Back for its third and final year, the Scott-Jewett Fund for Innovation and Student Success will fund eight projects centered around promoting social justice and student-led research at Cal State Fullerton.
This year, the Scott-Jewett Fund will support programs ranging from a woman’s leadership initiative to “Project Rebound,” a program providing formerly incarcerated students with academic opportunities and mentoring.
“This sort of philanthropy is so transformative,” said Kimberly Shiner, vice president for University Advancement. “The purpose is to build that pipeline into leadership for historically underrepresented students.”
The fund was created in 2021 after philanthropist Mackenzie Scott and her husband, Dan Jewett, gifted $40 million to the university to be used freely.
Scott, currently worth $31 billion, promised in 2019 to donate her entire fortune following her divorce with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Since then, she has donated over $16 billion to nearly 2,000 organizations, according to a report by Forbes.
The CSUF gift was part of $2.7 billion announced in a one-day donation spree benefiting 286 organizations nationwide that spread an infusion of new funding around Southern California, benefiting colleges and arts programs, youth advancement efforts and social justice groups.
The $40 million gift to Cal State Fullerton, the largest in the university’s history, was allocated to seven different initiatives, with the largest piece, $15 million, used to create the MacKenzie Scott & Dan Jewett Endowed Fund for Excellence. Another $11 million went toward a matching gift program, where the funding will provide a 50% match to endowments to the university.
Of the remaining $14 million dedicated to various campus initiatives, $3 million was allocated to the Scott-Jewett Fund for Innovation and Student Success.
To receive funding of up to $150,000, students, faculty or campus groups submitted an abstract of up to 1,000 words outlining their cause and its ties to social justice. Proposals were then selected by a committee of campus stakeholders.
Terri Patchen, professor of elementary and bilingual education at Cal State Fullerton, applied for funding in 2023 to support Black undergraduate students’ participation in research at the university.
The resulting program — Bolstering Black Undergraduate Student Creative Activities and Research — supported 18 Black undergraduate students and 11 faculty mentors to conduct and present their own unrestricted research.
“All the students, with no experience in research, really went from zero to 100 in terms of pulling together the most amazing research. If you look for that capacity, you will find it,” Patchen said.
Dominique Beck, a fourth-year majoring in criminal justice and African American studies is supported by the program. An aspiring criminal defense attorney, her research centers on prison abolition.
Beck said the program gave her the space to pursue her academic interests.
“I’ve always been interested in wrongful convictions, but the more I talked to people about it, I could tell it was a controversial topic,” said Beck. “The program gave me the opportunity to learn how to do something that I enjoy doing.”
Since its creation, the fund has supported 25 projects, with $1 million dollars being allocated to a group of projects each year.
Though the fund is set to expire in spring of 2025, Shiner hopes to continue supporting student-led projects through philanthropic work.
“The impacts of this program are far-reaching,” Shiner said. “And our goal is to see these projects continued and sustained.”
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