Participate in Manifund Microgrants: an ACX Grants giving game
A follow-up to last week’s announcement about ACX grant impact certificates: to offer more people a chance to try impact-market investing, Manifund is giving out investment budgets of several hundred dollars each to a cohort of people interested in testing out weird new charity-funding mechanisms.
It’ll work the same way as regular ACX impact-certificate investing (profits in charity dollars), except that you get free funds to charitably invest. We’re looking for people who are excited to thoughtfully consider how to allocate their investments, similarly to Manifund’s regrantors (see examples here), and to post some feedback on the funding decisions they make.
If you’re interested in participating, fill out this short interest form (shouldn’t take more than 5-10 minutes) by the end of Friday, March 22. We’ll prioritize earlier submissions somewhat if we get significantly more interest than we have space for (we’ll probably cap it at one or two dozen people).
Two questions:
(1) Is public disclosure of one’s full name required? (As relevant here, I do not post in ~public using my last name to keep my EA involvement separate from my day job.)
(2) How many grants are you looking for the micrograntors to make? For context, acting as if one had $50,000 (and then dividing the resultant allocations by 100) would produce a better learning experience and provide better data, but it would involve more work for both the micrograntors and the Manifund team.
(1) Nope, first name is fine, as long as you’re okay with privately giving the Manifund team your real name for bookkeeping purposes.
(2) We’re pretty agnostic as to how the micrograntors view their strategies – one of our main goals is to stoke thoughtful discussion and get data not only on how the investments get allocated but also why. There’s something to be said for acting like you’re in a scenario more similar to that of a larger, more typical funder, but there’s also something to be said for the information value of spending the money you actually have and not having to pretend anything. So we’d be happy to read a comment or a retro saying “I’m making my choices imagining I have $50k because I want to send a signal about which projects I like the most, but if I didn’t care about that then I’d spend my whole budget in one place because I think my favorite project can easily absorb the funding,” or something like that.