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.

AI Risk-specific ideas

Quick plug: If you’re considering founding an AI safety organization, you can apply for the AI safety incubator I co-founded: Catalyze Impact.

• 100+ concrete projects and open problems in evals (2025)

• AI projects to accelerate science and security (2025)

• Request for Proposals on Hardware-Enabled Mechanisms (HEMs) (2025)

• Ten AI safety projects I’d like people to work on (2025)

• Evals projects I’d like to see, and a call to apply to OP’s evals RFP (2025)

• For-profit AI Safety Ideas (2024)

• The AI Assurance Technology Landscape (2024)

• 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

• Some for-profit AI alignment org ideas (2023)

• R/​AISafetyIdeas

• Probably good projects for the AI safety ecosystem (2022)

• AI Safety field-building projects I’d like to see (2022)

Longtermist & Neartermist—mixed ideas

• EA forum tags to browse

  • Research agendas, questions, and project lists

  • Collections and resources

  • Take action

  • Cause candidates

• Fundamental Development Gap Map v1.0 (2025)

• List of Lists of Concrete Biosecurity Project Ideas (2024)

• Ideas EAIF is excited to receive applications for (2024)

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

• 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

• 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

• Projects I’d like to see in the GHW meta space (2025)

• Awards | Global Grand Challenges (2025)

• Megaprojects for animals (2022)

• 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)

• The YC Library—lots of articles on entrepreneurship from the world’s leading incubator.

• Help for coming up with ideas:

  • Prompts to find problems (2020)

• Two EA project idea exchange platforms:

  • EA Work Club Projects

  • Airtable Project Platform

• How to Do Great Work (2023)

Many thanks to Alejandro Acelas and people in the comments for sending over additions to this list to help maintain it as an up-to-date resource.

[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