Background: Good Ventures is requiring Open Philanthropy (OP) to exit the wild animal welfare space.
Recent development: The Navigation Fund (TNF) plans to fill the gap left by OP, at least through the end of 2026.
This is awesome :) Really glad to hear this news!
Buying the WAW sector & other allies time to deal with the funding gap left by GV seems naively to me like a really good spend. Very glad someone filled it, thank you to those who made it happen and especially TNF / Jed!
I agree! I erred on the side of dryness in the post because I’m really worried that “good news” will be misinterpreted as “okay everything is fine now.”
But that doesn’t mean this isn’t worth celebrating! It’s freakin’ awesome!! Easily a contender for the biggest karmic harvest any philanthropist has reaped this year.
It’s especially impressive given that the Navigation Fund is so new, yet they were willing and able to make a big fast pivot. I don’t know what exactly it entailed for them, but I can say I’ve learned from Wild Animal Initiative’s Grants Program that both setting up grant-making systems and administering grants are way more administratively complicated and time-consuming than I ever thought it would be. So I’m guessing it was no small undertaking for a small team in its first year of grant-making. Thank you TNF!
Heart! “It’s freakin’ awesome!!” really resonates with me here (my initial reaction was “OMG yes”).
Also this in general makes me feel relieved and grateful that the ecosystem is robust enough to deal with sudden funding shortfalls like this on a short timeline (although I imagine this was no trivial lift to juggle for everyone involved). This feels like an existence proof / credible test of at least one part of our collective resilience.
🤝🏻 Hope you & others get some time to celebrate this win before you have to dive back into resolving the longer term sustainability issue!
This is awesome :) Really glad to hear this news!
Buying the WAW sector & other allies time to deal with the funding gap left by GV seems naively to me like a really good spend. Very glad someone filled it, thank you to those who made it happen and especially TNF / Jed!
I agree! I erred on the side of dryness in the post because I’m really worried that “good news” will be misinterpreted as “okay everything is fine now.”
But that doesn’t mean this isn’t worth celebrating! It’s freakin’ awesome!! Easily a contender for the biggest karmic harvest any philanthropist has reaped this year.
It’s especially impressive given that the Navigation Fund is so new, yet they were willing and able to make a big fast pivot. I don’t know what exactly it entailed for them, but I can say I’ve learned from Wild Animal Initiative’s Grants Program that both setting up grant-making systems and administering grants are way more administratively complicated and time-consuming than I ever thought it would be. So I’m guessing it was no small undertaking for a small team in its first year of grant-making. Thank you TNF!
Heart! “It’s freakin’ awesome!!” really resonates with me here (my initial reaction was “OMG yes”).
Also this in general makes me feel relieved and grateful that the ecosystem is robust enough to deal with sudden funding shortfalls like this on a short timeline (although I imagine this was no trivial lift to juggle for everyone involved). This feels like an existence proof / credible test of at least one part of our collective resilience.
🤝🏻 Hope you & others get some time to celebrate this win before you have to dive back into resolving the longer term sustainability issue!