to Yield: $10 million in 2020 to Goodwill Northern New England; $9 million in 2020 to the Vermont Foodbank; and $6 million to the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation’s Community Crisis Action Fund, which serves Vermont and Maine.
CHT, which owns and manages $400 million worth of real estate, will use the gift to shore up existing programs. Some of the money will boost CHT’s endowment, which is used to pay for homeowner education and for the social workers who assist people who have moved from homelessness to affordable housing — services that haven’t had a dedicated source of funding.
“We were going to either raise money for it or go out and sort of reduce the amount of service work that we’re doing in our properties,” Monte said.
The donation also will help CHT expand its homeownership equity program, which provides down-payment assistance for people of color statewide through work with similar agencies, such as Windham & Windsor Housing Trust of Brattleboro, he added.
“We had talked about doing it statewide, but we weren’t getting very far,” Monte said. “Now we can do that.”
More than 2,600 families live in rental units managed by CHT in Chittenden, Franklin and Grand Isle counties. It has about 500 apartments planned or under construction.
CHT has bought nine hotels or motels in recent years and is preparing to purchase a 10th, the Champlain Inn on Shelburne Road in Burlington. Six are slated for affordable housing, one is a domestic violence shelter and another is being used for transitional housing in St. Albans. Two others are being used for the state’s emergency housing general assistance program for people experiencing homelessness, said Chris Donnelly, CHT’s director of community relations.
CHT also provides mortgage and down-payment assistance, as well as financial counseling. And CHT also has a small community development portfolio. It owns the Old North End Community Center and plans to buy the O’Brien Community Center in Winooski, which houses a library, a community health clinic and other tenants. It’s also helping to expand Feeding Chittenden, the Burlington-based food shelf and meal program.
“People and neighborhoods need more than housing — they need services, places to gather and connect,” Donnelly said.
The Yield Giving money will help CHT both avoid borrowing money for projects and strengthen its balance sheet so that when it must, it can obtain financing more easily.
Monte said Yield knew of CHT through its work with large national affordable housing organizations such as NeighborWorks America and the Grounded Solutions Network. Other affordable housing leaders from the U.S. and Europe visit CHT to learn more about its shared equity program, which provides down payment assistance to low-income homebuyers, and about its work in converting motels and hotels to permanent affordable housing. Yield looks for innovative, high-performing nonprofits with deep experience, he said.
“They didn’t just pick us out of a hat; it was a little more complex than that,” Monte said.
Before selecting CHT, Yield’s consultants also spent months poring through the paperwork associated with CHT’s complex mix of real estate development, property management and lending activities. The nonprofit uses federal low-income housing tax credits, state funds administered by the Vermont Housing & Conservation Board, energy rebates and an array of partnerships to build and maintain its properties and services.
Donnelly estimated that $100 million to $150 million flows through the organization each year. CHT undergoes 80 annual audits and processes 38,000 invoices. With housing prices escalating in Vermont and nationwide, $20 million won’t solve northwestern Vermont’s housing problems. But it helps, Monte said.
“We have grown pretty dramatically over the last handful of years,” he said. “This gives us a financial foundation.”
This article appears in Sep 20-26, 2023.
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