Great work! :) Very happy to see the increase in rigour over earlier estimates. If your research is correct (and, in my casual reading of it, I can find no reason why it wouldn’t be) this opens up a whole new area of funding opportunities in the global health & wellbeing space!
I’m also excited about the rest of your research agenda. It seems very ambitious ;)
Some things I find interesting:
“we found evidence that group psychotherapy is more effective than psychotherapy delivered to individuals which is in line with other meta-analyses (Barkowski et al., 2020; Cuijpers et al., 2019). One explanation for the superiority is that the peer relationships formed in a group provide an additional source of value beyond the patient-therapist relationship.”
--> I did not expect group therapy to be more effective. Instead I expected it to be less effective per person, but more cost effective in total. This is great news.
I am also surprised by the extremely low cost of lay therapy. Is there any correlation between the effectiveness of lay therapy and its cost? I can imagine training costing money but increasing effectiveness.
Most charities not responding/willing to share their costs is .. maybe not so surprising? Let’s hope that changes if/when StrongMinds gets a bunch of funding, and you develop your reputation!
Last question: what’s HLI’s current funding situation? (Current funding, room for funding in different growth scenarios)
Last question: what’s HLI’s current funding situation? (Current funding, room for funding in different growth scenarios)
Our funding situation is, um, “actively seeking new donors”! We haven’t yet filled our budget for 2022.
Our gap up to the end 2022 on our lean budget is £120k; that’s the minimum we need to ‘keep the lights on’.
Our growth budget, the gap to the of 2022 is probably £300k; I’m not sure we could efficiently scale up much faster than that. (But if someone insisted on giving me more than that, I would have a good go!)
Hi Michael, has the funding situation of the HLI changed in the last three months?
I’m especially interested to know if this analysis and the discussion around it brought new funds.
Also, are financial statements for 2020 and 2021 from the HLI available somewhere by any chance? I’m thinking about directing there some of my donations for 2022
Sorry for the slow reply on this—I’ve been taking a bit of a break from the EA forum.
I’m pleased to report the funding situation at HLI has substantially improved on the back of our new research. We’ve raised enough money that we’ve switched to our ‘growth’ budget (most of the difference between ‘lean’ and ‘growth’ is hiring 2 new staff). However, we are still $50k short of funding for our growth budget for 2022 and donations would be welcome! Feel free to reach out to me privately too.
I’ll talk to our fiscal sponsor, PPF and find out about the financial statements.
You replied in less than a week, I consider it a fast reply, nothing to be sorry about!
I’m so very glad to hear that the funding situation of the HLI has improved, I think the work you’re doing is really important and something that was/is sorely missing when trying to maximize and align impact.
On a personal note, I’ll take this opportunity to mention that I find your posts and comments on this forum very valuable. As someone ignorant about philosophy and happiness research, that’s how I was introduced to important topics like population ethics and WELLBYs. It helped me understand much better my intuitive uneasiness about GiveWell’s values and cleared up a lot of internal confusion.
Seeing a different perspective in what sometimes seems a bit of a monoculture (EA short-term interventions to improve human lives), and seeing the importance of SWB being relentlessly pushed for years was very enlightening and inspiring.
Hi Siebe, thank you for the kind words! We agree that using SWB could help us find new opportunities! We’re excited to explore more of this area.
I was also surprised by the things you mention, but I think they make sense on reflection. I can share more of my reasoning if you’d like (but I’m unsure if that’s what you were asking for).
We don’t have enough information to estimate the relationship between cost and effectiveness, but this is an interesting question! The issue is that we lack studies that contain both the effects and the costs of psychotherapy. However, we should be able to get cost information from another psychotherapy NGO operating in LMICs, so we hope to analyze that too.
I will let Michael comment on the funding situation!
Great work! :) Very happy to see the increase in rigour over earlier estimates. If your research is correct (and, in my casual reading of it, I can find no reason why it wouldn’t be) this opens up a whole new area of funding opportunities in the global health & wellbeing space!
I’m also excited about the rest of your research agenda. It seems very ambitious ;)
Some things I find interesting:
“we found evidence that group psychotherapy is more effective than psychotherapy delivered to individuals which is in line with other meta-analyses (Barkowski et al., 2020; Cuijpers et al., 2019). One explanation for the superiority is that the peer relationships formed in a group provide an additional source of value beyond the patient-therapist relationship.” --> I did not expect group therapy to be more effective. Instead I expected it to be less effective per person, but more cost effective in total. This is great news.
I am also surprised by the extremely low cost of lay therapy. Is there any correlation between the effectiveness of lay therapy and its cost? I can imagine training costing money but increasing effectiveness.
Most charities not responding/willing to share their costs is .. maybe not so surprising? Let’s hope that changes if/when StrongMinds gets a bunch of funding, and you develop your reputation!
Last question: what’s HLI’s current funding situation? (Current funding, room for funding in different growth scenarios)
Our funding situation is, um, “actively seeking new donors”! We haven’t yet filled our budget for 2022.
Our gap up to the end 2022 on our lean budget is £120k; that’s the minimum we need to ‘keep the lights on’.
Our growth budget, the gap to the of 2022 is probably £300k; I’m not sure we could efficiently scale up much faster than that. (But if someone insisted on giving me more than that, I would have a good go!)
Hi Michael, has the funding situation of the HLI changed in the last three months?
I’m especially interested to know if this analysis and the discussion around it brought new funds.
Also, are financial statements for 2020 and 2021 from the HLI available somewhere by any chance?
I’m thinking about directing there some of my donations for 2022
Hello Lorenzo,
Sorry for the slow reply on this—I’ve been taking a bit of a break from the EA forum.
I’m pleased to report the funding situation at HLI has substantially improved on the back of our new research. We’ve raised enough money that we’ve switched to our ‘growth’ budget (most of the difference between ‘lean’ and ‘growth’ is hiring 2 new staff). However, we are still $50k short of funding for our growth budget for 2022 and donations would be welcome! Feel free to reach out to me privately too.
I’ll talk to our fiscal sponsor, PPF and find out about the financial statements.
Hi Michael,
You replied in less than a week, I consider it a fast reply, nothing to be sorry about!
I’m so very glad to hear that the funding situation of the HLI has improved, I think the work you’re doing is really important and something that was/is sorely missing when trying to maximize and align impact.
On a personal note, I’ll take this opportunity to mention that I find your posts and comments on this forum very valuable.
As someone ignorant about philosophy and happiness research, that’s how I was introduced to important topics like population ethics and WELLBYs. It helped me understand much better my intuitive uneasiness about GiveWell’s values and cleared up a lot of internal confusion.
Seeing a different perspective in what sometimes seems a bit of a monoculture (EA short-term interventions to improve human lives), and seeing the importance of SWB being relentlessly pushed for years was very enlightening and inspiring.
So thank you for all your amazing work!
Hi Siebe, thank you for the kind words! We agree that using SWB could help us find new opportunities! We’re excited to explore more of this area.
I was also surprised by the things you mention, but I think they make sense on reflection. I can share more of my reasoning if you’d like (but I’m unsure if that’s what you were asking for).
We don’t have enough information to estimate the relationship between cost and effectiveness, but this is an interesting question! The issue is that we lack studies that contain both the effects and the costs of psychotherapy. However, we should be able to get cost information from another psychotherapy NGO operating in LMICs, so we hope to analyze that too.
I will let Michael comment on the funding situation!