How could you best spent one million dollars, to materially help the world in a lasting way?

1 million dollars doesn't go that far these days, at the world scale it is almost nothing.

You could however make a lasting difference in your community by making a scholarship, building needed facilities, or doing something else where you directly make sure the funds go where needed and can't be used for other uses. Lets face it, if you give it to some charities 90% of it will just go to the administration.

One of the things that I've seen is that politicians can be bribed for shockingly little money. I think with a 1million dollars you could bribe one high member of congress, or 10-20 low-level politicians.
"1 million dollars doesn't go that far" depends on what you use it for. Donating it all in one go will not take it far. Investing it in an education for climate science (or paying for some to do climate science) will take it further as you'll have some leftover to make more of an impact. Also isn't admin apart of the cost of being a charity org?

Follow in the footsteps of Gil Cisneros...

"...is an American government official, philanthropist, and politician who served as Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness in the Biden administration. He served as the U.S. representative for California's 39th congressional district from 2019 to 2021

"In 2010, he and his wife won a $266 million Mega Millions lottery jackpot and became philanthropists, establishing endowments for scholarships to be given to Latino students at GWU and the University of Southern California. They also founded Generation First Degree Pico Rivera, with the goal of ensuring every Latino household in Pico Rivera has at least one college graduate, and the Gilbert and Jacki Cisneros Foundation with an initial investment of $20 million to provide mentorship in education."

Give it to me.

One million dollars can't do jack shit to "fix" this world. It's like telling the doctor to put an adhesive bandage over a third-degree burn.

I have an idee fixe that I could set up a non profit that bought homes and rented them at a price somewhere between the maintenance cost and the market price. It would make a profit and slowly expand providing more and more affordable housing. Ideally it would start with more than 1 million but doesn't need to.

If you rent at cost or even a little over you'll go broke. People won't pay their rent and trash the places. Non-profits are finding out that they can't even support what they're trying to do with housing because the actual costs are more than what you think are "at cost".
- I think that's why they said between the maintenance cost and market price.

Dedicate the $1 million to funding zoning reform efforts in your city to allow for the construction of more housing and reduce the cost of housing for everyone.

Set up a trust to invest the money, from the compounding returns, use a sustainable portion of the dividends to fund a cause you believe will help change the world. Be very explicit to the trust managers as to the long term instructions of the trust.

With compound market returns the million dollars could be worth $40 million in 50 years and would be distributing af a sustainable 3% dividend, 1.2 million a year to a cause you believe in.

I think spending all of it on feeding people who are starving. You could keep a lot of people alive on a million, even if it was just for long enough to give them a second chance on their own. And even if that second chance failed, then at least all of the goodness of those people would have more time to be in the world.

Give water and food to where it is needed.

Guillotines with "Heroes Work Here" signs atop them.

You might be able to buy some land, build a playground and maintain it for a few years in a deprived neighbourhood. If you have money left over, do it again somewhere else.

Give to a charity. Get an education that persues ecology or climate science. Fund someone doing ecology or climate science. Ignore the money and find a group planting trees. Plant trees. Plant trees. Plant trees. Plant.trees

I'm generally against the idea of planting as many trees as possible.

Trees are not very good carbon sinks because they decompose and burn. Also, there are also some ecological communities where adding trees makes the land a worse carbon sink.

Avoiding cutting down forests to build suburbs is something I can certainly get behind though.
- Fair, but I think that the economic benefits of growing more wood is a big factor, I'm in the UK so planting trees is OK basically anywhere. I think kelp forests are also a good option, not sure about any other benefits outside of using green house gases.

According to Rutger Bregman: just give it away to people who don't have it.

Fund an open source project to make something useful that helps make life cheaper and easier for regular people

Free education

Well, if you put that million dollars somewhere that makes a bit of money and follow the 4% rule, you could take out $40k each year and maybe help 4 kids attend a state school every 4 years.
For like 5 people?
- Then I suppose the question is reduced to how one should select the 5 people! :)
- Anything better than 0

Call up Louis Rossmann and have a talk about how you can help with democracy to stop the present dystopian neo feudal regression in the world. Long term, you could impact the trajectory of the next few centuries in substantial ways and lessen the coming dark age.

Long term, you could impact the trajectory of the next few centuries in substantial ways and lessen the coming dark age

With a budget of $1,000,000? That seems very ambitious at best.
- Not really. There are very few lobbyists for a non dystopian future. The battle for the right to own your tools is the absolute fulcrum of the future and the next several centuries. The loss of ownership rights is the largest sociopolitical issue and regression of the past millennia. The atrocity of feudalism was already hashed out as a terrible and failed social structure. Allowing it to reemerge will have extreme long term impacts
  
  The way people fail to see and understand this issue speaks to the potential force needed to shift the trend and trajectory. All it takes are a few influential and connected people working to shift the political conversation and momentum in the opposite direction to alter the course of the future. Funding a few individuals to speak up for us could make an enormous impact. Ownership IS citizenship; IS democracy. Trusting others while renting tools and property IS feudalism. It is a path to slavery in all but name. It happened before, and is always the inevitable outcome of this situation. Putting up any fight against the lackadaisical complacency of our present culture absolutely has the potential to impact the future in a substantial way.