As the year draws to an end, let’s take a moment to celebrate 2021.
Share your favourite good news, wins, and milestones for the EA community, key causes, and for yourself!
As the year draws to an end, let’s take a moment to celebrate 2021.
Share your favourite good news, wins, and milestones for the EA community, key causes, and for yourself!
The WHO recommended widespread use of the new malaria vaccine – another excellent tool in the fight against malaria.
I started Effective Altruism at Georgia Tech this year (to much greater success than I expected)! I’m planning on running an EA Forum post about this sometime in the next few weeks. I’m also celebrating my fifth anniversary of having taken the Giving What We Can Pledge!
I’m thrilled to see so much innovation within EA. From the Patient Philanthropy Fund to Charity Entrepreneurship’s new charities including 2 meta-charities, many workplace and industry groups being launched, effectivecrypto.org, Effective Giving Quest, and so much more!
GWWC saw our biggest growth year on record, with already ~2,000 new pledges (including trial pledges) and a significant increase in our reach of audiences that are entirely new to EA.
Our Common Agenda, a major UN report, was released which “explicitly uses longtermist language and concepts, and suggests concrete proposals for institutions to represent future generations and manage catastrophic and existential risks.”
I’m excited by the recent explosion of activity aimed at supporting people in entering impactful careers, e.g.:
The number of people doing such work at universities roughly doubled this past year, the amount of support going to each of these campus organizers also greatly increased, and relevant organizations have big plans to further build relevant, professionalized university centers.
A bunch of programs that support undergrads in learning about some pressing problems / getting relevant research experience all started or greatly scaled this past year, e.g.: the Stanford, Cambridge, and Swiss Existential Risk Initatives’ summer research internships; global introductory courses on important fields; and a high-impact internship board for undergrads.
3+ programs aimed at supporting impact-driven high schoolers launched.
The OpenPhil Tech Policy Fellowship, the ML for Alignment Boot Camp, and the ML Alignment Theory Program—all of which were launched this year—are collectively supporting dozens of people with intensive training/support for entering impactful careers.
Broadly makes me optimistic that the movement will do well at turning its funding overhang into impactful, direct work.
After 21+ years of existence and six as an ACE Standout Charity, Faunalytics was awarded “Top Charity” status. As the organization’s founder and executive director for almost 20 years, this is personally gratifying. More essentially, however, it signals the importance of research and effectiveness for the animal advocacy movement, which has historically operated on passion and gut instinct.
During 2021 we grew the GWWC team from 1 staff member to five regular staff. I’m now pretty honoured to be working with outstanding colleagues who are working hard to grow the community of effective givers.
Hi Luke, here are a few things that I enjoyed learning/hearing about the EA community in 2021.
Peter Singer won the $1M Berggruen Prize and gave the entire prize to effective altruist aligned organizations.
GiveDirectly sent a cash transfer to its 1 millionth household this year. With their track record in growth, GiveDirectly thinks that it will eventually be able to serve 2M households a year.
GWWC exposure on BBC with https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59466051
The Against Malaria Foundation has $72M of donations through the first half of their FY22 (FYE 6⁄30), which is a 112% increase from FY21. This is enough to purchase over 30M bed nets.
GiveWell: Directed $1.5M to charities in 2010 and over $500M in FY21, and are projecting to direct ~$1B annually by 2025.