I stumbled across the charity Trans Rescue, which helps transgender people living in unsafe parts of the world move. They’ve published advice for people living in first world countries with worsening legal situations for trans people, but the vast majority of their funding goes toward helping people in Africa and the Middle East immigrate to safer countries (or for Kenyans, move to Trans Rescue’s group home in the safest region of Kenya) and stay away from abusive families.
As of September 2022, their total funding since inception was just under 33k euros https://transrescue.org/where-does-the-money-go . They helped about twenty people move using this funding https://transrescue.org/some-things-weve-done/ . That puts the cost to help a person move at about 1,650 euros, which is in the same ballpark as a Givewell top charity’s cost to save one person from fatal malaria.
I haven’t looked closely at the likely outcome for people who would benefit from Trans Rescue’s services but don’t get help. Some would live and some would not, but I don’t have a good sense of the relative numbers, or how to put QUALYs on undertaking a move such as this. Since they’re very new and very small, I’m considering donating and keeping an eye on how they grow as an organization.
Mainly I hoped you all could help me by pointing out whether there’s anything fishy that I might have missed. This review https://transrescuewatch.medium.com/the-trans-rescue-papers-when-help-looks-more-like-human-trafficking-exploitation-4e3d7886bfbc was published by a group of Twitter users, apparently after an argument with one of the board members. It’s certainly not unbiased, but they do seem to have made a concerted effort to find anything bad or construable as bad that Trans Rescue has ever done. Trans Rescue wrote a blog post in response https://transrescue.org/responding-to-our-attackers . I came away with a sense that the board is new at running an organization like this, and they rely on imperfect volunteer labor to be able to move as many people as they do, but their work is overall helpful to their clients.
I’m really happy to see you asking this question and doing an investigation of a charity and a cause yourself. It makes intuitive sense to me that moving from a very dangerous place to a very safe one would have long term benefits to well-being and seems worth doing additional investigation on the intervention.
It’s hard to know how much risk people are facing and how much improvement people will experience by moving; migration has upsides (eg better economic opportunity) and downsides (eg isolation from family). I’m not an expert on either but would be excited to see you do any additional analysis on this that you can do and post about it.
I think an ideal version of the EA Forum would have a lot of people willing to help you analyze this issue and work out answers for yourself. Please don’t get discouraged if you don’t get a lot of feedback here though. The EA Forum has happened to develop into a place with a high concentration of people primarily interested in AI, biosecurity, and animal welfare. There are definitely people around with other interests but you might have to hunt around for them.
Thank you so much for this thoughtful and encouraging answer.
These are good things to think about. I’ll see if I can find any research on migration in general. I get the sense most of Trans Rescue’s clients didn’t have good family relationships before moving, which does change the equation some, but it’s a starting point for which research probably exists.
I’ll try to post if I do any analysis that’s worth posting. I’ll also look deeper into EA forum and see if I can find advice for approaching small, young organizations like this. (On my to-do list is asking them if they’d benefit from a donation specifically earmarked for administrative use, a savings buffer for emergencies, or other things that would help the mission but look unappealing to the average donor.)
It occurs to me that an important question I haven’t yet asked, is if the organization’s accounting of their funds includes everything they spend on helping people relocate, or if board members and/or volunteers are also paying out of pocket for things related to the organization’s mission. I need to figure out how to ask that tactfully.
I may have switched from replying to thinking out loud somewhere in there. Thank you again for your advice and for taking the time to read and offer encouragement.
I have an update: Eden House was raided after the Trans Community asked Anne Ogborn / Trans Rescue to STOP posting photos of the people who lived in Eden House to the public internet. She went so far as to have the AP (Associated Press) film and interview neighbors. Almost a week later the Kenyan police raided Eden House.
It is illegal to be LGBTQIA+ in Kenya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Kenya . The original safe house was supposed to be a temporary space before people got their immigration paperwork in order.
However, Anne Ogborn made it a FOREVER home, and paid the ultimate price after doxxing the location of the safe house to the entire world. Ending in the life shattering raid.
We wrote the Medium blog “The Trans Rescue” papers to warn people not to donate, to stop Trans Rescue from destroying more lives. This was not an “interpersonal dispute”—This is about protecting trans lives
It makes me very sad you could not see this, this is not “twitter drama”
I am one of the people who helped who helped write the Medium piece.
Let it be known that after Anne Ogborn doxxed the location of the Eden House safehouse to the world, on the Associated Press youtube channel. The Safe House was soon after raided by the police, destroying the lives of the “passengers” who lived there. https://twitter.com/Trans_Rescue/status/1666848794686763026
Many of the passengers where sexually assaulted by the local police, tortured, and worse. This has been posted on Trans Rescue’s own Mastodon page. This is the reason why wrote the article in the first place, to warn people about how dangerous working with Trans Rescue is for the people they try to “help”.
The entire trans community has been telling Anne Ogborn / Trans Rescue to stop playing with the lives of trans women of color, and putting them in danger by posting their faces online for fundraising.
In my opinion every penny is given to this organization, is another chance for Anne Ogborn and Trans Rescue to destroy the life of another Trans person of color.
Enough is enough, not another dime for these neo-colonialist exploiters of human life.
I had the opportunity to talk to one of the board members of Trans Rescue and wrote a post with some additional information, focusing on their operations in East Africa helping LGBTQ+ Ugandans of all sorts escape the wave of homophobic violence happening there. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zC5CNAv8dCMyhtxW2/trans-rescue-s-operations-in-uganda-high-impact-giving
Get in touch with me, am a former volunteer