Charity incubation is the provision of various types of support for the creation of a new charity. This support can involve things like training, advice, seed funding, connections, and operational support. It could also involve actively trying to work out what new types of new charities should be founded (e.g., which interventions it would be worth having a new charity working on) and then finding people to found those charities.
Organizations that focus primarily on charity incubation are known as charity incubators. Examples of charity incubators aligned with effective altruism are Charity Entrepreneurship and the Longtermist Entrepreneurship Fellowship. There are also organizations that, despite not being charity incubators, engage in some charity incubation activities. Examples include GiveWell (via its incubation grants).[1]
Related entries
Charity Entrepreneurship | effective altruism funding | entrepreneurship | Longtermist Entrepreneurship Fellowship | operations
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GiveWell (2021) GiveWell Incubation Grants, GiveWell, April.
Things that could be added:
Discussion of how this is similar to startup incubators like Y Combinator
Discussion of non-EA charity incubators/incubation? Is that done?
Discussion of how various EA orgs have emerged from or spun out of other orgs (e.g., Rethink Priorities from Rethink Charity, EA Funds and GiveWell and maybe 80k from CEA, maybe AI Impacts from MIRI, maybe SPARC from CFAR)
Those “maybe”s are because I’m going off memory rather than double-checking things
Discussion of how some EA orgs offer operational support to other orgs
I think in most cases, these are cases where the latter orgs have emerged from or spun out of the former
But maybe there are cases of orgs which emerged separately, but where the founders knew and had worked with the more established org or whatever, and the established org offered some support due to economies of scale etc.?
I’m not sure how the boundaries should be drawn between that and charity incubation
This entry emerged from the Discussion page on Longtermist Entrepreneurship Fellowhip, where I said:
And Pablo said:
And I said: