Like many problems in EA, this one is 100% at the door of OpenPhil. There is absolutely nothing to stop them funding fewer organizations with more money per organization, rather than overseeing this sprawling empire of countless tiny orgs. The real question is why OpenPhil prefers it this way?
Yea, I think the funders are the ones with the main powers here. I’m also curious.
I assume it would take a fair bit of effortful work and coordination to set things up large organizations that people feel good about. My impression is that the funders in our ecosystem have had pretty low staff levels and didn’t have spare senior management capacity or experience that would have made this sort of thing straightforward.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative both seem to have much larger headcounts than OP, for instance.
The cynical explanation is that because all of these orgs are small ,they’re also weak and very likely to remain entirely dependent on the funder. Larger orgs would be much more likely to start their own fundraising teams and seek to diversify their revenue sources.
For what it’s worth, with what I know, this specific thing doesn’t seem very likely to me.
My impression is that one reason for having these orgs be independent is the hope that other funders would come in to help fund them. (But that doesn’t seem to have happened as we might have liked)
Like many problems in EA, this one is 100% at the door of OpenPhil. There is absolutely nothing to stop them funding fewer organizations with more money per organization, rather than overseeing this sprawling empire of countless tiny orgs. The real question is why OpenPhil prefers it this way?
Yea, I think the funders are the ones with the main powers here. I’m also curious.
I assume it would take a fair bit of effortful work and coordination to set things up large organizations that people feel good about. My impression is that the funders in our ecosystem have had pretty low staff levels and didn’t have spare senior management capacity or experience that would have made this sort of thing straightforward.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative both seem to have much larger headcounts than OP, for instance.
The cynical explanation is that because all of these orgs are small ,they’re also weak and very likely to remain entirely dependent on the funder. Larger orgs would be much more likely to start their own fundraising teams and seek to diversify their revenue sources.
For what it’s worth, with what I know, this specific thing doesn’t seem very likely to me.
My impression is that one reason for having these orgs be independent is the hope that other funders would come in to help fund them. (But that doesn’t seem to have happened as we might have liked)