Foundation grants for the 1% Treaty
Give an organization one share and a letter.
For about $300-$400, we can buy one share of a military contractor and donate it to a nonprofit, patient group, peace group, church, student group, or other organization that wants less war and more medicine.
That makes them a shareholder. Then we help them send a polite love letter to the board.
The letter does not ask the company to become kind. It asks the board to do the thing boards are supposed to do: look after shareholders.
Receiving charity
Accelerated Medicine Foundation Inc
Tax ID
EIN 41-2555651
Legal status
Wyoming 501(c)(3)
First milestone
1,000 organizations
The mechanism
The argument is simple: sell 1% of the company's assets and invest it in biotechnology. If biotech has better margins than making more weapons, that is good for shareholders.
Then use the company's lobbying power to ask the same question at national scale: would shareholders be better off if 1% of military spending moved into pragmatic clinical trials?
If the answer is yes, lobby for the 1% Treaty instead of lobbying for infinitely more weapons forever. That would lower clinical trial costs for the biotech companies the contractor just bought. It would also make shareholders significantly less dead.
Run the math
Pick how many organizations to equip and which contractors to write. The model uses the cited treaty impact parameters and assumes the campaign starts to matter when at least 1,000 organizations are doing this.
Love-letter calculator
How many shares and letters?
This assumes the first real milestone is 1,000 organizations. Below that, it scales expected value linearly. That is probably too kind at tiny counts, but it makes the assumption visible instead of hiding it in a spreadsheet.
Contractor targets
Letters
300
300 donated shares
Share budget
$120,000
$400 per share assumption
1,000-org threshold
10%
100 organizations equipped
Expected DALYs avoided
5.55M
After target coverage, 1 in 5,000 chance this is pivotal
Expected lives saved
105.5K
Discounted by selected contractor coverage
Expected cost per DALY
$0.0216
49.1% of this target list selected
One share gives an organization standing to write the board. It does not control the company. The point is to make the board analyze the shareholder case on the record, then repeat that pressure from enough independent organizations that ignoring it becomes more annoying than reading the math.
DALYs at stake
Lives at stake
Treaty funding
Military lobbying
What money does
We will take whatever a foundation wants to give us. The unit of work is not mysterious. More money buys more of this loop.
Find an organization
A nonprofit, patient group, peace group, church, student group, union, club, or other organization that wants less war and more medicine.
Buy and donate one share
The organization becomes a shareholder. That is the boring little key that opens the boardroom door.
Send the board a love letter
The letter asks the board to analyze whether shareholders are better off if the company shifts 1% of assets into biotech and lobbies for the 1% Treaty.
Follow up until it is real
Lawyers check the template, organizers keep calling, and every output stays countable: organizations, shares, letters, replies, and public math checks.
A small grant can buy a few shares and letters. A larger grant lets someone spend the next two years doing the boring part: finding organizations, buying shares, getting lawyers to check the letters, sending them, following up, and making sure this does not become another clever PDF nobody used.
Cost-effectiveness, with the skeptic's discounts already applied
Conditional on success
per DALY, roughly better than bed nets.
Risk-adjusted
per DALY, still better than bed nets.
If the treaty never passes
per DALY for direct philanthropic funding of pragmatic trials alone.
The calculator above prices the full treaty success case: the disease timeline shift in the cited model, discounted by organizations reached, contractor coverage, and whatever pivotal probability you assign.
If you only want to credit a single treaty year, use this as a separate sanity check. One treaty year puts into trials at /patient, roughly 23 million patient-slots. The useful foundation question is not "what is the perfect grant size?" It is whether the chance of helping trigger the treaty beats the bed-net baseline. The calculator above lets you change the spend and the pivotal probability directly.
The break-even against bed nets at sits near a one-in-five-thousand chance of mattering. We are not claiming the campaign probably succeeds. The claim is narrower: that its probability of being pivotal exceeds one in five thousand.
Please check the math
Our model says this is the best use of our time for reducing suffering on Earth that we have found. We know how that sounds. The numbers are public because we would rather be corrected before anyone funds us.
Please check the math. If there is a better use of our time, or a cheaper way to avert a DALY, email us. We will do the better thing instead.
If the math is right but someone else should run this, use it. We do not need credit. We need the thing to happen.