thisfinecrew | Summary of research re: foreign donations to US non-profits

Reposted from

(Based on consultation with a British lawyer and his consultations with an American colleague.)

Basically, anything that's registered as a 501(c)(3) non-profit is fine.

501(c)(4) organizations are entitled to do direct political campaigning and lobbying of specific kinds, for which they are not permitted to use funds from people who are not US citizens or naturalized.

It doesn't necessarily rule out the organization accepting foreign donations, but they should have a separate "compliance account" that foreign donations go into so that they're not used for funding work that's "political"(in the strictly-defined sense here).

In practice, a lot of 501(c)(4) organizations are set up with a sibling 501(c)(3) foundation (e.g. the ACLU Foundation) that does stuff which is not directly political, e.g. litigation, public education. So it seems like the best route for foreigners who want to donate in these cases is probably to donate directly to the 501(c)3.

I'd imagine that large organizations like the ACLU must surely have an internal mechanism for funneling foreign donations to the right bit, but right now they're obviously swamped so attempts to clarify via e-mail have been unsuccessful so far.

Original post at https://rydra-wong.dreamwidth.org/461923.html