Effective Giving Projects That Have (and Haven’t) Been Tried Among Christians
TLDR: US Christian giving amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Much of it is far less effective than it could be. EA for Christians (EACH) is tackling this, but more can be done. Below is a list of projects we have worked on so far related to effective giving. If this excites you, or you’d like to start a new project or incubate a charity improving effectiveness among Christians/Christian orgs, we’d love to partner with or support you.
Context: I recently had a chat with someone at Giving What We Can who thought that people may be less keen to start a new project in the effective giving & Christianity space because they assume Effective Altruism for Christians has already tried it. But there’s a lot we haven’t tried (or things we have tried that we might not be best at). For more context, EACH is a global community of 500+ Christians in EA. I’m the FT director and I work with numerous excellent and committed PT staff.
Effective-giving related Projects: In no particular order, here’s a short list of most of the effective giving projects we’ve undertaken over the last 3-5 years (while I’ve worked here). Some of these have cross-over with careers, EA community building, etc.
Projects we’re giving proactive attention to (at least 1-2+ staff hours a week) are marked with (✔)
Projects we’re giving even more attention to (2+ staff hours a week) are marked with (✔+)
1-on-1s with Christians interested in effective giving (we’ve done 500+ to-date; most of our 1-on-1s at least touch on effective giving) (✔+)
General EA Christian conferences, retreats, and meetups (✔+)
A conference organizing Christian impact professionals from large Christian development charities (E.g. Compassion, Hope, etc.) (✔) to discuss EA . We did one in 2023. A video on this here. DM me for a report on how this went. (✔)
Report about M&E practices at Christian development charities. We have one forthcoming this spring. (✔)
Published book about effective altruism and surprising ways to have a large impact with one’s life. We have one forthcoming in 2025 (✔+)
A Christian Campaign for (mostly Givewell) effective charities (raised $380,000+) (✔)
Talks at churches on effectiveness and radical generosity.
Uni internships doing outreach related to radical and effective generosity (We’ve had 8 interns for this and also a partnership with One-For-The-World)
Articles about EA and Christianity, especially effective Christian charity (We’ve published dozens of blogs (✔+)
A podcast heavily featuring Christians who earn-to-give or work at effective charities. We’ve done one with 10+ episodes (✔+)
3+ videos with Christian youtubers about effective altruism (especially effective giving)
Social meetups at cities across US coastal cities and London (we’ve done a couple dozen) (✔+)
Online discussions on EA and Christian themes (we’ve done 140, about 30 about effective giving topics with an avg. 10 people at each; youtube videos here) (✔)
A 5-minute animated video describing effective altruism (and effective giving) from a Christian perspective. See here
Academic workshops on effective giving. We’ve done some on EA themes, with a few talks on generosity. This year we have one on longtermism. (✔)
Online talks on effective giving themes. We’ve done 5-10 (✔)
M&E advising from Christian EA development professionals to Christian development charities. We’re starting a pro bono offering in spring 2024 (✔)
A report on plausibly highest-impact Christian poverty charities. We have done some related work in this report
An Intro-course to EA/Effective giving for Christians. See our 4-week Intro course (✔)
Career outreach that promotes effective giving as a primary way to have an impactful career. We’re prioritising this via our Career advisory (✔+)
A directory of Christians who give effectively. Relatedly, we have a directory of 250+ Christians who are in the EA movement / broadly agree with the basic ideas behind EA.
Thoughts on the above:
Some projects above we’ve discontinued / no longer prioritize.
Some projects we find valuable but are irregular or otherwise don’t require continued engagement (e.g. directory).
Some projects above we would tackle more if we had more talent or resources.
Here are related projects we haven’t tried but that are maybe high in expected value:
Outreach to HNWI Christians to give more effectively
Influencing wealthy Christian institutions to incorporate effectiveness (NCF, Trinity Wall Street with $10b in assets, Church Pension Group with ~$20b in assets, etc.)
Influencing Christian foundations to incorporate effectiveness
Talking about effective giving with very widely-followed Christian thought leaders (e.g. NT Wright, John Piper, Allister McGrath, David Platt, Francis Chan etc.) e.g. on our podcast
Promoting Unconditional Cash Transfers (e.g. GiveDirectly) for the Church of England’s $1 billion reparations program
Promoting more effective interventions (e.g. malaria net programs) within Christian development charities that have done so/are doing so (e.g. Episcopal Relief and Development, Catholic Relief Services, respectively)
Others...
I’d like to produce a write-up with what’s worked more or less. We have our theory of change and output stats here. For quick access to all EA Christian materials, see our linktree.
Again, if you’re interested in doing any of these, I’d be happy to support you / share resources or learnings! Please feel free to book a chat with me anytime here.
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Thanks so much for writing this up!