2020 Annual Report

To anyone reading this:

I don’t know you, but it’s a safe bet that you’re pretty busy. Odds are, you have plenty of boxes still unchecked on today’s to do list. So why should you bother to leaf through our annual report? What’s so different about Tusk Philanthropies that makes us interesting? To me, the answer falls into two buckets: approach and results.

Approach

  • We embrace politics and use it aggressively to achieve specific results like new funding for hunger programs or giving people the chance to vote in elections on their phones. Our sweet spot is where change is achievable but needs some political force and know-how to make it happen.

  • We always try to combine our financial resources with our skill set – dealing with politics, media, regulators, influencers, advocates, unions and others – to achieve a much bigger result than we could just through making donations alone. Almost everything we do combines running campaigns for the causes we support with providing funding to the groups who support it.

  • We don’t take funding from anyone else, we try to have as little bureaucracy and process as possible (no board, no quarterly meetings), and rather than making sure we spend no more than 5% of our endowment annually, we spend our money on causes and campaigns as fast as we make it. If it runs out at some point, it runs out.

Results

  • We’ve made mobile voting happen in the United States, advocating for, funding and helping conduct the first 18 mobile elections across 330 jurisdictions where either deployed military or people with disabilities could, for the first time in U.S. history, vote on their phones. Each election was independently audited by the National Cybersecurity Center and found secure. Turnout, on average, doubled. We are the only foundation working on this. And mobile voting, in our view, is the only way to solve the problems destroying our democracy.

  • We’ve passed legislation to allow mobile voting, we’ve aggressively lobbied election officials to approve mobile voting, we’ve brought the issue into the forefront publicly (links to some of the coverage on the issue and our work to date are on page 12) and we’re now trying to both build our own mobile voting technology and build a movement itself.

  • We’ve funded and run campaigns in 14 different states to pass bills mandating and expanding funding for universal school breakfast, summer meals for kids, free meals for seniors, reducing requirements to qualify for free meals and more. In total, this has helped create a regular source of free meals for over two million people (mainly children) and counting.

  • We took on the task of lobbying Senate Republicans in Washington DC to support a 15% increase in SNAP funding in the most recent stimulus bill – and it actually happened.

  • Is all of this different enough to merit a closer look? I hope so. And if you agree, I hope you enjoy this report. We’d be thrilled to talk more about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Thanks for your time.