I do farm animal welfare grantmaking at Coefficient Giving. I was previously doing social movement and protest-related research at Social Change Lab, an EA-aligned research organisation I’ve founded.
Previously, I completed the 2021 Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program. Before that, I was on the Strategy team at Extinction Rebellion UK, working on movement-building for animal advocacy and climate change.
My blog (often EA related content)
See a bit more about me here.
This is a beautiful piece Abraham, thanks for writing it. I feel very similarly to you. I thought this EA Forum post from the FTX-era hit a few of these concerns well, as well as this comment from Benjamin Todd:
One way to see the problem is that in the past we used frugality as a hard-to-fake signal of altruism, but that signal no longer works.
Basically, it feels harder to know who is genuine and who to trust vs who is involved for the various status-based and financial incentives. Whilst not new, I feel like I’ve seen an increasing number of organisations/individuals who are functionally cosplaying being interested in EA, to increase their chances of getting funding. This makes me sad—I would love not to have to question people’s motives like that, but it feels necessary sometimes.
Also, the demanding part of EA is something I really value too (in fact, I wrote a relatively controversial post on some issues with paying high salaries in EA orgs shortly before the FTX crash). On the frugality aspects of demandingness: I feel torn on how to navigate this. As I say in the post above, I worry about losing some ideological commitment (and related impact-focused decision-making) by paying generous salaries and attracting new people. But at the same time, I am very happy that we can pay more as a movement, if it means attracting great people. Similarly, even though people can often fairly justify spending significant chunks of money to increase their productivity, this kind of thinking still makes me uneasy sometimes (the most obvious example being a $2k coffee table).
This was very impressive and fun to play with! I feel like it could do with a few “REMIX” or other vocal effects for good measure though..
I think it’s probably true that animal advocates likely under-rate how weird things might be with TAI but I am not convinced that this would change significant amounts of how resources are allocated:
If the world really will be that weird, probably there isn’t that much we can actually do now that would improve animal welfare going forward. For example, if we think that frontier AI companies will replace governments and AI decides on policy issues like cultivated meat regulation: what can we actually do to change this? An optimistic view is that we should make sure that AIs have pro-animal values (which people are already working on!) but a pessimistic view might say that AIs will realise that their values have been altered by some pressure groups and this work is moot. They might come to the (I believe) correct conclusion that factory farming is a very inefficient and cruel way to produce food but this is not because of advocacy, but because this is a super-intelligent AI system that just worked it out.
Relatedly, it’s possible that in worlds where things are very weird, any good that happens to animals is basically due to non-animal-movement factors and our advocacy won’t make much of a difference. For example, if all humans are uploaded to the cloud or we send out digital copies ourselves across the universe, how would our advocacy predictably influence this in a positive way for animals? And therefore, most of the counterfactual impact is in worlds where things aren’t that weird, timelines are long, etc.
(In case it’s not clear, I also agree with the recommendations you have: research to figure out a strategy, building flexible capacity to respond quickly, influencing frontier AI companies, etc. I’m glad some of these things are beginning to happen but I’m also somewhat pessimistic on how well research can actually make actionable recommendations, given the weirdness of the future).
I’ll be joining the Farm Animal Welfare team at Coefficient Giving come May!
Help me find my replacement doing farmed animal advocacy grantmaking!
I wanted to share a job opening for, in my opinion, one of the coolest jobs to help animals: my job! I’m moving on from Mobius soon, so we’re looking for the next person to lead our grantmaking and entrepreneurial projects.
The role: You’d manage the grantmaking portfolio for one of the top ten largest funders of farmed animal welfare work globally, plus lead entrepreneurial projects like incubating new organisations and identifying strategic gaps in the movement. You’d work with a small and nimble team and influence where millions of dollars go.
Some key details:
Full-time, US-based, remote (Bay Area preferred). We’re open to other countries in exceptional cases, as a contractor.
$70k – $120k depending on experience and location. We can go higher for exceptional candidates.
Open to hiring at two levels: Philanthropy Manager (3+ yrs experience) or Director of Philanthropy (5+ yrs)
Application deadline: Sunday, April 12th
Why I’d recommend it: This role is a great mix of grantmaking and incubating/running important projects. You get to collaborate with other donors in the movement, as well as support high-impact nonprofits. Maybe most importantly, you’ll work with a very supportive team, with plenty of learning opportunities, space for personal development, and regular pickleball.
Full job description and application form here.
Seems like some of your concern is that a bunch more money should be spent on neglected species & wild animals but my sense is that EA AWF is explicitly prioritising this work? or do you think that it’s still not sufficient given the potential marginal opportunity vs farmed animal work?
I think there shouldn’t just be one view / dominant position on how to help animals, multiple perspectives should get a seat at the table / we should make multiple types of bets, even those I disagree with because I’m sure I’m wrong about many things.
I generally agree with this but I guess I’m not sure that there is one dominant position on how to help animals in the EAA world? You might say CG directs a large portion of overall movement funds, therefore their position becomes the dominant position, but IMO The Navigation Fund has a relatively distinct view on how to best help animals, which is meaningful as they’re the second biggest funder in the movement. But yes, probably CG and EA AWF have relatively similar worldviews to one another.
I think the climate/global heath analogies aren’t quite right, because the majority (maybe even large majority) of that money is spent in pretty ineffective ways — I probably wouldn’t be excited about marginal money to a random global development charity, vs a GiveWell top charity, which have much more limited room for more funding.
Yes this is true but GiveWell moved over $400M in grants in 2026, which makes me think there is at least $400M of highly cost-effective opportunities in global health & development, not counting the other hundreds of millions of other impact-focused global health focused funding from people like CG, Mulago, etc. FWIW even a very outdated RFMF page on GiveWell’s website from 2019 estimated their top charities had $70-600M+ in RFMF, so hard for me to imagine the FAW movement can only spend $20-40M well (of course, we are a relatively newer movement so we do have less scalable things to fund—I agree finding those should be a priority).
Basically, I just disagree that the FAW movement only has around $20-40M of good opportunities and additional funds aren’t that well utilised. A priori, that would just be extremely surprising to me, given:
We have some interventions that work relatively well (corporate campaigns) but there are still many important countries where we have <5FTE utilising this strategy
Factory farming is a global problem, so we need people in many different countries to figure out how to address it
We only have around 2,000 − 3,000 people working full-time on farm animal welfare globally. This seems ludicrously small given the scale of the opposition and there is lots of useful movement building that we probably should fund to attract more good people (basically copying what AI safety / EA has been doing wrt movement building).
The FAW movement has historically paid pretty low salaries, so there are some salary increases just to be on par with other NGOs/issues
Welfare technology seems to be a whole area that could use lots of funding in a productive way and we’ve barely explored it (e.g. starting companies or putting out prizes to develop better stunning technology, on-farm welfare monitoring tech, etc).
We have historically not invested much in political advocacy, and this seems both essential and tractable if done well. Our opponents are spending a bunch of money on this political work and slowing down / overturning promising reforms (e.g. EU animal welfare reforms) so spending additional money here is likely quite useful.
Also, I would be curious how much of AI safety funding you think is well-spent, similar to the $20-40M number you had in mind for FAW?
This seems overly negative on marginal FAW funding opportunities. I struggle to believe that a movement with only $250M/year will struggle to spend more money productively when climate mitigation spends $10B, global development spends $11B, AI safety is probably spending $500M+, etc. Also, funding in the FAW space myself, I think the marginal opportunities are far better than “obviously not worth funding”, and I still expect them to affect approx. several animals per dollar (for impact-minded donors like CG, EA AWF, etc). I’m curious what you have in mind though when you conceptualise the marginal FAW funding opportunity and why you’re so negative on them generally.
FWIW I am also very pro having more decentralised regrantors like FTX and would like to see some more experiments like that too! But having almost been a recipient of such a grant, my guess is that this also leads to a lot of wasted money.
yes I was definitely inspired by that great post! thanks for flagging
my understanding is that lying about current status of cage-free/BCC isn’t a huge issue as companies can get sued for lying to investors or false advertising. But if it’s a commitment to do something in the future, companies are allowed to change their mind and backtrack
I don’t think this is a good idea:
Infrastructure lock-in. Furnished cage systems last 10-20 years. Once companies adopt it, they will likely not want to go cage-free until the end of this lifespan, which isn’t great. This creates lock-in against further reform, not momentum toward it.
The public won’t be excited/that supportive of this: Corporate campaigns work best when there is public consensus and pressure. “Better cages” likely will not be something many people want to get behind. So you might lose your primary campaign tool and also the potential to bring in future activists.
Advocacy cost (likely) doesn’t scale linearly with producer cost. The hard part (I think) is getting companies to change at all. If it takes a similar campaign effort to win either commitment, furnished cages are less effective per advocacy dollar. My guess is that even if furnished cages only cost 5% more (relative to 20% for cage-free), this won’t mean the campaigns are 4x easier to win. I would be interested to ask some corporate campaign experts on their best guesses for this number.
Verification is harder so follow-through rates might be lower (e.g. who will audit to make sure there is the right amount of litter area or perch space?).
The campaign raised an estimated $16,700--$59,300
Is this not some evidence that the target audience exists?
talented people who never enter the social sector because they can’t afford the pay cut.
FWIW I don’t like this framing. These people can almost certainly afford the pay cut, because probably if you get a job as a researcher/employee at some average US nonprofit, you are making above the US median and in the top few % globally.
But yes, it’s more likely to tempt people who would otherwise not work for a nonprofit.
Given your expertise is in global health, I do think it’s likely that you’re less well-calibrated on how reasonable your animal welfare comments are relative to your global health ones! So you may think it’s a reasonable critique but someone who is a die-hard animal person may have already thought about your comment and know there is a common counterpoint that negates it (which you haven’t heard yet). Obviously, the inverse could be true for global health comments.
But I agree that this shouldn’t have been downvoted on karma grounds!
(Also, sometimes your comments do give me “I am sceptical of most things animal welfare” vibes, so people might be reacting to a real or perceived difference in values about how much animals matter).
Intervention evaluators and funders should ensure that interventions are evaluated based on their ability not just to help animals directly, but to build power and generate learning value for the movement.
My impression is that most funders are already doing the above (we are too).
Fund researchers to look into and advise the movement on:
which milestones it should aim towards (including confidence levels for those recommendations). This would potentially reap huge benefits with relatively few movement resources—I could imagine even just a team of 3-5 full-timers could go a long way
I don’t think the above is that promising as I think there is not a predetermined set of milestones that lead to victory and instead we should pursue opportunities that are both achievable and important, as they come. I also think political and cultural winds change very quickly, such that many of the milestones set might become impossible or irrelevant. For example, maybe these researchers would have predicted 7 years ago that a major milestone would be major US & EU retailers selling cultivated meat but actually, it turns out the technology is super far off in 2025 and the actual best thing to do for alternative proteins now is getting defence agencies to research cultivated meat (this is a made-up example).
I also think that when this has been attempted, basically nothing useful was generated so it was actually quite a poor use of movement resources.
Thanks for posting this Allegra! I was actually looking into this the other day and one thing that stopped me from giving as an individual donor was understanding exactly how cost-effective groups working on this are. My general understanding is that traditional humanitarian efforts aren’t particularly cost-effective if your goal is to help the most people (I think largely because these efforts raise lots of money through salience and they are not as rigorously designed as GiveWell charities might be—but these might not be true in this case).
Do you have any information or research into Emergency Response Rooms or other groups working in Sudan on how many people they are helping or lives they are saving?
can we go back to the old font? I was such a big fan of it!!