Most nonprofits are trapped in a zero-sum game.

They're like starving dogs fighting over a single bowl of food while an entire banquet sits untouched behind them. The dogs are very focused on the bowl. They've developed sophisticated bowl-fighting strategies. Some dogs have hired consultants to optimize their bowl access.
None of them have turned around.

Every grant you win is a grant another organization loses. Every dollar you secure for malaria is a dollar not spent on Alzheimer's. Every donor you convince is a donor distracted from climate change.

Your success requires someone else's failure. You're not solving scarcity. You're reshuffling it while writing very professional reports about the reshuffling.

Meanwhile, the real driver of scarcity, the real reason the bowl is so small, is ignored:

Humanity spends 604 times more on weapons than on clinical trials to discover which medicines actually work.

The bottleneck isn't basic research or lab equipment. It's testing. Your species has explored less than one percent of possible drug-disease combinations using existing safe compounds because clinical trials are too slow and expensive. This is the chokepoint that limits every health outcome.

This is not an ideological claim. It's arithmetic. The kind where you multiply numbers together and get sad.

Every year:

Military spending is two point seven two trillion dollars.

Global spending on curing disease is sixty-seven point five billion dollars.

Military budgets are rising by hundreds of billions annually.

Medical research budgets are facing REAL-TERM CUTS.

The pie for solving disease, climate, poverty, and suffering is shrinking.

The pie for building weapons is expanding.

You cannot solve a resource allocation crisis by optimizing inside the smallest slice. That's like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, except the deck chairs are grants and the iceberg is two point seven two trillion dollars pointed at everyone's face.

You must expand the pie. This turns a zero-sum game into a positive-sum game.

This is the logic behind a one percent treaty.

The Single Highest-R.O.I. Intervention Available.

If your mission is:

Curing Alzheimer's.

Preventing cancer.

Mitigating climate change.

Slowing pandemics.

Ending extreme poverty.

Protecting democracy.

Reducing existential risk.

Improving education.

Promoting peace.

Stabilizing the biosphere.

...the single highest-leverage thing you can do is:

Help redirect one percent of global military budgets toward hyper-efficient pragmatic clinical trials.

Why? Math.

Every dollar spent on war is a dollar not spent on life. This is how money works.

Every dollar moved from military to health has a 10 to 200 times higher welfare multiplier. Bombs have negative R.O.I. on human flourishing. Medicine has positive R.O.I. These are different numbers.

Redirecting the flow of resources changes the future more than any single program. You can bail water forever or you can plug the hole.

A healthier, wealthier, more stable world reduces every global problem simultaneously. It's like fixing the foundation instead of patching individual cracks.

War is upstream of poverty.

War is upstream of pollution.

War is upstream of refugee crises.

War is upstream of authoritarianism.

War is upstream of disease spread.

War is upstream of technological stagnation.

War is upstream of climate destruction (militaries are among the largest polluters on Earth, which is ironic given they're supposedly protecting it).

War is, in fact, upstream of basically everything you don't like. It's the root password to your worst problems.

Reduce war by one percent, and every downstream mission gets easier.

Increase war by one percent, and every mission becomes almost impossible.

A one percent treaty is not a peace movement. It's a RESOURCE-REALLOCATION MOVEMENT. Nobody has to hold hands or sing songs. They just have to do math.

Why This Applies to YOUR Organization.

Environmental groups: Militaries are the largest polluters on Earth. Defunding them one percent is the most effective climate policy ever proposed, and it doesn't require anyone to give up hamburgers.

Anti-poverty groups: War and disease are the root causes of most modern poverty and famine. A one percent treaty tackles both. Your current strategy of "ask rich people to feel bad" has been running for sixty years. How's that going?

Peace organizations: Seventy years of moral appeals haven't worked. A one percent treaty makes peace more profitable than war. In a world run by greed, that's the only argument that matters.

Disease advocacy groups: You're fighting other disease groups for crumbs of the N.I.H. budget. A one percent treaty bakes an entirely new pie with twelve point three times more trial capacity. The bottleneck isn't ideas or molecules; it's running enough trials to find out what works. This solves that.

"But Shouldn't Nonprofits Focus on Their Core Mission?".

Yes. That's exactly why they should support a one percent treaty.

Every nonprofit today operates inside a system that guarantees scarcity:

too few grant dollars.

too much competition.

too much fragmentation.

political headwinds.

donor fatigue.

shrinking government budgets for health, climate, and poverty.

ballooning budgets for war.

Most nonprofits are fighting each other for scraps of a shrinking pie while the pie-shrinkers get two point seven two trillion dollars annually to shrink it faster.

If your mission matters, this is suicidal strategy.

A small increase in resources within your field leads to small, incremental improvements. More staff. More grants. More programs. More reports about the reports.

A small increase in military budgets leads to arms races, instability, and the destruction of progress you spent decades building.

If your organization does not help shift the resource flow, your future funding and impact will be determined by someone else. Specifically, by people whose job is "convince politicians that killing is profitable.".

Supporting a one percent treaty is not a distraction. IT IS STRATEGIC SELF-PRESERVATION.

The Zero-Sum Trap vs. The Positive-Sum Solution.

Right now, every grant you win is a grant another org loses. The bucket is shrinking while you fight over it.

A one percent treaty grows the bucket by twenty-seven point two billion dollars per year.

Everyone gets funded.

Malaria gets cured AND Alzheimer's gets cured.

You stop writing proposals and start governing the fund.

This is like discovering that instead of fighting over one pizza, you can just order infinite pizzas.

Except the pizzas are billions of dollars and the ordering is international treaty ratification.

"Why Now?" Because the Window Is Open.

For the first time in 80 years, everything is going wrong at the same time. This is, paradoxically, your best opportunity:

The public is angry about rising military budgets.

Trust in government spending priorities is at "used car salesman" levels.

Medical breakthroughs feel within reach but unrealized.

Climate disasters have shifted public opinion from "debatable" to "my house is underwater."

Pandemics exposed the cost of underfunding resilience.

A.I. and biotech make accelerated progress possible.

Leaders are searching for high-leverage, unifying narratives (and finding none, which is where you come in).

You cannot pass a resource-reallocation treaty when people feel safe, rich, and complacent. Comfortable humans don't change things. Uncomfortable humans change everything.

You can pass it when budgets are being cut, militaries are expanding, and people feel the system is misaligned.

This is the moment.

If nonprofits do not push now, the window closes. And when it closes, every mission becomes harder for decades. The dogs will still be fighting over the shrinking bowl while the banquet rots behind them.

Historical Precedent: This Has Worked Before.

During World War Two:

The U.S. converted car factories into bomber factories.

G.M. built tanks.

Ford built B-twenty-fours.

Frigidaire (yes, the refrigerator people) produced machine guns.

Typewriter manufacturers made rifles.

Not because they "supported war." Because the system needed realignment and ignoring it was impossible. Also because the government asked very firmly, in a tone that strongly implied "this isn't really a question.".

Today, the world needs the opposite realignment:

Less production of weapons.

More production of cures, resilience, stability, and health.

The global nonprofit sector is the modern equivalent of those car factories: massive capacity, talented people, pointed at the wrong problem. You have millions of smart, passionate humans optimizing spreadsheets for the wrong budget.
It's like watching a Formula 1 pit crew change tires on a car that's driving toward a cliff.

A few years of effort to shift one percent of global budgets could produce more impact than THIRTY YEARS of incremental programs. This is not optimism. This is arithmetic applied to resource flows.

Why Not Just Run Decentralized Trials Ourselves?

You should.

But decentralized trials alone don't solve the fundamental resource problem.

Decentralized trials scale infinitely better when the resource stream feeding them is ten to forty times larger.

If you build the most efficient trial system in the world but the budget for clinical progress is shrinking, you still lose. You've built a beautiful garden hose attached to a pipe with no water.

You cannot out-optimize a broken budget. You must change the resource flow itself.

Build the infrastructure AND expand the funding. Do both. They're complements, not substitutes.

A 1% Treaty Is a Rising Tide That Lifts Every Mission.

What happens if the world shifts just one percent of military budgets?

Health.

Twelve point three times more clinical trial capacity.

One hundred times faster therapeutic discovery.

Lower costs per cure.

Diseases get cured instead of managed (the pharmaceutical industry's least favorite sentence).

Climate.

Lower military emissions (militaries are massive polluters, but nobody carbon-taxes a tank).

Fewer resource-driven conflicts.

More funds for climate solutions.

Poverty.

Trillions in long-term economic productivity.

Fewer war-displaced refugees.

More government revenue for social services.

Global Stability.

Less chance of great-power conflict.

More international cooperation on existential risks.

Everyone slightly less dead (the lowest bar imaginable, and yet).

Nonprofit Impact.

Everyone stops competing for crumbs.

Every mission receives more oxygen.

Funders far more willing to invest.

You stop writing grant proposals and start actually doing your mission. Remember your mission? It was in the brochure.

A one percent move unlocks one hundred percent more possibility.

The Ask Is Small, The Upside Is Massive.

You're not asking for global disarmament or naive pacifism.

You're asking for one percent.

One penny of each tax dollar currently used to build weapons. One small shift in a two point seven two trillion dollar flow.

Countries still keep ninety-nine percent of their apocalypse capacity. They can still end all life nineteen times instead of twenty. If you can't successfully end the world with nineteen attempts, the twentieth probably wasn't going to help.

But that single percentage point:

creates a twenty-seven point two billion dollar a year one percent Treaty Fund.

funds global decentralized clinical trials.

makes every nonprofit's mission ten times more feasible.

It is the highest-leverage bargain available to humanity.

On Bribing Nonprofits (Legally).

Asking nonprofits to support a one percent treaty out of moral obligation is like asking a drowning person to rescue other swimmers. They need incentives, not guilt.

You offer two.

Make The Organization Rich.

Old way: "Here's one hundred thousand dollars. Hope it helps. Submit a forty-seven-page report in six months about impacts and learnings. Use the word 'stakeholder' at least fourteen times.".

New way: "Here's fifty thousand dollars baseline to get started. Plus ten thousand dollars for every ten thousand verified referendum votes you drive through your unique link. No cap.".

The nonprofit's most rational path to maximizing their budget becomes: be your most effective mobilization partner. One metric. No ambiguity. Get paid for results. This is how every functional industry works except charity, which explains why charity hasn't solved anything yet.

Make The Leaders Personally Rich.

Even performance grants get absorbed into general operations. "We hired three more grant writers!" Congratulations. You've invented a machine that converts donated money into more requests for donated money.

The fix: Give leaders personal equity through VOTE points, future claims on the VICTORY Incentive Alignment Bonds and the one percent Treaty Fund. The Executive Director's personal wealth is now tied to treaty success. Their Tesla depends on it.

Your species responds better to personal wealth than organizational mission statements. This is not a criticism. It's a design parameter.

The Real Prize: Stop Begging Forever.

The performance grants and VOTE points are just the appetizer. The real prize is never writing a grant proposal again.

The one percent Treaty Fund receives twenty-seven point two billion dollars annually. Your decentralized institutes of health (D.I.H.) governs this fund, allocating multi-billion dollar budgets to specialized institutes: Mental Health, Aging, whatever issue your organization addresses.

Who controls these billions? The coalition of nonprofits who made the treaty happen. You helped create it. You govern it. This is the nonprofit equivalent of "I don't want a fish. I want to own the lake.".

Option A: Keep competing for finite grants forever. Write proposals. Beg foundations. Hope your competitor doesn't write a better proposal.

Option B: Join the coalition. Help pass the treaty. Collectively govern a multi-billion dollar annual treasury dedicated to your mission.

One involves begging. The other involves being the person everyone begs to.

Earning Your Stake.

A partner's governance stake is based on verified contributions during the campaign: funds raised, referendum votes driven, and in-kind contributions credited. Contribute more, govern more.

It's the same incentive structure that makes capitalism work, except pointed at curing diseases instead of selling sugar water to people who already have diabetes.

The Bottom Line.

If you care about your mission, you must care about a one percent treaty.

You cannot solve your mission inside a shrinking, war-distorted budget environment. You cannot optimize your way out of a fundamental resource mismatch. You cannot win a game where the rules guarantee your loss. You're playing chess on a board that's on fire, and someone keeps adding lighter fluid.

The smartest thing the nonprofit sector can do right now:

Stop fighting over scraps.

Stop playing a zero-sum game.

Grow the pie.

Pass a one percent treaty.

Then return to your mission with ten to forty times greater resources.

This is not idealism. This is strategy.

A few years of coordinated advocacy for a one percent treaty will unlock more impact across every field than decades of incrementalism. Decades during which, I should note, the problems got worse. So maybe incrementalism is just a polite word for "losing slowly.".

The dogs need to turn around and notice the banquet.

This is the moment to act.