As Mikaela said, the EA Animal Welfare Fund has a lot of leverage to strategically diversify the effective animal advocacy movement:
The EA Animal Welfare and ACE Recommended Charity Fund sometimes act as a pipeline, where a nascent project will seek support from the EA Animal Welfare Fund before growing into a more established charity that receives support from the ACE Recommended Charity Fund. One example of this pipeline is Wild Animal Initiative, which has received EA Animal Welfare Fund grants since 2017 (under the name Wild Animal Suffering Research), and became an ACE Top Charity in 2020.
I’m lucky enough to work for Wild Animal Initiative, and I can confirm that the EA AWF’s support was essential to establishing enough of a track record that ACE could evaluate us. Without that funding, ACE just wouldn’t have much to evaluate, and whatever we might have accomplished could not have been accomplished nearly as professionally.
As a former donor to the EA AWF, it’s really important to me that it keep playing this role as the beginning of the high-impact project pipeline. So we’re taking care to design a fundraising strategy that allows the EA AWF to dial down their funding for us as soon as possible. Over the next 2-5 years, we plan to grow a donor base rooted more and more in the broader wildlife advocacy movement. We’ll need the EA AWF’s support to get there, but once we get there, we’re looking forward to freeing up more funding for fledgling ventures.
[Observations from inside the charity pipeline]
As Mikaela said, the EA Animal Welfare Fund has a lot of leverage to strategically diversify the effective animal advocacy movement:
I’m lucky enough to work for Wild Animal Initiative, and I can confirm that the EA AWF’s support was essential to establishing enough of a track record that ACE could evaluate us. Without that funding, ACE just wouldn’t have much to evaluate, and whatever we might have accomplished could not have been accomplished nearly as professionally.
As a former donor to the EA AWF, it’s really important to me that it keep playing this role as the beginning of the high-impact project pipeline. So we’re taking care to design a fundraising strategy that allows the EA AWF to dial down their funding for us as soon as possible. Over the next 2-5 years, we plan to grow a donor base rooted more and more in the broader wildlife advocacy movement. We’ll need the EA AWF’s support to get there, but once we get there, we’re looking forward to freeing up more funding for fledgling ventures.