By “professional EA,” I meant that—at least by and large—the fund managers have relevant professional expertise in the subject area of the fund. An investment banker, law firm partner, neurosurgeon, or corporate CEO is very unlikely to have that kind of experience. My assumption is that those folks will take significantly longer to adequately evaluate a grant proposal than someone with helpful background knowledge from professional experience. And given the requirements of most jobs that pay enough to make independent grantmaking viable, I don’t think most people would have enough time to devote to adequately evaluating grants without strong subject-matter background. In contrast, I imagine that I would do a better job evaluating grant proposals in my field of expertise (law) than the bulk of the EA Funds managers, even if the specific subject matter of the grant was a branch of law I hadn’t touched since law school.
I’m a public-sector lawyer, so no one has dissauded me from independent grantmaking. I don’t have nearly the money to have ever thought about it!
In case someone is interested in the idea of a “Donors Choose” type system: unless the proposed grantees had their own 501(c)(3)s, what you’re describing would need some degree of 501(c)(3) organizational oversight/control/overhead to keep the tax deduction in the US (which higher-income individuals definitely care about). A straight-up “EA GoFundMe” wouldn’t be any more tax-deductible than vanilla GoFundMe is. Certain types of grants—those that could be seen as closer to gifts to individuals rather than compensation for work to be performed—might need heightened scrutiny to avoid problems with private inurement (benefit).
501(c)(3)s can be acceded via fiscal sponsorship. There is already a network of agreement between EA orgs to re-grant to each other for tax reasons, mostly thanks to Rethink https://rethink.charity/donate
In order to tap into this, an individual needs to be paid by though an org that is tapped into this network. For AI Safety projects I think AI Safety Support would be willing to provide this service (I know they already done this for two projects and one person). I don’t know what the options are for other cause areas, but if this becomes a major bottleneck, then it seems like a good plan would be to set up orgs to financially host various projects.
By “professional EA,” I meant that—at least by and large—the fund managers have relevant professional expertise in the subject area of the fund. An investment banker, law firm partner, neurosurgeon, or corporate CEO is very unlikely to have that kind of experience. My assumption is that those folks will take significantly longer to adequately evaluate a grant proposal than someone with helpful background knowledge from professional experience. And given the requirements of most jobs that pay enough to make independent grantmaking viable, I don’t think most people would have enough time to devote to adequately evaluating grants without strong subject-matter background. In contrast, I imagine that I would do a better job evaluating grant proposals in my field of expertise (law) than the bulk of the EA Funds managers, even if the specific subject matter of the grant was a branch of law I hadn’t touched since law school.
I’m a public-sector lawyer, so no one has dissauded me from independent grantmaking. I don’t have nearly the money to have ever thought about it!
In case someone is interested in the idea of a “Donors Choose” type system: unless the proposed grantees had their own 501(c)(3)s, what you’re describing would need some degree of 501(c)(3) organizational oversight/control/overhead to keep the tax deduction in the US (which higher-income individuals definitely care about). A straight-up “EA GoFundMe” wouldn’t be any more tax-deductible than vanilla GoFundMe is. Certain types of grants—those that could be seen as closer to gifts to individuals rather than compensation for work to be performed—might need heightened scrutiny to avoid problems with private inurement (benefit).
501(c)(3)s can be acceded via fiscal sponsorship. There is already a network of agreement between EA orgs to re-grant to each other for tax reasons, mostly thanks to Rethink
https://rethink.charity/donate
In order to tap into this, an individual needs to be paid by though an org that is tapped into this network. For AI Safety projects I think AI Safety Support would be willing to provide this service (I know they already done this for two projects and one person). I don’t know what the options are for other cause areas, but if this becomes a major bottleneck, then it seems like a good plan would be to set up orgs to financially host various projects.