Ethical mandate, fiduciary control and professional execution — separated
The board is deliberately not composed primarily of religious leaders. Three levels separate the ethical mandate from fiduciary control and from professional execution. A Board of Trustees of nine to fifteen members with an independent majority — finance, humanitarian, governance, legal and international-development experience — holds fiduciary authority. A Global Faith Council of twenty to forty internationally respected religious and ethical leaders across Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and other traditions protects the institution's ethical mandate but does not individually control capital allocation. Professional committees execute: Investment, Impact, Audit & Risk, Ethics, Faith Standards and Nomination/Governance. The Faith Standards Committee owns the segregation rules; the Investment Committee cannot override them.
The intended character of the institution is a combination of major international foundation, development institution and investment organization — not a religious fundraising organization.
The accountability spine
Donations collected in America are never simply wired abroad. Although the IRS's equivalency-determination and expenditure-responsibility regimes formally govern private foundations, every cross-border transfer in this architecture is voluntarily built to the expenditure-responsibility standard, whatever classification the US entity ultimately holds:
- 01Donor
- 02NY Foundation
- 03Approved Program
- 04Luxembourg / Project Entity
- 05Beneficiary
Every link in that chain carries purpose restrictions, a project identifier, a budget, milestones, AML and sanctions screening, reporting requirements, impact KPIs, audit rights and return-of-funds provisions. The transparency platform funded in Phase I exists to let any donor trace a restricted gift along this chain.
What donors fund — stated in advance, as policy
Unrestricted gifts carry an 8% administrative allocation; restricted program gifts carry 5%, covering the compliance chain, transparency reporting and audit that the restriction itself demands. Faith-fund gifts carry whatever rate the applicable religious standard permits, set by the Faith Standards Committee, and never subsidize other pools. Because the Founders Capitalization and the operating-runway tranche of the Founding Round fund institution-building, program donors are not asked to. The overhead story is simple: founders funded the institution; your gift funds the work, minus the cost of proving to you that it did. An annual What Donors Funded statement publishes actual allocations against these policy rates.