Thank you for the post about our organization. We’d like to provide some additional context that may help clarify to those interested.
SPI is indeed a very young, all-volunteer organization. We spent $0 in our entire first fiscal year (2024-2025) and remain underfunded in 2025, still operating on a volunteer basis.
Regarding our work: Much of our current efforts involve policy advocacy and preparation for litigation, which we keep confidential for operational reasons—sharing details publicly would compromise potential cases and policy advocacy strategies. This is not uncommon in certain arenas of legal and policy work. We are, however, happy to share information about our specific victories and interventions confidentially with interested funders who request it.
We understand VettedCauses’ methodology of requiring more transparency before making recommendations, and we respect that approach. However, we’d note that:
The nature of legal and legislative work often requires confidentiality
As a volunteer organization with zero budget in our first year, our capacity for public communications and website maintenance has been limited
We prioritize direct impact work over public relations when resources are constrained
To Eevee: Thank you for your support. We’re happy to provide you with updates; I’ve reached out on Slack.
We’re working to improve our public transparency as we grow, while balancing the operational security needs of our work. We welcome conversations with anyone who would like to learn more about our specific activities and impact. Thank you.
Edit: In response to VettedCauses’ concerns with our wording, we have changed the phrase “Much of our current efforts involve policy advocacy and litigation” with “Much of our current efforts involve policy advocacy and preparation for litigation” and changed “sharing details publicly would compromise pending cases and policy advocacy strategies” to “sharing details publicly would compromise potential cases and policy advocacy strategies” to ensure clarity. The original wording was meant to convey that these are general strategies we employ, but given possible ambiguity on the meaning of “pending cases” and “efforts involve policy advocacy and litigation,” we think the edited wording will ensure there is a lower likelihood of misunderstanding.
I’d want to know more about the organization’s history—especially funding history—before deciding what weight to assign to a lack of evidence of “specific actions taken by SPI (besides insubstantial actions such as posting on instagram).” It’s a young organization—the IRS approval letter was issued in April 2024. The rest of this comment takes at face value the absence of specific actions; I have no basis to weigh in on that either way.
For instance, if this were an all-volunteer organization that had raised minimal sums, then I’d be inclined to assess more softly—more along the lines of too young / not enough information yet than a straight do-not-recommend. I would be more inclined toward a more categorical non-recommendation if the organization had raised significant funds long enough ago that it should should be able to identify some specific activities with a plausible theory of impact by now. Making serious fundraising attempts without a plausible public action plan might also trigger a straight do-not-recommend from me, but merely asking for donations on an organization website would not.[1]
From an end-user perspective, the difference between the two evaluations is that the former is a short-term rating with a reasonable probability of being stale in 6-12 months, and it doesn’t signal a lack of efficient utilization of donor resources.
Sorry, it’s taken me so long to comment, I’ve been busy. (I’m also writing this quickly)
I am the “anonymous” funder for this review. I never asked or intended to be anonymous and generally think that anonymity has a lot of costs on the community and thus I think it should be used sparingly and only when there are great benefits.
I originally requested this review ~2.5 months ago because I had intended to make a donation to SPI that I had promised, but I had been advised not to do so due to concerns that I wasn’t being informed about. I was already talking with VettedCauses and just offhand asked him to look into them since I was busy and this was taking up a lot of my time and that I would be happy to pay for it. I didn’t ask for a full review, but I’m happy for a full review to be made of any charity.
I eventually found out about what these concerns were, found them to be minor/false and proceeded with the donation about a month and a half ago. I’m fairly happy with my decision.
I’m fairly disappointed in this review and the follow-up. I think the review didn’t engage with the charity in a way that would elicit the effectiveness of what they do, didn’t dive into any concerns people had with the charity, and generally was just lazy. Any effective review will have to talk to the charity, figure out what they do, and go beyond merely publicly available information. I think this kind of review tries to hold charities to the standard of a billion-dollar public company as opposed to a tiny charity. I saw similar patterns with other reviews, and the more these kinds of bad-faith engagement occur with charities, the less I want to trust VettedCauses.
Note that I am, of course, going to follow through on paying for the review as agreed upon but I won’t be further asking for reviews from VettedCauses .
Disclosure: Possible conflict of interest here. I donated close to $900 to SPI in November 2024 based on information they shared with me privately about their work and confirmation of their activities from a mutual contact. This was a large portion of my giving last year, which may bias me towards wanting to believe they will have impact.
I appreciate that you folks did a review of SPI, but why publish this linkpost without a description?
Also, is there really no information you can share about SPI’s work so far? This doesn’t match my impression of the work they were up to. I’m happy to follow up with them about their progress and share what I find out here, provided that they don’t object.
Also, is there really no information you can share about SPI’s work so far? This doesn’t match my impression of the work they were up to.
We searched for publicly available information about SPI’s work, and also reached out directly to SPI. We shared multiple drafts of the review with SPI and, between drafts, specifically asked for information about their work. However, SPI told us there wasn’t any work we could include in the review.
Thank you for the post about our organization. We’d like to provide some additional context that may help clarify to those interested.
SPI is indeed a very young, all-volunteer organization. We spent $0 in our entire first fiscal year (2024-2025) and remain underfunded in 2025, still operating on a volunteer basis.
Regarding our work: Much of our current efforts involve policy advocacy and preparation for litigation, which we keep confidential for operational reasons—sharing details publicly would compromise potential cases and policy advocacy strategies. This is not uncommon in certain arenas of legal and policy work. We are, however, happy to share information about our specific victories and interventions confidentially with interested funders who request it.
We understand VettedCauses’ methodology of requiring more transparency before making recommendations, and we respect that approach. However, we’d note that:
The nature of legal and legislative work often requires confidentiality
As a volunteer organization with zero budget in our first year, our capacity for public communications and website maintenance has been limited
We prioritize direct impact work over public relations when resources are constrained
To Eevee: Thank you for your support. We’re happy to provide you with updates; I’ve reached out on Slack.
We’re working to improve our public transparency as we grow, while balancing the operational security needs of our work. We welcome conversations with anyone who would like to learn more about our specific activities and impact. Thank you.
Edit: In response to VettedCauses’ concerns with our wording, we have changed the phrase “Much of our current efforts involve policy advocacy and litigation” with “Much of our current efforts involve policy advocacy and preparation for litigation” and changed “sharing details publicly would compromise pending cases and policy advocacy strategies” to “sharing details publicly would compromise potential cases and policy advocacy strategies” to ensure clarity. The original wording was meant to convey that these are general strategies we employ, but given possible ambiguity on the meaning of “pending cases” and “efforts involve policy advocacy and litigation,” we think the edited wording will ensure there is a lower likelihood of misunderstanding.
I’d want to know more about the organization’s history—especially funding history—before deciding what weight to assign to a lack of evidence of “specific actions taken by SPI (besides insubstantial actions such as posting on instagram).” It’s a young organization—the IRS approval letter was issued in April 2024. The rest of this comment takes at face value the absence of specific actions; I have no basis to weigh in on that either way.
For instance, if this were an all-volunteer organization that had raised minimal sums, then I’d be inclined to assess more softly—more along the lines of too young / not enough information yet than a straight do-not-recommend. I would be more inclined toward a more categorical non-recommendation if the organization had raised significant funds long enough ago that it should should be able to identify some specific activities with a plausible theory of impact by now. Making serious fundraising attempts without a plausible public action plan might also trigger a straight do-not-recommend from me, but merely asking for donations on an organization website would not.[1]
From an end-user perspective, the difference between the two evaluations is that the former is a short-term rating with a reasonable probability of being stale in 6-12 months, and it doesn’t signal a lack of efficient utilization of donor resources.
There are tax-law reasons that a small US non-profit with few donors should generally solicit donations on its website and undertake similar actions.
Sorry, it’s taken me so long to comment, I’ve been busy. (I’m also writing this quickly)
I am the “anonymous” funder for this review. I never asked or intended to be anonymous and generally think that anonymity has a lot of costs on the community and thus I think it should be used sparingly and only when there are great benefits.
I originally requested this review ~2.5 months ago because I had intended to make a donation to SPI that I had promised, but I had been advised not to do so due to concerns that I wasn’t being informed about. I was already talking with VettedCauses and just offhand asked him to look into them since I was busy and this was taking up a lot of my time and that I would be happy to pay for it. I didn’t ask for a full review, but I’m happy for a full review to be made of any charity.
I eventually found out about what these concerns were, found them to be minor/false and proceeded with the donation about a month and a half ago. I’m fairly happy with my decision.
I’m fairly disappointed in this review and the follow-up. I think the review didn’t engage with the charity in a way that would elicit the effectiveness of what they do, didn’t dive into any concerns people had with the charity, and generally was just lazy. Any effective review will have to talk to the charity, figure out what they do, and go beyond merely publicly available information. I think this kind of review tries to hold charities to the standard of a billion-dollar public company as opposed to a tiny charity. I saw similar patterns with other reviews, and the more these kinds of bad-faith engagement occur with charities, the less I want to trust VettedCauses.
Note that I am, of course, going to follow through on paying for the review as agreed upon but I won’t be further asking for reviews from VettedCauses .
Disclosure: Possible conflict of interest here. I donated close to $900 to SPI in November 2024 based on information they shared with me privately about their work and confirmation of their activities from a mutual contact. This was a large portion of my giving last year, which may bias me towards wanting to believe they will have impact.
I appreciate that you folks did a review of SPI, but why publish this linkpost without a description?
Also, is there really no information you can share about SPI’s work so far? This doesn’t match my impression of the work they were up to. I’m happy to follow up with them about their progress and share what I find out here, provided that they don’t object.
Hi Eevee, thanks for the comment.
We searched for publicly available information about SPI’s work, and also reached out directly to SPI. We shared multiple drafts of the review with SPI and, between drafts, specifically asked for information about their work. However, SPI told us there wasn’t any work we could include in the review.