If the money for EA Funds comes from donors who have the impression the fund is allocated in a technocratic way do you still think it is a reasonable compromise for EA Funds to become more democratic? It seems low intergrity for an entity to raise funding after communicating a fairly specific model for how the funding will be used and then change it’s mind and spend it on a different program (unless we have made it pretty clear upfront that we might do other programs).
If the suggestion is to start a new fund that does not use existing donations that seems more reasonable to me, but then I don’t think that EA Funds has a substantial advantage in doing this over other organisations with similarly competent staff.
Agree on maintaining existing EA Funds largely as is, but I am curious what other non-EVF organizations might be in a good position to pull this off. I’m not a non-profit (or other) tax expert, but it seems that the number of non-EVF good homes for a new fund could be somewhat limited. In particular, my guess is that EVF/CEA USA’s dual corporate existence in the US and UK is a major practical advantage. E.g., if the new funds only had a US corporate existence, they’d not only start off at a major disadvantage for UK donors, but would also face extra challenges granting to non-profits from the UK—presumably they would need to obtain an equivalency determination costing several thousand dollars, or assume expenditure responsibility, for each non-US non-profit grantee. And then you’d probably want some practical grantmaking-operations experience in the fiscal sponsor org as well for efficiency reasons.
If the money for EA Funds comes from donors who have the impression the fund is allocated in a technocratic way do you still think it is a reasonable compromise for EA Funds to become more democratic? It seems low intergrity for an entity to raise funding after communicating a fairly specific model for how the funding will be used and then change it’s mind and spend it on a different program (unless we have made it pretty clear upfront that we might do other programs).
If the suggestion is to start a new fund that does not use existing donations that seems more reasonable to me, but then I don’t think that EA Funds has a substantial advantage in doing this over other organisations with similarly competent staff.
Agree on maintaining existing EA Funds largely as is, but I am curious what other non-EVF organizations might be in a good position to pull this off. I’m not a non-profit (or other) tax expert, but it seems that the number of non-EVF good homes for a new fund could be somewhat limited. In particular, my guess is that EVF/CEA USA’s dual corporate existence in the US and UK is a major practical advantage. E.g., if the new funds only had a US corporate existence, they’d not only start off at a major disadvantage for UK donors, but would also face extra challenges granting to non-profits from the UK—presumably they would need to obtain an equivalency determination costing several thousand dollars, or assume expenditure responsibility, for each non-US non-profit grantee. And then you’d probably want some practical grantmaking-operations experience in the fiscal sponsor org as well for efficiency reasons.
See here. I’m not sure how EA Funds is pitched to donors. A new fund probably would be better regardless.
(Adding for context: I had heard EA Funds was being reorganized at one point, which suggested to me it might be looking for a new funding model)