Founder of Ultra Philanthropy, an independent advisory that helps major donors—increasingly from tech and AI—give for maximum impact; fund manager of its mid-stage global health fund; Chair of Trustees at High Impact Athletes.
Jack Lewars
Karma: 2,842
GiveWell just announced the biggest grant in its history. Here’s what it means for your giving.
Donors should push animal welfare and global health charities to have more robust scaling plans
These are certainly a good start, yes.
In one or two cases, I would argue that they could be improved. For example, I don’t think placing people into target institutions for 24 months is enough. I think you need to show that the people you place are able to influence policy or decision-making.
I recall one example where an org reported that one of the people they placed had written the memo on an AI safety decision that went to the National Security Council. Unfortunately, this was about a week after the Administration had completely ignored the memo and done the exact opposite of what it recommended.
Nonetheless, these indicators are a decent first stab, and could be refined to be quite effective with a small amount of work/expert input/negotiation.
Nice to know the word of day calendar is paying off.
I think donors should use reasonable indicators to judge evidence if an RCT isn’t available, while also being clear with themselves that this makes the grant higher risk. This is relatively easy in global health, where most places are doing decent monitoring, evaluation and learning, and running pre/post studies or difference-in-difference studies of their work. It’s harder in other cause areas, as I just posted about.
If donors have the money, I would love to see more funding specifically for RCTs. I think a funder or group of funders dedicated to this could do an enormous amount of good. You do need a significant amount of capital, though—it’s not uncommon for health RCTs to run to several million dollars per study.
Of course, my mid-stage global health fund aims to do good grantmaking in this gap, but we would need more capital to be the main funder of RCTs.
AI governance work needs much better monitoring
As you say, I wouldn’t recommend going all-in on the single max-EV idea, but I would recommend backing a spread of them.
I think these a very defensible recommendations but, without knowing anything about a specific donor, I didn’t want to give a maximalist recommendation. If the donor has the appetite and tolerance for it, these could be exciting options.
Most donors get risk wrong
I would like to see this sort of diversity of approaches/opinions/lenses, yes.
Their announcement doesn’t mention that as a motivation, although it would indirectly factor into their assessment of the field’s ‘room for more funding’.
This is a really useful counterweight to the prevailing thinking.
How do you think about trading off the downsides of growing too late (if the money materialises) versus growing too quickly (if it doesn’t)?
My sense so far has been that the field is kind of doing business-as-usual, or at least was until cG gave GiveWell a billion dollars to get ahead of an expected windfall, anyway. A lot of places don’t seem to have hired much or made firm moves as if they really expect the money to land (with a couple of notable exceptions).
Hi Calum—thanks for this. I think your heuristics for thinking about giving are very helpful and would endorse them to donors.
To address your other point, I don’t think this claim does rely on GiveWell having fixed grantmaking capacity. It relies on GiveWell having some limit to its grantmaking capacity, and a reasonable belief that that limit may be covered by existing receipts and expected receipts. Given that GiveWell’s announcement of this grant says that the grant is $1bn and that it aspires to grow its grantmaking to $1bn, that belief is reasonable, especially as GiveWell will also continue to receive donations from other donors (and has in the first 6 months of the year).
To use your own logic, you could use the historical parallel, which is that GiveWell’s grantmaking has remained reasonably constant for the past several years (around $400m per year, except for a dip in 2023). It is great that GiveWell says it will direct more this year, but this has been announced alongside a dramatic increase in receipts. It doesn’t follow that donors should therefore believe that it can increase grantmaking indefinitely, and it isn’t unreasonable for donors to wait and see whether these projections come to pass.
FWIW, I do expect GiveWell’s grantmaking to increase substantially this year—I think the post said it has already ~equalled last year’s grantmaking in the first half of the year, which is great. I think it is quite unclear whether GiveWell’s grantmaking will exceed its receipts, however.
To frame this directly, would you bet your own money that GiveWell will grant more than it receives in 2026? I would personally bet the opposite, especially as it granted out less than it received in 2021, 2022, 2023, roughly broke even in 2024, and almost certainly received more than it granted in 2025 (although it has not released final figures for 2025 receipts yet).
In short, I don’t think this argument relies on the claim you suggest it does. It instead relies on reasonable claims based on a) GiveWell’s disclosures of its own finances; and b) the historical pattern of GiveWell’s grantmaking.
(Your comment also doesn’t address the issue of power concentration, which just got much worse, and could be mitigated by donors, but then neither did mine, so fair enough.)
I am nonetheless excited to see how much GiveWell can move this year, remain a huge fan and donor with my own money, and endorse your questions as smart ones for any donor to think about.
Great post, thanks for writing it (and appreciate the shout outs for Ultra/our Mid-stage Global Health Fund).
One way to frame this is as an opportunity for all non-cG GiveWell donors to give to these other parts of the scaffolding this year. Given that cG’s grant covers the majority or all of GiveWell’s expected grantmaking in 2026, this frees up other donors to redirect funding, and then they can always return to the bigger GiveWell next year if it needs more regranting funds.
Worth noting that cG has increased its $175m to GiveWell to $1 billion, since this was written. https://open.substack.com/pub/fundinganthropalypse/p/coefficient-giving-just-gave-givewell?utm_source=share&utm_medium=eaforum&r=4b7xoz
Coefficient Giving just gave GiveWell $1 billion. Where should other donors give now?
I think Joey is working on this at Elevate Philanthropy.
Thanks for writing this—extremely interesting.
Disclosure: I recently advised a client to fund a small grant to Dimagi, to do emergency cholera response in Nigeria.
Overall, this is a plausible way to activate a lot of small actors, while overcoming some of the difficulties of vetting very large numbers of small grants, or requiring overly burdensome due diligence from small actors.
I would also note that many of these interventions are externally validated, e.g. vitamin A, treating childhood malnutrition, kangaroo mother care. They are funded by organisations EAs have learnt to trust, like GiveWell (which specifically funds all three of these).
It is also often true that verification is a critical factor in delivering services or commodities, and that digital platforms like Connect can ensure more cost-effective delivery.
I would be interested to see actual cost-effectiveness figures for your table, rather than just rate per unit, if that is available? E.g. a cost per DALY averted estimate?
Two Coefficient Givings beat one twice as big
I agree that there is certainly gatekeeping happening around AI donors and that this relates to issues around power concentration (related post coming later today on my Substack).
This post wasn’t particularly intended to address either problem.
One related issue is that most people on this forum probably do want some gatekeeping—that is, they wouldn’t want Bridgespan or Blue Meridian to have unfettered access to AI donors, because they don’t focus on cost-effectiveness enough.
If that’s true, it becomes an argument about where to draw the line, and most parties want the line to extend to exactly where they are but no further 😂
It should be possible fairly easily to get separate funders to use the same indicators—the right MEL plan should address the ‘true progress’ of the project, and so should be of interest to all funders.
Given the power dynamics, it might be easier for one funder to negotiate this with another, rather than you having to do this as the project.
I have sat on the charity side and I actually do think this can be done in under half a day, at least if the indicators don’t require bespoke data curation. The plan we included as an example above would take <10 minutes to report on (‘passed’, ‘didn’t pass’, ‘passed’). Of course, most grantees then want to editorialise on top (‘we didn’t achieve X because of Y’), so maybe I am being a bit simplistic.
Overall, I agree that funders should use the same indicators more.