The call was fishy, so she hung up. It was actually a local nonprofit’s dream donor
The large anonymous donation seemed like a hoax, Colleen Speer told the Peninsula School Board.
The executive director of Communities in Schools of Peninsula explained she got a call Dec. 9 from a number she didn’t recognize.
“So I pick up the phone and this woman started asking me these questions,” Speer said at the school board meeting Feb. 10. “And she said, well I just want to tell you that I have a donor that wants to give you a large, anonymous donation.”
The woman wouldn’t give her the name of the donor, the company she worked for or really anything solid to go on.
“And I was like: ‘OK, this is a scam,’ so I hung up on her,” Speer said. “True story.”
It turned out the caller was a representative of philanthropist MacKenzie Scott. Scott wanted to support the nonprofit, which is a dropout prevention program with branches across the country that works to give students the support and resources they need to stay in school.
“I got a phone call from my national president, Rey Saldaña,” Speer said. “He was at the airport. And he said: ‘Colleen, you just hung up on a very important person, so you better call her back right now.’”
She did, and what followed was $800,000 for the local program, part of a $133.5 million donation Scott made to the program nationally. More than $5 million went to programs in Washington state, including the nonprofit’s state office and the Peninsula, Benton-Franklin and Renton-Tukwila branches.
“I found out that we are one out of 40 affiliates in the nation. There’s 110 affiliates in the nation, and this donor did extensive research on us and looked at everything that we have accomplished,” Speer told the school board. “ ... as my national president said: ‘We passed a test we didn’t know we were taking.’”
That kind of random donation is a nonprofit director’s dream, she said.
“This donation will not only allow Communities In Schools of Peninsula (CISP) to increase the number of schools and students we serve, but it will also add organizational sustainability and the ability to increase resources and services within our existing schools,” Speer said in a news release announcing the donation earlier this month. “It also speaks to our work of striving for educational and racial equity, which was clearly important to this donor.”
She’s putting together a task force to figure out the specifics.
Kept under wraps
For six weeks, Speer had to keep the news secret. Her husband found out the morning it was featured on CBS earlier this month. It wasn’t until the weeks before the donation that Scott decided to attach her name to it, Speer said.
The national organization has been around for 44 years, and it’s been operating in the Gig Harbor area for 22 years.
“We have 17 qualified professional staff that work in the schools, both as site coordinators positions and after school program coordinators,” Speer said.
It had 130 volunteers helping with its after-school reading and math programs prior to the pandemic, and right now it has about 60, she told the board, and will be ramping back up as social distancing requirements allow.
Scott’s donation will be a “game-changer” Speer told The Gateway. It’s about the size of the nonprofit’s budget, which is about $760,000 this year.
“I’m glad I kept her number,” Speer said. “... It’s just a blessing.”
This story was originally published February 13, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
