Thank you for this writeup Luke, and in general for the tireless work you do to help improve these organizations.
Iâm likely to make my end of year donations toward something in this space, and would be excited to chat through the decision with others, and possibly coordinate. If youâre willing to spend some time on this, feel free to leave a comment or DM for setting up a call. :)
Hi Cassidy!
Thanks for being so generous in offering up your time for EA initiatives, I hope you find a good fit that is full of both impact and meaning :) You might be interested in helping out in the Nordic effective giving landscape, where I am Chairman for Ge Effektivt.
At Gi Effektivt and Ge Effektivt in Norway/âSweden respectively, we work to fundraise for charities recommended by GiveWell, Animal Charity Evaluators, and Giving Green. You might be familar either with us or counterparts from other countries like Effektiv Spenden or Ayuda Efectiva. The total money raised is a few million dollars per year, with significant increase in the past year.
Norway and Sweden share backend and most aspects of frontend, and we have a full-time CTO who is significantly capacity constrained. It sounds like you have skills that could come in handy, and I think we could have the right size where youâd get the right kind of support/âcounterpart to get you leverage on your time â and still an org small enough that you could make an impressive difference in a few months.
Happy to answer any questions at an initial stage, but in case interested I think it would be even more useful would be for you to speak to our CTO to get an idea of whether you could be helpful and if the projects excite you. You can either DM me here, email henri[at]geeffektivt.se, or reach out to the technical team directly.
I am quite receptive to caveats about how easy it is so scale current orgs and interventions, but that seems more of a practical issue (than can partially be solved through more money?).
Other than that, I just think itâs a crazy scale of very neglected suffering and the sooner we figure out how to make significant changes to the system the better.
I was super surprised by this, but then discovered that indeed GW top recommended charities are all listed on the top of the page, in some kind of main set of recommendations. E.g. Humane League is absent in the same way from animal welfare.
Maybe makes sense to list them in both groups (cause area, and top recs), @Sjir Hoeijmakersđ¸ ?
That makes sense, and thank you for the suggestion :)
For what itâs worth, I was also on a personal level quite excited about the smaller type of projects that could get funding through something like this and otherwise might not make the effort of going through a long application process.
Thank you for an interesting and useful post, the style of narration made it an enjoyable read.
I wanted to briefly address the below statement:
Rethinkâs requesting funding for specific projects says to me âwe basically think these are the least important things weâd spend money on, otherwise weâd spend it on them out of our primary budget
As I was part of the group at Rethink Priorities that chose what project to front on Manifund, I can honestly share that this is not how our thought process went. Rather, we focused mostly on âŚ
I) relatively small asks, that would be a better fit for the crowdfunding format of people giving hundreds of dollars
II) projects we thought were best suited for the âEA Communityâ framing of the funding round, i.e. meta efforts rather than broader .
Relative to our scale, we also donât have a large âprimary budgetâ that we can use to fund projects we think are impactful. Some of our departments do not have grants for general team work, and have to fundraise for any specific next research project. Even the ones that do have department-level earmarking, are often somewhat restricted by funder(s) in what types of projects they can choose to work on by default. My experience is that itâs more likely that a particular project that doesnât get funded gets put on hold in hope of another funder, than that weâre able to use general unrestricted funds for it.
With more unrestricted funds available to RP, I think our reality would look at least a bit more like what you described in your comment. I think we have some very astute thinkers internally when it comes to cause prio, so I think that would be a good thing.
If I have done this some previous year, and got charged membership this year as well, do I need to do anything else? :) đŠđ° đ¤ đ¸đŞ
Will try to spread the word!
Thank you so much for what you have done for the effective giving community over the years, Luke!
Iâd be hard pressed to find anyone who has been as responsive, friendly, helpful, sharp, or inspiring as you have â let alone all these qualities combined into one awesome human being!
Enjoy the well-earned personal time, I sincerely look forward to what wonders you will do for the world in your next professional endeavors!
You can now find a recording of the webinar on this link.
Thank you to those that attended, and contributed with meaningful questions!
Thank you for the work that you do â the forum is one of the best products I use that just WORKS! :)
FWIW I think the Norwegian main talent pipeline is from Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), e.g. see this post, rather than University of Oslo. The community there has been going strong there for 10 years.
Welcome to the forum simoj!
I think this might not be a great idea, due to uncertainties in what would happen with the allocated charity budget if it doesnât get donated right now. Itâs quite possible that the counterfactual is low, so we should probably not invest more into the ecosystem at this point â in particular when things are so up in the air about the future of the platform.
Agree that this seems useful! Hope these seem like theyâre getting to interesting possible disagreements.
On the other hand, by filling the gap for 2024 we think there is over a 90% chance that we will be able to reach a sustainability tipping point i.e. have a viable income stream for at least 1 FTE and therefore avoid similar threats in the future.
Is your claim that for funding of 2025, you will have âĽ1 FTE funding (120k >loty /â 29k USD) ready at the end of 2024 â excluding Open Philanthropy, EA Infrastructure Fund, and Meta Charity Funders? Or does the statement permit grants from those sources?
5. [...] Wouldnât it be better to give them the money and letting them choose the best charity thatâs gone unfunded from their applicant pool?
FWIW, I donât think this Meta Charity Fundersâ model. I think they let funders join rather than donate to a pool. As far as I understand, after joining you access communal resources to best decide on grants â but the decision itself of where to donate remains with yourself as original funder.
This looks great, thank you for doing work to increase excitement about effective giving further!
For those interested, I created a Manifold market for the Donation Election, where people can add their own charities and bets on how the funds will be distributed.
It seems obvious to me that numerous stakeholdersâincluding organization leaders, donors of all sizes, group leaders, and entrepreneursâwould all benefit from having an accurate understanding of EAâs growth trajectory. And it seems just as obvious that it would be tremendously inefficient for each of those parties to conduct their own analysis. It would be in everyoneâs interest to receive a regular (every 3-6 months?) update from a reliable analyst. This wouldnât be expensive (it wouldnât require anything close to a full-time job initially, though the frequency and/âor depth of the analyses could be scaled up if people saw value in doing so). As public goods go, this should be an easy one to provide.
Quick vibe-check from Rethink Priorities: Could people react with Agree or Disagree if you think EA Infrastructure Fund (as an example) paying for the Surveys & Data Analysis team of Rethink Priorities to do this (say, for a trial period of one year), would be money well spent?
I understand it depends on scope and price, but as a general direction this information would be useful. We agree this seems important, have done similar work before for other organizations, and would be happy to take on such a project.
(I think the links in the summary are linking to a collaborative edit version of this doc, rather than the places you want it to)
@Luke Moore đ¸ could probably be helpful with some overview for 2022-2023, while I expect 2024 numbers will take a few months before presenting.