It’s actually pretty rare that we’ve not been able to fund something; I don’t think this has come up at all while I’ve been on the fund (2 rounds), and I can only think of a handful of cases before.
It helps that the fund knows some other private donors we can refer grants to (with applicants permission), so in the rare cases something is out of scope, we can often still get it funded.
Of course, people who know we can’t fund them because of the fund’s scope may choose not to apply, so the true proportion of opportunities we’re missing may be higher. A big class of things the LTFF can’t fund is political campaigns. I think that might be high-impact in some high-stakes elections, though I’ve not donated to campaigns myself, and I’m generally pretty nervous of anything that could make long-termism perceived as a partisan issue (which it obviously is not).
I don’t think we’d often want to invest in private companies. As discussed elsewhere in this thread, we tend to find grants to individuals better than to orgs. Moreover, one of the attractive points of investing in a private company is that you may get a return on your investment. But I think the altruistic return on our current grants is pretty high, so I wouldn’t want to lock up capital. If we had 10-100x more money to distribute and so had to invest some of it to grant out later, then investing some proportion of it in companies where there’s an altruistic upside might make more sense.
If a private company applied for funding to the LTFF and they checked the “forward to other funders” checkbox in their application, I’d refer them to private donors who can directly invest in private companies (and have done so once in the past, though they weren’t funded).
What would you like to fund, but can’t because of organisational constraints? (e.g. investing in private companies is IIRC forbidden for charities).
It’s actually pretty rare that we’ve not been able to fund something; I don’t think this has come up at all while I’ve been on the fund (2 rounds), and I can only think of a handful of cases before.
It helps that the fund knows some other private donors we can refer grants to (with applicants permission), so in the rare cases something is out of scope, we can often still get it funded.
Of course, people who know we can’t fund them because of the fund’s scope may choose not to apply, so the true proportion of opportunities we’re missing may be higher. A big class of things the LTFF can’t fund is political campaigns. I think that might be high-impact in some high-stakes elections, though I’ve not donated to campaigns myself, and I’m generally pretty nervous of anything that could make long-termism perceived as a partisan issue (which it obviously is not).
I don’t think we’d often want to invest in private companies. As discussed elsewhere in this thread, we tend to find grants to individuals better than to orgs. Moreover, one of the attractive points of investing in a private company is that you may get a return on your investment. But I think the altruistic return on our current grants is pretty high, so I wouldn’t want to lock up capital. If we had 10-100x more money to distribute and so had to invest some of it to grant out later, then investing some proportion of it in companies where there’s an altruistic upside might make more sense.
If a private company applied for funding to the LTFF and they checked the “forward to other funders” checkbox in their application, I’d refer them to private donors who can directly invest in private companies (and have done so once in the past, though they weren’t funded).