aaronhamlin

Fellow @ Show Me Integrity
576 karmaJoined Jun 2017Working (6-15 years)
https://www.aaronhamlin.com/

Bio

Participation
1

I've successfully founded and grown two nonprofits from scratch, each reaching $1M+ budgets. These were The Center for Election Science and Male Contraceptive Initiative. I first learned about EA in 2016 and went to my first EA event in 2017. My formal education is in the social sciences and law. You can find my writing and resources at www.aaronhamlin.com.

How others can help me

I'm doing a fellowship at Show Me Integrity where I'm writing a book on voting methods. This is self-funded and I'm still seeking the remaining funding to complete the project. I'm also looking for funders for statewide ballot initiative campaigns in the US.

How I can help others

I'm highly familiar with tax law and philanthropy. I'm a great resource for tax-efficient giving. I also have 10 years of experience starting and running nonprofits.

Comments
64

The funding to gather the signatures wasn't there. The main thing is just money and that tends to be why Irv campaigns take off instead. Money. Happy to talk with folks about supporting specific campaigns. Feel free to reach out.

Note that funding was not sufficient to be able to move forward for this campaign. Feel free to reach out to me for other statewide funding opportunities.

The implementation keeps the primaries throughout the state as-is.

Right now, Missouri's primaries are "open" in the sense that you must vote within a party, but you can choose which party at any time. This would stay the same, but in both the primary and general, approval voting would be used. The campaign chose this system-wide change as the easiest option.

Additionally, approval voting would allow for independents to be viable candidates in the general.

Adding the link to CES was meant as a way of showing the need, but I don't think it was taken that way. Removing to keep the focus on the poster's idea and avoid my appearance of self promotion.

I consistently recommend Fidelity to others when talking about DAFs. Here's an article I did on DAFs.

Why Fidelity Charitable?

  1. They're the largest DAF in the world and have efficient internal processes. They approve pretty much everything and if it's new or controversial to them, they get back to you quickly. 
  2. They make direct transfers to the charity's bank account. You don't want some check just flying around. Many banks send off paper checks. No need for that nonsense.
  3. They also handle cryptocurrency, which is nice. There may be some extra paperwork, but it's largely quite useful.
  4. Their fees are low. If you quickly donate from your account anyway, there's nothing to really get hit with. If you leave funds in there, minimal investments should cover any fee. Remember that the job of a DAF is not to have it sit around and make more money. You do that with investments before they go into the DAF.
  5. They make it easy to transfer assets to the DAF from other banks. If you use Fidelity already, it's even easier. They even have a tool that lets you see the most tax-efficient stocks to give (It looks at the most appreciated stocks you've held over a year).

Bonus tip:
Don't forget to set a charitable beneficiary for your DAF, just as you can do for any other financial account.

If you like, I talk with lots of folks on technical aspects of giving, particularly as it also relates to balancing practical considerations like retirement. Feel free to message me.

You can also check out a number of essays I've written on this topic: https://www.aaronhamlin.com/articles/#philanthropy

I know our team isn't super excited by this switch by Every.org. Will be interesting to see how it goes.

This is a big need for a lot of organizations, including ours at The Center for Election Science. We're looking for especially well networked candidates, particularly those who could help with funding bottlenecks. We use committees to do internal board duties. See our board posting here: https://electionscience.org/join-our-board/

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

Hi Adam,

I think your response fairly addresses the concerns I initially raised, and I appreciate your effort there. Thank you for the delicate response.

Load more