A democratic platform for donations

Redistributing wealth through democracy

I’ve previously written about how I think things are fucked, and ideally we wouldn’t have the wealth disparities that we do. I can’t change that. One of the most effective actions I can take to reduce the disparity is to give away money.

In April 2020, a billionaire, that feels to me like "one of the good guys"¹, announced that he was donating over a billion dollars to charitable causes. Jack Dorsey committed a third of his net worth, and the results were to be tracked in a public spreadsheet.

The last update to that spreadsheet was on December 19th, 2023, with a million dollar donation to the Tor Project. As of March 2025, the amount left is $1.021 billion dollars. So after interest they still have over a billion dollars, even after giving out six hundred and thirty-four million.

But I can’t fault Jack, and his #startsmall foundation for struggling to donate all the money. Donating vast sums of money is difficult. You want to donate it somewhere effective. And do your best to avoid lining the pockets of rich or corrupt charities. But with the sourcing, the vetting, the deciding, and even sometimes the giving… the whole process takes a lot of resources in and of itself. Especially at large scales.

The end result is hundreds of billions of dollars sitting stagnant in funds that were earmarked for donations. Ideally we could extract and distribute more wealth from the rich, but is there a better way to effectively distribute those funds?

Fundraising

I despise classical fundraising. A system where the charities have to go out and actively court donations from benefactors. The explicit use of a charity’s time and resources on something that does nothing to directly advance their cause.

One of my pet peeves is the charities that use a portion of their income to send unsolicited mail to millions of people, often including small gifts, pieces of useless plastic that’ll likely land up in the landfills. Or fancy paper that makes the entire package unrecyclable.

Then there are the charities that host opulent events and galas. I understand why they exist, but they serve to corrupt the space. Rich donors choose the charities to give money to based on the social reward and invitations. A quid pro quo that pushes more money towards more famous non-profits, and often ones that do more to expand the wealth gap rather than shrink it.

You could argue, and rightly so, that many of these donors would give far less without the fundraising. But it’s a systemic flaw. And systemic solutions could improve the situation.

Democracy

The core tenet of our current system is democracy. From ancient greek, the dēmos (‘people’) kratos (‘rule’). Dividing up the power of the country among the people. Many system failures are caused by small groups gaining too much power. In the dangerous cases— using that power to accumulate even more.

I’m interested in trying to solve that specific problem: Given a group of people, how do we come to the best answers?

Whether that group is a household, community, village town or country. How do we take everyones input and extract something intelligible out of it. Especially on the country scales, when everyone has differing priorities and investments into the specific question

An organization I’ve been following called the Collective Intelligence Project has been trying to answer this question, even if they seem to be a little more focused on AI at the moment.

The most impactful place this appears in in government elections. The democratic voting system is fairly new in the grand scheme of things, and while we’ve done good… we haven’t done great. The US has been moving away from a democratic vote for decades now, and my home in South Africa hasn’t fared that much better.

Some other countries mandate voting. A couple US states have used ranked choice voting. Others systems, such as liquid democracy, have complicated incentives that seem risky in practice. I think there’s a good answer here, but getting it wrong at a country scale would be a tragedy. So it’s useful to have demonstrations and experiments to gain confidence in new voting systems, before trying to implement them on grander scales.

I’d like to start a donation platform which will also function as an experiment in democracy. Giving the people a platform to choose the destination of the funds, rather than the ultra-wealthy donors.

A modern democratic fundgiving platform

I’m starting a new fundgiving platform, as opposed to the fundraising ones. The core idea where is to reduce the amount of work charities need to do, and enable relatively unknown ones to receive useful cash infusions.

I take a lot of inspiration from the Pineapple Fund, but because I don’t have $86 million to donate I’ll only be kicking the fund off with a more humble $50k. I’ll do some fundraising (yes, I appreciate the irony) to build that up.

We’ll take proposals of charities to donate to, and set up a voting system so anyone in the US can vote on where they think there’s funds should go. Combatting fraud here is difficult, and so initially the system will require you to have a US phone number in order to register.

Beyond that nothing is decided. There already a bunch of compromises I don’t love, but feel necessary to prevent fraud. The phone verification has a set of problems and abuses. I wouldn’t want to limit to just the US. But initially— those feel like a fair set of constraints.

Voting systems

I’m still in the research phase for voting systems, so not much here yet.

The GitCoin grants was powered by an interesting take of matching funds by the number quadratic funding. You get additional votes based on the amount you’ve donated, but not linearly with your donated amount.

The simpler kwanda.co gives votes to each $5/month contributor, and then they propose funding targets with a focus on African development.

I’m hoping to find a group to discuss this with as we build the platform.

Finding and funding smaller charities

There are some well known giant charities. My favorites are GiveWell and GiveDirectly. But there are thousands more individuals that could do amazing things with a small grant.

The small charities are the ones struggling. The ones with passionate founders who are hamstrung by finances. The ones where each dollar could be far more effective. But with the broader publics attention. And it might not be useful anyway, because they wouldn’t know what to do with more than a couple thousand.

I’m hoping this approach can help source these charities, fund them, and help improve global equality by allowing these people to do the work they want to do, without having to do the fundraising no-one wants them to be doing.

Trying to source these grants and filter them will be a lot of work. It’s an area that’s a particular target for scams and fraud. This is still very much an unsolved problem in my mind, but even if we don’t get to a perfect answer — we sure as hell can do better than nothing.

And there’s also the set of non-profits that I don’t think are doing good. Those pushing religious agendas, or those helping in one area but at the cost of another. How do we filter these charities, while keeping the process democratic. The whole point here is to remove my power in making the decision on where the money goes.

If this platform is successful it will help surface the best of these charities, delivering the funding they need. Reducing the fraud risk, but doing so while keeping the destinations public and democratic.

1. You could argue that there shouldn’t be any billionaires, and I do agree. But I want to give the man some credit, the way he earned his wealth is without the typical exploitation, and he’s done a lot to enable better platforms. One, Bluesky, was in direct competition to his company Twitter. This is all before the listed donation.