The email I sent Chase last month was five words long. Looks like we go for US. Attached was the third and final no from Bermuda, the country where my late son Finn grew up, where the fund named after him kept getting turned down. This is the business half of a story I tell properly over on the Finn Wardman World Explorer Fund blog. The short version of how to get 501(c)(3) status when you do not live in America, and what it actually costs.
Start with the failure, because that is the useful part. Bermuda denied the charity three times across two years. The reason in writing the first time was that we had not satisfied the requirement for public benefit, and that the organisation could "achieve its aims and objectives without charitable status." We appealed to the Minister. No. We tried again under a re-registration process, the full folder of trustee declarations and bye-laws and bank statements. By May the answer arrived in nicer clothes saying the same thing: set up a private trust if you like, but you may not solicit the public. A fund that cannot ask anyone for money is a chequebook, not a charity.
So I stopped trying to win the argument and switched countries. The bit nobody tells you, when you are a non-US resident staring at the IRS website at midnight: you do not have to be American to run a US 501(c)(3). What you need is a US address, at least one director with a US tax number to be named the responsible party on the application, a board of three people, bylaws, a conflict-of-interest policy, and roughly $2,500 for a specialist firm to prepare and file Form 1023-EZ. We had Chase on the US side as the responsible party, which is the single thing that makes the whole process fast instead of a fax-and-wait slog. The determination letter came back about six weeks after filing: public charity, contributions deductible, effective late May.
An American donor can now give to the fund and deduct it. We are allowed to ask the public, the exact act the other country had made an offence. As of last week we are live for donations.
I have written before about building the whole campaign before Google said yes, and about why I started putting all of this in public in the first place. This is the same pattern again, and it is the most useful thing two years of rejection taught me. When a system keeps telling you no, the move is almost never a better argument. It is a different system. I spent two years trying to convince a Bermudian commission of something. The IRS agreed in six weeks and a form.
The full story, the denial letters, the determination letter, and the part about the couple who made the first donation, is on the Finn blog here. If you want to send a young person somewhere that turns them into someone slightly braver, the donate page is here, and every dollar is now deductible.
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Day 92 of 365.