With our main donation in 2021, my partner and I supported the Future Matters Project (FMP), who are working on understanding and strengthening social movements, currently focused on climate change. I think of social movement research and work as a very valuable diversification of the “classical effective altruist” portfolio, and thus took up the opportunity to bridge a funding gap between two other grants.
I interacted with the FMP founder a bunch during and after making the grant, which seems to have added value for them (by asking questions, helping to brainstorm, and providing perspectives). This made me update somewhat towards “individual, medium-sized EA donors can be a valuable part of the ecosystem by adding grant-making and mentoring capacity”.
Like many here (I suspect), we also donated to EA Funds. Finally, I am one of the people who make small donations to Wikipedia every year—though I think of this more as paying the utility bills^^ Happy to chat about any and all of the above!
An alternative is to donate your time rather than your money, and use it to do the kind of work you would have funded, had this been an option. With most interventions, this isn’t possible or realistic, but Wikipedia is the Free Encyclopedia that Anyone Can Edit.
With our main donation in 2021, my partner and I supported the Future Matters Project (FMP), who are working on understanding and strengthening social movements, currently focused on climate change. I think of social movement research and work as a very valuable diversification of the “classical effective altruist” portfolio, and thus took up the opportunity to bridge a funding gap between two other grants.
I interacted with the FMP founder a bunch during and after making the grant, which seems to have added value for them (by asking questions, helping to brainstorm, and providing perspectives). This made me update somewhat towards “individual, medium-sized EA donors can be a valuable part of the ecosystem by adding grant-making and mentoring capacity”.
Like many here (I suspect), we also donated to EA Funds. Finally, I am one of the people who make small donations to Wikipedia every year—though I think of this more as paying the utility bills^^
Happy to chat about any and all of the above!
I used to think the same, but after reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019/Annual_Plan_2021-2022 I don’t think most (if any) of the money goes to things donors care about.
It would be great if there was a way to fund editing Wikipedia, with a focus on increasing the quality of important articles.
But looking at the comments here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FebKgHaAymjiETvXd/wikipedia-editing-is-important-tractable-and-neglected , it sadly seems currently not feasible.
An alternative is to donate your time rather than your money, and use it to do the kind of work you would have funded, had this been an option. With most interventions, this isn’t possible or realistic, but Wikipedia is the Free Encyclopedia that Anyone Can Edit.