Well it finally came through, what we have been waiting to hear for more than two and a half years.
We're pleased to tell you.
It sits near the top of a plain IRS letter dated 3 June 2026, under an employer ID number and a contact named J. Kearl, and it means the Finn Wardman World Explorer Fund is now a registered US 501(c)(3) public charity. Donations are tax-deductible. We can ask people for money out loud. After more than two years of being told no, somebody finally wrote it down: yes.
I want to be honest about how we got here, because it hasn't been easy. We are glossing over a lot of the details, and time suck that has led us down the wrong path. A few times.
We started in Bermuda, where Finn grew up and where this all should have been simplest. In February 2024 the Charity Commissioners denied our first application. The reason, in writing, was that the organisation had not "satisfied the requirement for Public Benefit."
So we pivoted to the Bermuda Community Foundation, that was a huge mistake as well as they ended up throwing us out basically on the street with no solution at all. We decided after nearly a year to apply again to the registry general in Bermuda as we had spent close to $80,000 in grants and had funded a Bermuda athlete to follow his dreams.
The third denial came in, this time "the organisation can achieve its aims and objectives without charitable status." A government department had looked at a fund named after my son, built to send young people somewhere that changes them, and decided it wasn't of public benefit. They added that, having been denied, it would be an offence for us to ask the Bermudian public for a single donation.
So we appealed. I wrote to the Minister and explained what the fund was, what the seed capital was for, who Finn had been. That didn't move it either. We tried again under a re-registration process, gathered the trustee declarations, the bye-laws, the bank statements, the whole folder. By May 2026 the answer arrived dressed in nicer clothes but saying the same thing: we could set up a privately funded trust, but we would not be permitted to solicit the public. Three noes in roughly two years. I forwarded the last letter to Chase with one line: Looks like we go for US.
Finn was an avid skier and surfer, someone who treated a powder day as a moral obligation. He spent the last day of his life in the water with his brother Somers. He was funny in the specific way that made teachers slightly wary of him. He was twenty when he died. The fund exists because that restlessness was the best thing about him, and because there are young people aged eighteen to twenty-six sitting in small towns with a dream that costs money they don't have — a language course, competition fees they can't afford, a coaching qualification, a trip that rearranges what they think is possible. We give them between $5,000 and $10,000 to go and do it. Leo, our first grantee, had never been on a plane and couldn't swim; she's now on the committee that picks who gets funded next.
The US route was unglamorous and I'll spare you most of it. A specialist firm, a Form 1023-EZ, an EIN, a board of three, bylaws and a conflict-of-interest policy adopted on a video call, a registered address in Mount Kisco, New York where my mother happens to live (thanks Mom!). About $2,500 all in. The determination letter came back classifying us as a public charity under 509(a)(2), with an effective exemption date of 26 May 2026 and one box I'd been waiting two years to see ticked: contributions deductible — yes.
What that means in plain terms: an American donor can now give to Finn's fund and deduct it. We are allowed to ask. And as of 16 June we are live for donations. The thing Bermuda told us was an offence is now moot.
The first official gift under the new status came from a couple who have backed this fund since before it had letterhead, when it was just an idea and a grief I hadn't finished having. They've never asked for thanks and I won't embarrass them with their names here. But the first dollar through the door being theirs felt exactly right, and it's the right way to reopen the donation phase.
We've started raising $100,000 for something happening in 2027. We're $90,000 short of that, which tells you how early we are. I'm not going to say what it is yet — it deserves its own post, and it's not finished enough to name. For now it's enough to say the number is real, the deadline is real, and we've begun.
If you've read this far, you can do the thing Bermuda spent two years forbidding. Give to the fund here. Every dollar is now deductible, and every dollar goes toward sending a young person somewhere that turns them into someone slightly braver.
Finn would have found the whole saga hilarious — two years of forms and three rejection letters to establish, officially, that he was worth it. He'd have been right. He was.
We've got the official letter to prove it now.