1 million dollars doesn’t go that far these days, at the world scale it is almost nothing.
You could however make a lasting difference in your community by making a scholarship, building needed facilities, or doing something else where you directly make sure the funds go where needed and can’t be used for other uses. Lets face it, if you give it to some charities 90% of it will just go to the administration.
One of the things that I’ve seen is that politicians can be bribed for shockingly little money. I think with a 1million dollars you could bribe one high member of congress, or 10-20 low-level politicians.
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Follow in the footsteps of Gil Cisneros…
"…is an American government official, philanthropist, and politician who served as Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness in the Biden administration. He served as the U.S. representative for California’s 39th congressional district from 2019 to 2021
“In 2010, he and his wife won a $266 million Mega Millions lottery jackpot and became philanthropists, establishing endowments for scholarships to be given to Latino students at GWU and the University of Southern California. They also founded Generation First Degree Pico Rivera, with the goal of ensuring every Latino household in Pico Rivera has at least one college graduate, and the Gilbert and Jacki Cisneros Foundation with an initial investment of $20 million to provide mentorship in education.”
Give it to me.
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Dedicate the $1 million to funding zoning reform efforts in your city to allow for the construction of more housing and reduce the cost of housing for everyone.
I have an idee fixe that I could set up a non profit that bought homes and rented them at a price somewhere between the maintenance cost and the market price. It would make a profit and slowly expand providing more and more affordable housing. Ideally it would start with more than 1 million but doesn’t need to.
If you rent at cost or even a little over you’ll go broke. People won’t pay their rent and trash the places. Non-profits are finding out that they can’t even support what they’re trying to do with housing because the actual costs are more than what you think are “at cost”.
I think that’s why they said between the maintenance cost and market price.
I think spending all of it on feeding people who are starving. You could keep a lot of people alive on a million, even if it was just for long enough to give them a second chance on their own. And even if that second chance failed, then at least all of the goodness of those people would have more time to be in the world.
Set up a trust to invest the money, from the compounding returns, use a sustainable portion of the dividends to fund a cause you believe will help change the world. Be very explicit to the trust managers as to the long term instructions of the trust.
With compound market returns the million dollars could be worth $40 million in 50 years and would be distributing af a sustainable 3% dividend, 1.2 million a year to a cause you believe in.
Guillotines with “Heroes Work Here” signs atop them.
Give water and food to where it is needed.
You might be able to buy some land, build a playground and maintain it for a few years in a deprived neighbourhood. If you have money left over, do it again somewhere else.
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I’m generally against the idea of planting as many trees as possible.
Trees are not very good carbon sinks because they decompose and burn. Also, there are also some ecological communities where adding trees makes the land a worse carbon sink.
Avoiding cutting down forests to build suburbs is something I can certainly get behind though.
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Free education
For like 5 people?
Then I suppose the question is reduced to how one should select the 5 people! :)
Trial by combat
To the victor goes the scholarship.
Anything better than 0
Well, if you put that million dollars somewhere that makes a bit of money and follow the 4% rule, you could take out $40k each year and maybe help 4 kids attend a state school every 4 years.
Fund an open source project to make something useful that helps make life cheaper and easier for regular people
According to Rutger Bregman: just give it away to people who don’t have it.
