In March I sent an email to the Bermuda charity registry to chase an application I had posted in January. The reply came two days later. The officer I had been writing to no longer worked there. They could not find my January email. And, almost in passing, the message mentioned that the Charity Commissioners had denied an earlier version of our application back in February 2024.
What seemed to be implied is, we have your old application on file, we know who you are, and I don't think you should bother applying. I was trying to register the adventure grant-making fund, after being denied twice by the Bermuda register of charities. We set it up in our son Finn's name. It makes grants to young people, eighteen to twenty-six, for the trip or the training or the competition that is out of reach for most families and that changes the direction of a life. Registering a charity in Bermuda was meant to be the clean way to take public donations. Finn was twenty when he died. Finn was Bermudian, I am Bermudian, the other co-founder is Bermudian, we had even awarded an aspiring Bermuda athlete a $10,000 grant, likely because no one else would.
For the better part of two years we've been in a stealth, private unassociated incorporation status, which is not legal to take donations. We could keep reading applications and making grants from the existing account. We could not openly ask the public for money while the paperwork was unresolved. So we did the quiet version of the work and waited. The project has essentially been on ice for at least 15 months due to this regulatory purgatory.
The polite no
At one point the office told me, in the politest possible terms, that I did not need to be a charity to do what I was trying to do. There was a one-off fundraising licence for individual asks. The aims, they suggested, could be met without the registration at all.
I took a while to hear that for what it was. It is easy to read a sentence like that as guidance, a helpful pointer toward another path. It was a no. A kind one, but a no. Being confused, I called the department and asked the person in charge of compliance. The register said that we could achieve our objectives being a private fund, or being a formal scholarship. Is that true? Can we fund raise in Bermuda using either of these two vehicles?
No, you may not, was the again all too polite response.
Well, I am confused. You said that we could achieve our objective of providing $5 to $10,000 youth empowerment grants without becoming a charity. If we can't take donations, how are we supposed to supply the grants?
You can do these privately through a fund, Mr Wardman.
Excuse me? You want me to personally fund these out of my own pocket and never ask for assistance?
Yes Mr Wardman.
That was the end of that discussion, and I turned my back on my own homeland feeling more than a little disappointed at the lack of vision from the Bermuda Government.
The door that opened
That day, I sent a one line WhatsApp to my co-founders. What do you think about going the 501(c)(3) route (meaning applying in the US)?
Yes, what do we have to lose, was the answer.
I signed with a US firm to file the Form 1023 for 501(c)(3) status. Two thousand five hundred dollars, wired, the memo line reading the Fund's name and the form number. Then I more or less forgot about it and got on with the actual work.
There was some back and forth and a 90 minute long session where Claude helped me drive through the 1023 registration, but to be fair to the firm that handled this, it was pretty damn easy, especially in comparison to how my own country had treated me.
Then came the official answer, yesterday. The Finn Wardman World Explorer Fund is a registered US 501(c)(3). It has an EIN, a US bank account, and a donation page that takes tax-deductible gifts. An American donor can now give and write it off against federal tax. The small recurring services that run on a phone will plug into it. The whole donor conversation I could not have for two years is open.
The US charity market is the biggest in the world, and we're now a part of it.
Two years asking one office. A few months asking another. Same fund, same mission, same person filling in the forms.
What it actually cost
I want to be fair about Bermuda. It is a small jurisdiction and the rules are the rules. The denial was not personal and the people I dealt with were courteous. This is not a complaint about them.
It is a complaint about me. The cost was not the no. The cost was the eighteen months I spent treating one office's approval as the only approval that counted, sending follow-up emails into a queue that had already closed, keeping the donation side of the Fund switched off the whole time. That is donations not asked for, which is grants not made, which is real young people who waited longer than they needed to.
I started this build-in-public year writing about running an AI ops business, and the same trap shows up there constantly. I have spent weeks of this campaign waiting on a platform verification before switching on a campaign. Founders wait on one investor's yes, one big prospect's signature, one approval, and treat it as load-bearing when it is not. Most permission you are waiting on is not the only door. It is just the one you happened to knock on first.
The work never actually depended on the registration. While the application sat in a queue, one of our grantees was on a podium at a British championship. That happened with no charity number attached to it. The proof was already there for the charity commission to see. A young Bermudian on the podium due to his hard work, probably made possible through the help of our grant last year which helped him race off island.
The page is live now. If you want to see what the Fund actually does, or back it, it is right here. Two years late, and entirely on the other side of an ocean from where I started asking.
Monthly Revenues $11,000 | Clients 2 | Prospects (AI outbound agent now live) | Team: Me + part time Jan (CTO)
Day 85 of 365.