Impactful Projects and Organizations to Start—List of Lists

[Alexandra Bos]

Are you an (aspiring) changemaker looking for the next thing to do? Consider founding something!

In Nov and Dec of 2022 I have scoured the depths of the internet to find as many lists of impactful project/​organization/​charity ideas as I could to gain inspiration for what to start myself. I hope that sharing this curated version of my ‘list of lists’ can help more people to get the creative juices flowing and to take the next step.

There are definitely resources that I have overlooked or newer ones which did not exist yet during my search, so I’d invite everyone to share ideas and links to additional resources in the comments. I sometimes update this list when I come across forum posts that seem relevant but the collection of relevant materials starting in 2023 might be less exhaustive.

Longtermist & Neartermist—mixed ideas

• EA forum tags to browse

  • Research agendas, questions, and project lists

  • Collections and resources

  • Take action

  • Cause candidates

• Project ideas for making transformative AI go well, other than by working on alignment (2024). Series:

  • Project ideas: Governance during explosive technological growth

  • Project ideas: Epistemics

  • Project ideas: Sentience and rights of digital minds

  • Project ideas: Backup plans & Cooperative AI

• 20 concrete projects for reducing existential risk (2023) by Rethink Priorities

• List of Short-Term (<15 hours) Biosecurity Projects to Test Your Fit (2023)

• Some More projects I’d like to see (2023)

• EA Projects I’d Like to See (2022)

• Possible gaps in the EA community (2021)

• Things CEA is not doing (2021) by CEA

• Big List of Cause Candidates (2020)

• Annotated List of Project Ideas & Volunteering Resources (2020) which includes smaller and larger project ideas and links to many lists.

• 69 things that might be pretty effective to fund (2018) lists many (potentially) high-impact projects.

• List of possible EA meta-charities (2019)

• EA Summit Project Ideas

• Projects I’d like to see (2017)

• Concrete project lists (2017), both the post and the comments might be valuable.

• EAV Ideas in Need of Implementation (2015)

Longtermist ideas

• Nonlinear’s idea list (2023) contains hundreds of ideas. It is not published yet but you can request access to the document.

• A rough list of ideas for scalable longtermist projects (2022) by Rethink Priorities.

• The Future Fund’s Project Ideas Competition (2022) - The comments under this post.

• Ideas that were on the Future Fund’s website (2022).

• Longtermist Entrepreneurship Fellowship ideas database (2020)

Neartermist ideas

• Charity Entrepreneurship’s research reports (2020-2023)

• Animal Welfare charity recommendations by Animal Charity Evaluators:

  • Charities We’re Excited About (2018)

  • Interventions we’d like to see (2017)

  • Charities we’d like to see (2016)

• Charities we’d like to see by GiveWell (2015)

Bonus resources

• Charity Entrepreneurship’s handbook (2021)

• So you want to be a charity entrepreneur. Read these first. (2022)

• Help for coming up with ideas:

  • Prompts to find problems (2020)

• Two EA project idea exchange platforms:

  • EA Work Club Projects

  • Airtable Project Platform

[Lizka]

There are three good topic pages that related to this (note that it looks like not all the posts above have been tagged with the topics listed below that are relevant for those posts):

• Research agendas, questions, and project lists

• Collections and resources

• Take action

I also think the Opportunity Board is really useful.

[Alexandra Bos]

Good point, it also reminded me to add the tags to the main text of this post as another tip for where to look. Thank you!

[Renan Araujo]

Here’s another compilation we put together for our team’s work on helping people found longtermist projects: [public] A rough list of ideas for scalable longtermist projects.

[Alexandra Bos]

Thank you for the addition! I added it