In terms of the process, I drafted the RFP and then ran that by the other fund managers. After that, I incorporated their feedback.
Hearing that, I suspect you might be somewhat less interested in the process and more interested in how we reached those areas and ideas. I think a quick response to this is:
All of us fund managers try to stay quite up to date on the body of evidence in our sector
We also routinely have calls with others involved in our sector and bounce ideas off of them, and try to hear their ideas
We then try quite hard to apply EA considerations in our sector (such as scale, neglectedness and cost-effectiveness)
We spend a lot of time reflecting on it
A lot of us are directly working on research into effective animal advocacy as part of our full-time job
All that, feeds into and generates what we think priority areas are.
But I am not sure that adequately addresses your question. Please feel free to follow up.
> would you say there are any key priorities (either overall or per category) that you would definitely like to see in your next grant round?
In terms of key priorities:
I would like us to fund further work in Asia
I would like us to fund further work on farmed fish
I would like us to fund further work on wild animals
I would love to find some promising new initiative on pb alternatives.
Yeah, I think I would be interested in a variety of scoping projects.
Briefly, some ideas that seem top of mind for me now are:
Someone thinking more about some very preliminary things that could be done in the policy space
Or more about an organization that might focus on wild animal welfare within cities
Or even more about a generalist group that may be to wild animals what GFI is to alt-proteins (some variety of programs and decent emphasis on movement-building)
However, I think the bottleneck here may be more about finding talented people to do this type of work, rather than the outlining of specific ideas.
Honestly, if readers have an idea for something that they would like to explore with regards to wild animal welfare, I expect I would probably be interested in hearing about it!
Very quickly, here are a few ideas/​interventions that seem interesting to me:
Helping scope whether large and respected enviro groups may lobby on this if funding was available
Helping establish additional university-affiliated research centers that focus on research into pb alts
Helping establish trade associations in important places that don’t really have them right now
Honestly, I think there’s just a lot of underexplored territory in the area. To some extent it is now about us diversifying somewhat, trying a number of different approaches, and then re-evaluating as to what has traction. The value of information from exploring some different interventions feels like it could be pretty high to me.
In terms of the process, I drafted the RFP and then ran that by the other fund managers. After that, I incorporated their feedback.
Hearing that, I suspect you might be somewhat less interested in the process and more interested in how we reached those areas and ideas. I think a quick response to this is:
All of us fund managers try to stay quite up to date on the body of evidence in our sector
We also routinely have calls with others involved in our sector and bounce ideas off of them, and try to hear their ideas
We then try quite hard to apply EA considerations in our sector (such as scale, neglectedness and cost-effectiveness)
We spend a lot of time reflecting on it
A lot of us are directly working on research into effective animal advocacy as part of our full-time job
All that, feeds into and generates what we think priority areas are.
But I am not sure that adequately addresses your question. Please feel free to follow up.
> would you say there are any key priorities (either overall or per category) that you would definitely like to see in your next grant round?
In terms of key priorities:
I would like us to fund further work in Asia
I would like us to fund further work on farmed fish
I would like us to fund further work on wild animals
I would love to find some promising new initiative on pb alternatives.
Can you say more about what kind of wild animal welfare work you would want to see?
Yeah, I think I would be interested in a variety of scoping projects.
Briefly, some ideas that seem top of mind for me now are:
Someone thinking more about some very preliminary things that could be done in the policy space
Or more about an organization that might focus on wild animal welfare within cities
Or even more about a generalist group that may be to wild animals what GFI is to alt-proteins (some variety of programs and decent emphasis on movement-building)
However, I think the bottleneck here may be more about finding talented people to do this type of work, rather than the outlining of specific ideas.
Honestly, if readers have an idea for something that they would like to explore with regards to wild animal welfare, I expect I would probably be interested in hearing about it!
Can you say more about what you think a promising new initiative on PB alternatives might look like?
Sure.
Very quickly, here are a few ideas/​interventions that seem interesting to me:
Helping scope whether large and respected enviro groups may lobby on this if funding was available
Helping establish additional university-affiliated research centers that focus on research into pb alts
Helping establish trade associations in important places that don’t really have them right now
Honestly, I think there’s just a lot of underexplored territory in the area. To some extent it is now about us diversifying somewhat, trying a number of different approaches, and then re-evaluating as to what has traction. The value of information from exploring some different interventions feels like it could be pretty high to me.