Peter Singer typically asks the hosts of his talks to give ~10k to effective charities. While this is not a strict demand, we would like to come close to this goal. To this end, we will try to find external sources, so that we redirect more money to good causes. However, we would appreciate if someone who is already planning to give to an effective charity is willing to do so nominally for the purpose of this talk, so that we have a safety cushion in case fundraising doesn’t go well.
Could you elaborate a bit more on this? It seems to me that you could just try as hard as you can to fundraise and if you fall short, it sounds like Singer wouldn’t mind? Are you nervous that it would look bad if you didn’t come up with the $10K?
I did the fundraising last year. We split the cost of his visit between ourselves and a bioethics organization, and he gave two talks, one for each org. For our own cosponsorship we also got a bunch of academic departments to pitch in and stuff. For that I had a lot more lead time, so didn’t have to worry about arranging a backstop.
Could you elaborate a bit more on this? It seems to me that you could just try as hard as you can to fundraise and if you fall short, it sounds like Singer wouldn’t mind? Are you nervous that it would look bad if you didn’t come up with the $10K?
Do you know how other colleges have afforded Singer in the past? What did you do when you hosted Singer last year?
I did the fundraising last year. We split the cost of his visit between ourselves and a bioethics organization, and he gave two talks, one for each org. For our own cosponsorship we also got a bunch of academic departments to pitch in and stuff. For that I had a lot more lead time, so didn’t have to worry about arranging a backstop.
Right, the main problem is that we finalized the date after most departments and funds finalized their budget, so we only managed to raise ~1k.