A couple of quick ideas from a legal perspective:
How to differentiate policy advocacy (which c3′s are allowed to engage in without limitations) from lobbying (which c3′s have significant restrictions on) in non-US systems (e.g. in the US pushing for agencies to adopt regulatory schemes does not count as lobbying, but the distinction between executive agencies and legislative bodies may not translate well to other governmental systems)
Effect of China’s NGO law (which creates huge barriers to giving/operating in China) on high impact causes (you’d probably need to narrow this down for a 30 page thesis—so maybe choose one specific cause), and what US/non-Chinese orgs can do to work with/around them
How the US regulations could better facilitate international giving (e.g. equivalency determination certificates should be good for a duration and not need to be re-issued for every grant, and anti-terrorism legislation should have a negligence standard rather than being basically strict liability)
and I second Abraham’s suggestion on what US orgs can do to prepare themselves for proposed DAF changes
I can think of a few different inter-related lines of effort in advancing the psychedelic movement, that may be most easily divided into:
policy work
scientific research
grassroots work
Do you have a sense of whether the policy work and scientific research are money constrained, talent constrained or both? For someone looking to enter the field what would be
And as far as grassroots work goes, it seems important to keep the movement “respectable” but at the same time it seems important for more people to have personal experiences with psychedelics if they’re going to get on board.
Given that it’s hard to be respectable while advocating for people to run around breaking the law, would should an effective grassroots component to the psychedelic movement look like? And specifically, do you think informal/under-the-table trip sitting/guiding (assume it is well researched, and carefully conducted) a valuable thing to offer to the movement?