Donation record for 2023

Sorry if I’ve mentioned this before, but if you’re reading this, you’re probably in the top 5% of high earners worldwide. Perhaps top 2-3%.

If you’re not sure, you can look it up via this handy calculator.

In the absence of a global wealth taxation scheme to fund global public health – it’s just around the corner I’m sure – it’s up to you do the right thing and donate to some effective health charities.

Very belated new year’s donations

The photo of turmeric will be explained, promise.

I’m very behind on life admin. Here’s what is normally an early January post of new year’s day donations. (New year’s day because it was a new year’s resolution…today it might make more sense to combine this now with something like #GivingTuesday – although that’s only a thing because Black Friday is a thing, and that’s upsetting).

Going back seven years now, I donate 10% of my earnings before tax to some of the world’s most effective health charities. I blog about it pour encourager les autres.

Open grant applications

Previously, on this blog:

• Research into the democracy ‘sector’ suggests that some efforts could be made to improve networking in the space (and that this is an excellent way to support the pursuit of a better democracy);
• I wrote up some ways to do that… but it rather depends how much money is available;
• The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust (JRRT) put out a call for proposals to do some of this work.

On Monday, myself and a team of partners put in a bid to answer that call for proposals. Our approach has been to attempt to live the values of the thing we think should exist in future: including working together (hence five different organisations/individuals coming together on the bid) and in regards to openness: we shared a summary of our bid doc for feedback (thanks everyone who made suggestions!) — and now, here’s the actual full bid doc. (The only thing I’ve removed is the list of endorsements, because we didn’t tell endorsers that they’d be public.)

Root causes and other stories

Last year, I published the results of a range of interviews across the democracy sector. It was only a small project, so I wasn’t able to speak to everyone I had hoped to.

Happily, Nesta funded an ‘expansion pack’ of interviews, and some more insight from these chats is below. I hope it’s of use to anyone thinking about ways to support the sector, and thus, a better democracy.

I spoke to 16 new people over the last couple of months. Given the typical size of organisations in the sector, these were mainly CEOs. Most people were working on democracy as their core mission, but for some it was one of many themes that their organisation worked on. The interviewees were a diverse group across genders, ages, locations and ethnicities. They included people working for non-profits, charities and for-profits — and people no longer working on democracy.

Sketches for a democracy network hub

Previously, on worrying-about-democracy:

• Our democracy needs some work;
• Perhaps the cheapest and quickest first step is to better connect everyone who’s already working on democracy, share info, coordinate and collaborate;
• That seems to be popular — there are lots of ideas for how this could work and what people would want from such a network; and,
• The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust are up for funding some of the effort needed to make this happen.

So what does that effort look like?

I’ve made a to-do list, based on the Networking for Democracy report and from further chats across the space over the last six months.

Donations for global public health in a pandemic year

Since 2014, I’ve donated one-tenth of my salary/income to end poverty. I do so alongside thousands of other folks, having pledged to via Giving What We Can.

Next steps on networking for democracy

Over the summer, I researched and wrote Networking for Democracy, funded by JRRT. It looked at the needs, capacity, tools and approaches for the democracy sector to better share information, to coordinate and collaborate. This post is about what happened next.