Ambitious Impact is a nonprofit that helps individuals find and transition to high-impact career paths through multiple cost-covered programs designed to fill crucial gaps in the philanthropic ecosystem, e.g. Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program.
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CE alert: 2 new interventions for February-March 2024 Incubation Program
Hi Everyone,
As Charity Entrepreneurship we just want to make sure people understand how our Incubation Program works in terms of setting up co-founder salaries after the program.Most importantly, CE does not determine, dictate, grant, or pay out salaries. We pay a stipend to cover costs of living during the Program (and for up to two months after in case an incubatee does not end up founding for whatever reason). Once graduated, our alumni set their own salaries.
In week 5 of our program, we suggest co-founder and idea pairings to the participants that most (not all) decide to accept and move forward with for the last 3 weeks of the Program.
Our incubatees graduate our Program at the end of the 2-month Incubation Program by submitting their own project proposals to the Seed Network. We give them feedback on their proposals to help make them as good as possible, but all decisions including their budget, salaries, and fundraising asks are their own. They are now independent co-founders and executive directors of their own charity.
To set their salaries the incubatees work out their needs, the budget of their fledgling organizations, and how much they think they can and should raise in the space they are fundraising in, as well as how this affects their cost-effectiveness and chances of success going forward. E.g., potential future funders outside the Seed Network will look at the budget and cost-effectiveness of a charity’s first year. All funders want the most bang for their buck, and if there are benchmarks like AMF, donating instead to a 2nd year organization can look very different levels of impactful depending on how much it cost.
CE does not decide who gets funding and how much. The Seed Network consists of about 30 individual grantmakers who make up their own minds. They sometimes decide to interview co-founders and/or ask CE for our impressions of the strengths and weaknesses of different teams, but how to use their funds is entirely their own choice.
After the Seed Network has announced their decisions, they transfer the money straight to the founders. The founders then set and draw their own salaries from the funds that they managed to raise. We have no control over the money.
We have had charities that launched with seed grants of as little as $25,000, $30,000 or $50,000. Their founders were confident they would fundraise more money after the launch outside of the CE Seed Network (i.e., from sources with better counterfactuals). We have had charities that sought seed funding for their entire first year and raised as much as $240,000 for two-person co-founder teams. Some of our founders have kids, cars, mortgages, and travel costs to consider. Others don’t and can target smaller seed grants.
At CE, frugality is one of the things we encourage because one of our core values is looking at money and other resources in counterfactuals. This is because in a space like Global Health & Development, we are very aware of what the counterfactuals of money are—all money that we use could instead have gone to AMF or other GiveWell top charities to counterfactually save more lives; similarly for the animal space. We think the most impactful thing to do in setting salaries is to cover people’s needs in order for them to live a good life, generously construed, but not much more. That is not what we work for.
Finally, there are differences about what exactly the right range of salaries is in our community, and salaries vary. This is natural and healthy. However, most people lean frugal compared to the current standard in EA.
It does not change our plans to incubate this charity.