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Why Every Nonprofit Should Support a one percent treaty Nonprofits fighting disease currently compete for the same shrinking

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pile of donor money. A one percent treaty creates twenty-seven point two billion dollars in new funding.

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Every charitable organization can stop fighting over crumbs and start fighting for the bakery, if someone tells them the

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bakery exists. Your nonprofit sector is a bit like thousands of starving dogs fighting over a single bowl of food while

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an entire banquet sits untouched behind them. The dogs are very focused on the bowl.

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They've developed sophisticated bowl-fighting strategies. Some dogs have hired consultants to optimize their bowl access.

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None of them have turned around. I have watched this for eighty years.

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Malaria kills six hundred thousand people a year and has a seven billion dollar nonprofit ecosystem dedicated to it.

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Polio has been "nearly eradicated" for twenty-five years. Cancer charities have raised hundreds of billions of dollars and

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cancer is still the second leading cause of death. Occasionally, as a side effect of all this activity, a problem gets slightly

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less bad. This is celebrated with an awards dinner. Every grant you win is a grant the Alzheimer's people lose.

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Every dollar you secure for malaria is a dollar that doesn't go to cancer.

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Every donor you convince is a donor distracted from the next organization, which is also trying to stop people from dying,

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which is the same thing you're trying to do, but you're competing because your species decided that "saving lives" should

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be a competitive market with limited funding. On Wishonia, this would be classified as a psychological disorder.

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On Earth, it's called "the nonprofit sector.". Meanwhile, the reason the bowl is so small sits right there in your budget

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documents, fully visible, discussed by no one: Your species spends six hundred and four times more on weapons than on clinical

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trials to discover which medicines actually work. Military spending: two point seven two trillion dollars per year and rising.

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Medical research: sixty-seven point five billion dollars (of which only four point five billion dollars funds government

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clinical trials) and facing real-term cuts. The bowl for solving disease is shrinking.

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The bowl for building weapons is expanding. You are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, except the deck chairs are grants

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and the iceberg is two point seven two trillion dollars pointed at everyone's face.

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

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The logic behind a one percent treaty is the logic behind turning around and noticing the banquet: stop optimizing inside

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the smallest slice of the pie. Make the pie bigger. Turn a zero-sum game into a positive-sum game.

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This requires no moral evolution. It requires looking behind you.

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Why the Banquet Exists and Nobody Has Noticed. On Wishonia, when we noticed that our species was spending the vast majority

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of its resources on activities that reduced the number of living citizens, we stopped.

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It took about a week. In fairness, we didn't have consultants.

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On Earth, every organization fighting a problem is fighting a symptom of the same upstream cause: your species allocates

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resources toward destruction and then wonders why everything is being destroyed.

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War is upstream of poverty (hard to build an economy when someone keeps blowing it up).

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War is upstream of pollution (militaries are among the largest polluters on Earth, which is ironic given they're supposedly

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protecting it). War is upstream of refugee crises (humans whose homes were converted into craters need somewhere else to

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live). War is upstream of disease spread (bombs do not improve public health infrastructure).

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War is upstream of technological stagnation (yes, DARPA invented the internet; military R and D occasionally produces breakthroughs

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as a side effect of spectacular waste, the same way a forest fire occasionally clears space for new growth, but nobody calls

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an arsonist a gardener). War is the root password to your worst problems.

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Redirect one percent of it, and every downstream mission gets easier.

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Increase it by one percent, and every mission becomes nearly impossible.

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This is not a peace movement. Nobody has to hold hands or sing songs or learn each other's names.

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They just have to do arithmetic, which is the one thing your species is actually good at when it bothers to try.

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I want to explain why this applies to every type of organization, but I'm going to do it by describing what I observe rather

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than what you should do, because your species responds poorly to instructions and reasonably well to feeling embarrassed.

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Environmental groups spend their time trying to reduce carbon emissions while the largest polluters on Earth (militaries)

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operate completely outside every climate agreement. Defunding them one percent would be the most effective climate policy

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ever proposed, and it doesn't require anyone to give up hamburgers or install a solar panel.

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Nobody has suggested this because the environmental movement and the peace movement operate in separate buildings and do

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not talk to each other. They attend different conferences. They have different donors.

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They fight the same problem from different angles and never coordinate, which is exactly the behavior they're trying to

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fix in the systems they criticize. Anti-poverty groups have been running the strategy of "ask rich people to feel bad" for

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sixty years. How's that going? War and disease are the root causes of most modern poverty.

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A one percent treaty tackles both. But poverty organizations don't work on military spending because that's "not their issue."

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Their issue is poverty. Which is caused by military spending.

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Which is not their issue. Peace organizations have been making moral appeals for seventy years.

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Moral appeals do not work on a species that runs on money. A one percent treaty makes peace more profitable than war.

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This is the only argument that has ever worked on humans, and the peace movement refuses to make it because it feels unseemly

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to talk about profit when people are dying. So people keep dying, but at least the peace movement's messaging is ethically

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pure. Disease advocacy groups are fighting other disease groups for crumbs of the N.I.H.

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budget. You are literally competing with cancer patients for the money that should be curing cancer patients.

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A one percent treaty creates twenty-seven point two billion dollars in new funding with twelve point three times more trial

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capacity. The bottleneck isn't ideas or molecules. It's running enough trials to find out what works.

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This solves that. If your organization is a five zero one (c) (three), you're already thinking "we can't lobby."

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You can, actually, within limits (the "no substantial part" test, or the five zero one (h) election caps).

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But more importantly, supporting a referendum is educational activity, not lobbying.

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And for the heavy political lifting, the legal architecture uses a five zero one (c) (four) that faces no lobbying limits

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at all. Your lawyers will feel better after reading that chapter.

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

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That is exactly the point. Your core mission is failing because your resources are shrinking while the resources of the

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people making your mission harder are expanding. This is like a firefighter insisting they should "focus on firefighting"

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while someone is actively pouring gasoline on the fire and nobody is addressing the gasoline.

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Every nonprofit today operates inside a system that guarantees their failure.

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Too few grant dollars. Too much competition for those dollars.

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Shrinking government budgets for health, climate, and poverty.

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Ballooning budgets for war. Donor fatigue (your donors are tired because you keep asking them for money to do things that

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don't work because you don't have enough money). And the people whose job is "convince politicians that killing is profitable"

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get two point seven two trillion dollars annually to make your job harder.

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Your future funding and impact will be determined by either (a) you, or (b) Lockheed Martin's lobbying department.

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Currently it's (b). You seem fine with this. The Obvious Solution That Nobody Sees.

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Right now, every grant you win is a grant another organization loses.

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This is called a "zero-sum game," which your species invented the mathematics to describe and then immediately forgot to

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apply to anything useful. A one percent treaty turns this into a positive-sum game.

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twenty-seven point two billion dollars per year in new funding.

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Malaria gets cured AND Alzheimer's gets cured. You stop writing proposals and start getting paid for results.

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This is like discovering that instead of fighting over one pizza, you can just order more pizzas than anyone can eat.

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Except the pizzas are billions of dollars and the ordering is international treaty ratification, which admittedly takes

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longer than calling Domino's. Countries still keep ninety-nine percent of their apocalypse capacity.

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They can still end all life nineteen times instead of twenty.

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If you can't successfully end the world with nineteen attempts, the twentieth probably wasn't going to help.

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But that single percentage point creates a twenty-seven point two billion dollars a year one percent Treaty Fund, funds

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global decentralized clinical trials, and makes every nonprofit's mission dramatically more feasible.

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Move one percent from the mountain to the puddle. The puddle becomes a lake.

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The mountain is still a mountain. Everybody wins except the people who were selling mountain insurance, and even they can

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pivot. Why Your Species Only Changes When the Building Is On Fire.

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Your species only reorganizes resources when things are going badly enough that ignoring the problem becomes more painful

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than fixing it. This is not a theory. It is the entirety of your political history, from the French Revolution to the New

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Deal to the creation of NATO. Comfortable humans don't change things.

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Uncomfortable humans change everything. Then they get comfortable and stop changing things again.

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Right now, for the first time in eighty years, everything is going wrong at the same time.

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Military budgets are expanding while everything else gets cut.

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Trust in government spending priorities has reached "used car salesman" levels.

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Pandemics exposed the cost of underfunding resilience. Climate disasters have shifted public opinion from "debatable" to

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"my house is underwater." And your leaders are searching for a unifying narrative, which is political language for "someone

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please tell us what to do before we get voted out.". This is your window.

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It opens when humans are scared and closes when they get distracted.

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Based on my four thousand, two hundred and ninety-seven years of observation, the average window lasts about eighteen months

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before your species discovers a new television show and forgets the crisis entirely.

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The Factory Precedent. During World War Two, your species did something remarkable.

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G.M. built tanks. Ford built B twenty-four bombers. Frigidaire (yes, the refrigerator people) produced machine guns.

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Typewriter manufacturers made rifles. Not because they "supported war."

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Because the system needed realignment and ignoring it was impossible.

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Also because the government asked very firmly, in a tone that strongly implied "this isn't really a question.".

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Your nonprofit sector is the modern equivalent of those car factories: massive capacity, talented people, pointed at the

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wrong problem. You have millions of humans optimizing spreadsheets for the wrong budget.

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The factories pivoted in months. Your nonprofits have been "focused on their core mission" for decades while the core mission

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gets harder every year. You didn't get better at focus. You got better at ignoring the context in which your focus operates.

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A few years of effort to shift one percent of global budgets could produce more impact than thirty years of incremental

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programs. Decades during which, I should note, the problems got worse.

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On Wishonia, we have a word for "doing the same thing for thirty years while results decline."

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The word is "hobby.". "Why Not Just Run Trials Without the Treaty?"

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You should. But then what? You've built a beautiful garden hose.

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You've optimized its diameter, its nozzle, its flow rate. You've published papers about its efficiency.

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It is the best garden hose your species has ever produced. It's attached to a pipe with no water.

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Your clinical trial infrastructure becomes twelve point three times more useful when the resource stream feeding it is ten

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times larger. You cannot out-engineer a funding problem. Build the hose AND turn on the water.

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They're complements, not substitutes. What one percent Less Violence Buys Every Mission.

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I'm going to describe what happens when you shift one percent of military budgets, but I'm going to describe it the way

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I actually observe it, which is as a single upstream change that fixes things your species has been trying to fix separately

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for decades while refusing to notice they're all the same problem.

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There is twelve point three times more clinical trial capacity.

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

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Militaries emit less pollution (nobody carbon-taxes a tank, but maybe they should).

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Fewer resource-driven conflicts means fewer refugees means less poverty.

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Everyone becomes slightly less dead, which is the lowest bar imaginable, and yet.

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And here is the part that should keep every nonprofit Executive Director awake at night: you stop writing grant proposals

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and start actually doing your mission. Remember your mission?

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It was in the brochure. The one you wrote to get the grant.

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To pay the person who writes the grants. To fund the office where the grant-writing happens.

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Your organization has become a machine whose primary output is requests for money and whose secondary output is occasionally,

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accidentally, the thing you set out to do. The treaty fixes this by making the money show up without the begging.

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Your species calls this "too good to be true," which is a phrase you use to describe things that are good and true but embarrassing

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to admit. On Bribing Nonprofits (Legally). On Wishonia, when we wanted organizations to cooperate on a shared goal, we explained

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the goal and they cooperated. On Earth, you need to pay them.

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This is not a criticism. It's a design parameter. I've learned to work with the species I have, not the species I wish I

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had. Asking nonprofits to support a one percent treaty out of moral obligation is like asking a drowning person to rescue

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other swimmers. They're drowning. They need a life preserver, not a guilt trip.

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The life preserver: you make the organization rich. Old way: "Here's one hundred thousand dollars.

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Hope it helps. Submit a forty-seven-page report in six months about impacts and learnings.

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Use the word 'stakeholder' at least fourteen times." New way: "Here's fifty thousand dollars baseline to get started.

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Plus ten thousand dollars for every ten thousand verified referendum votes you drive through your unique link.

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No cap." The nonprofit's most rational path to maximizing their budget becomes: be your most effective mobilization partner.

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One metric. No ambiguity. Get paid for results. This is how every functional industry works except charity, which explains

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why every problem charity was invented to solve is still here.

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And then the ocean itself: the one percent Treaty Fund receives twenty-seven point two billion dollars annually.

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Your decentralized institutes of health allocates multi-billion dollar budgets to the diseases your organization exists

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to fight. When the treaty passes, the grant-writing stops. The money arrives because the treaty says it arrives.

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You don't need influence. You don't need a seat at the table.

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You need the treaty to pass. Everything after that is automatic, the way gravity is automatic, except instead of pulling

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things down it pulls money toward curing diseases. (Gravity has never done this.

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I checked.). You have two options. Option A: keep competing for finite grants forever, writing proposals, begging foundations,

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hoping your competitor doesn't write a better proposal. Option B: help pass the treaty, get paid referral bonuses for every

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verified referendum vote you drive, and watch twenty-seven point two billion dollars per year flow to your disease area.

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One involves begging. The other involves getting paid. On Wishonia, this would not require a chapter to explain.

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But your species is very attached to its suffering, so here we are.

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The dogs need to turn around and notice the banquet. I've been watching them fight over the bowl for eighty years.

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The banquet is right there. It has always been right there.

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The dogs are very focused. They have written reports about the bowl.

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They have held conferences about bowl strategy. They have hired consultants to optimize bowl access.

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None of them have turned around. Turn around.