When we onboard a new partner, the first conversation is the most uncomfortable one. We send the organization a list of questions that takes most teams a week to assemble answers to. We do not apologize for that. The vetting process exists because every dollar of Buckshot revenue crosses their desk, and the donor — our customer — has a right to know what happens next.

The first question is for a transparent funding-flow map. Every grant over $1,000, every restricted fund, every account that receives Buckshot money — we want to see where it lands, when it lands, and what it buys. Some organizations have this on a public dashboard. Some assemble it in a spreadsheet. Some have to build it for the first time because nobody ever asked. The acceptance criterion is the same: a reader with no prior context should be able to follow the dollar from our wire to the program it paid for. If they cannot, the partnership does not move forward.

The second question is about mental-health-program overhead — not the financial kind, the operational kind. What fraction of the clinical staff are licensed? What supervision structure do crisis counselors operate under? What is the documented handoff procedure when a text or call exceeds the responder’s scope? A program with a beautiful website and a thin clinical layer is exactly the kind of program we cannot route donations into. The cost of being wrong in this space is measured in lives, not in brand reputation.

Third, we ask for evidence-based curriculum. Every program we fund has to be able to point at the underlying research base — peer-reviewed where it exists, practitioner consensus where it does not, and an explicit reason for every departure from either. We do not require an RCT for every decision; we do require that the decision be defensible to a clinician who is not in the room.

Two organizations we approached this year did not pass phase two. One passed phase three. None has signed yet. We will write about the first signing when there is one.