and part 3
If any of these sound similar to what you already do (or would like to start doing), please let us know! To apply:
- Go to Expensify.org/apply
- Describe the community work you are already doing, or intend to start
- Detail the specific kind of expense that you will be seeking to get reimbursed
- Explain how this work relates to one or more of the current funding areas
- Outline your plan for how to recruit other volunteers to scale up your campaign
We expect quite a few applications, so we are going to evaluate them in stages. But doing that is also a lot of work, so who better to help than
all Expensify.org donors. Specifically, it will work as follows:
- We will present the complete list of campaigns to every current donor to Expensify.org.
- They will rank the campaigns in order of interest (after all, we work for them), and we will award a minimum $25,000 budget to the top 10.
- We will then work with those 10 to flesh out and improve the campaign description, after which we will present the enhanced campaigns again to donors, to re-rank.
- We will pick the top 5 and award a minimum $50,000 budget to each.
- We will then work with those 5 to flesh their campaign concept out further, including interviewing initial volunteers to get stories of how each campaign is working out in the real world -- and present one last time to donors for a final vote.
- The top choice will be awarded a minimum $100,000 budget.
Each selected campaign will be run for at least one year, by the campaign manager who proposed it, during which it will be provided with at least as much budget as was awarded during the donor voting phase -- with the most popular options conceivably receiving much more depending on how much activity we see.
Like everything we do, this is highly experimental as we figure out the right way to be the most helpful to the largest number of people. Hit me up on Twitter
@dbarrett if you have any questions about it, or any ideas for how we can do a better job.
One final note before I hit Send: about that three million dollar budget. The idea for this whole thing came out of an internal discussion triggered by the BLM movement reflecting on our own less-than-optimal diversity as an organization. Quite a few improvements and initiatives have come out of that, most of which aren’t very visible to the outside. But in particular, we were trying to get creative about how to internalize the concept of "equity" -- which in large part means helping solve problems that happen
outside of our walls, not just those we create within.
To try to quantify the scale of the problem in some numerical way, we turned to the
Payscale: State of the Gender Pay Gap 2020 report. Specifically, we were struck by the "Gender pay gap by race, relative to white men" chart, which outlines the "uncontrolled pay gap" -- a value that does not limit itself to people in the same role. We feel this is the best measure of the financial effects of accumulated systemic inequality, as in theory if society were perfectly just, everyone would follow the exact same career trajectory regardless of gender or race. But in practice, obviously, that is far from the case.
As you’d expect, the first place we looked was internally, to ensure that everyone at the same role was being paid the same, irrespective of race or gender. Thankfully this is guaranteed by our
compensation review process, which has evolved a ton over the years and now calculates compensation formulaically based on an internal voting system involving all employees. This makes it essentially impossible for any one person’s bias (positive or negative) to skew the results for anyone else. But we also acknowledge that we exist in a fundamentally biased society -- and that even in the perfect case of us being totally neutral, the accumulation of injustice before people arrive here would still result in skewed results.
This conundrum is the whole basis of the philosophy of "equity", which led us to our first, very brute-force proposal: let’s just directly pay anyone in a historically marginalized group more, based on the Payscale data. This would mean white women, who earn $0.81 on the dollar relative to white men, would get a 19% raise -- to "catch them up". All Black, Native American, and Hispanic women would get a 25% raise. The thought process was that in theory, had they not experienced systemic bias prior to joining the company, they would be earning that much. However, those who were slated to receive the bonus were universally opposed to the idea -- everybody obviously wants to be paid more, but those who would have benefited the most wanted to help others more than they wanted to help themselves.
So the second thought was to take that same money, and rather than paying it to the employees directly, to instead donate it to
Expensify.org with a focus on justice and unwinding the effects of systemic bias. This was similarly well intentioned, but missed the mark: it in effect creates a "tax" on all non-white men, which creates perverse incentives in hiring.
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