Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸

Karma: 21

Becoming Earth’s best “layperson” effective giving advocate. All views expressed are my own. Therefore, I can absorb more pain and do more daring initiatives vs a formal organisation without worrying about being defunded. Current portfolio:

- Deeply personal 1:1 conversations

- In-person community building @ London Effective Giving Community

- Hosting EG advocacy workshops

- Finding new One for the World Community Ambassadors

- Doing surprise £1000 donation stunts and posting it on LinkedIn

- Lobbying the UK government to spend their foreign aid more effectively

- Joining professional networks to talk about EG: Nova Talent, UK Apprenticeships

- Advising an individual how to maximise new counterfactual effective giving using £50K

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 26 Dec 2025 14:46 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Is Silent Participation Ethically Sufficient?
Heya!
I think public advocacy can be a sliding scale of participation and does not immediately go from 0 to 100. It does not require fighting every online battle.
Why fight battles anyway, 99% of people havent even heard of effective giving despite all of GWWC / TLYCS / 1FTW’s online outreach. There are only ~11,000 pledgers worldwide. The London Effective Giving Community WhatsApp group is 100 people. Besides myself I rarely see other private individuals posting on social media about EG unless they work for an EG organisation.
Want to gently push in favour of starting with small-scale advocacy: You currently might find it draining to engage publicly, be it online or in person. I did too when I started out and still do sometimes.
You can always start low-touch with people in your immediate circle: “what did you do last weekend?” “Just some volunteering and donation things” and let the conversation flow from there.
Best argument against this is you might have a counterfactuallly better use of your time versus trialing effective giving / vegan advocacy. Since you’re earlier in your career you might want to prioritise building your credibility—less people in your personal life might take your EG / veganism seriously if they don’t consider you serious people. Or you’re working on a more ambitious initiative. Or you have personal commitments. Or you want to avoid burning out if advocacy will stretch you too thin.
Happy to DM on this for some of your more sensitive topics. Wishing you a Merry Christmas /good holiday season.

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 18 Dec 2025 18:05 UTC
1 point
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on: Why I donate: some selfish reasons
Unfathomably based. Im stealing this one and its relevant ideas:
Choosing to donate based on the cost-effectiveness of helping is making a radical political statement about equality.

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 21 Oct 2025 9:56 UTC
1 point
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on: Reflecting on One Year of Mieux Donner: Launching the French Effective Giving Initiative
Hey team! Late comment but really curious about this:
Counterfactual: We estimated the counterfactual factor, the part of donations received that have happened as a result of our work, at 0.5 → Now, our best guess is 0.64
This seems very high versus how GWWC attributed their counterfactual impact of a pledge (at least when I went through their Pledge Advocacy programme last year, they tentatively recommended a factor of 0.2)
Also, given a factor of 0.5 or 0.64, I’m not sure how accurate this statement follows: “50% / 64% of the decision-making of the pledger had not come from the pledger, but rather through active outreach and influence of Mieux Donner”. I’m probably wrong. How would I interpret this factor more accurately? :)

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 15 Oct 2025 0:18 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: What posts are you thinking about writing?
Considering writing a post on how EAG(x) Effective Giving meetups MUST drive a call to action (pledge, pledge advocacy, learning more about EG, running an EG-related project)
IMO intellectual discussion about EG without action does not meet the bar for engagement or expected impact for an EAG(x).
Example meetup dicussion topics I personally did not like at past EAG(x)s: talking about how cost of living / mortgages get in the way of giving, talking about giving now vs accruing interest then giving later, back-and-forth about how improving farmed animal welfare results in higher wild animal suffering. Valid personal concerns and intellectually stimulating, but I’d reserve it for local meetups. These discussions do not yield impact nor meaningfully increase community bonding.

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 13 Oct 2025 16:33 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Effective Giving for Relational Altruists
Mental framework here captures 80% of my experience as an in-person / events-based effective giving advocate.
That said there are ways to make impact-focused EA funds deeply relational. I passionately tell people a large part of my pledge goes to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund. “Since the beginning of 2025, 14 million lives could be lost due to entirely preventable deaths from malaria / TB / HIV. This was since the Trump administration and Elon Musk decided to shut down USAID. I give to ensure the most critical frontline organisations can keep their lights on to protect and empower some of the world’s most vulnerable”.
An important 3rd point: relational altruists might not start with the highest-impact malaria-reduction charity, or other EA golden standard charities. That said, t hey are still giving. It’s still counterfactual impact (as opposed to giving nothing), and they should be deservedly praised and acknowledged. Further effectiveness can come incrementally as along as you help nurture their altruism. Make them feel supported and part of a like-minded community of people with skin in the game (people who take concrete action improving the world by donating)

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 4 Sep 2025 20:53 UTC
2 points
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on: EA in the Lakes—Reflections
Kes, this was such a great weekend, so thoughtfully put together. It really helped me recentre. I came away feeling more authentically connected to people in the EA community I hadn’t met before.
Outing myself as the effective giving community-builder who ran the outreach and advocacy workshop. Was genuinely surprised how engaged and high-agency everyone was. Strong +1 on the value of this sort of workshop for highly-engaged EAs. Probably the best hour I’ve spent in the last few months. Substantially better than most EG group sessions I’ve attended at EAGs.
Really hoping EA in the Lakes becomes an annual thing, and that Pardshaw being is used more in general. Place felt truly EA: unpretentious, humble, a little basic but all the more charming. Great place for honest conversations and reflections.

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 31 Aug 2025 0:33 UTC
1 point
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on: How to stay motivated to donate?
If you currently don’t get much meaning or fulfilment from giving effectively, it might help to notice the areas in your life that do give you that sense of meaning and fulfilment. The fact that this question has stayed with you for six years, even during times when you weren’t actively donating, suggests it’s something important to you, something that continues to pull at you.
For me, I’ve welcomed pledging as part of my identity, and that’s where I draw meaning from it.
Like you, I don’t tend to feel a big emotional connection to my giving. I give because I believe it’s the right thing to do. I’m at peace taking longer to pay off a mortgage if it means more people in the world get the chance to live their lives. These are lives that might otherwise be cut short by preventable causes far beyond their control.
Effective giving has become part of who I am. It shapes my relationship with money, my decision-making, my career planning. That’s been my path. I’d be curious to hear what might work for you.

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 30 Aug 2025 12:20 UTC
1 point
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on: London Pledgers’ Co-working Circle (Bring your most curious +1)
Timetable:
- 09:00-10:30 — Early Bird entry
- 10:30–11:00 — Friendly introductions + goal-setting (whiteboard)
- 11:00–11:50 — 1st sprint
- 12:00–12:50 — 2nd sprint / Earlier lunch
- 13:00–13:50 — 3rd sprint / Later lunch
- 14:00–14:50 — 4th sprint / Effective Giving workshop (run by Lorenzo)
- 15:00–15:50 — 5th sprint
- 16:00–16:30 — Reflections, next steps, in-office social
- 16:30 onward — After-co-work social at a nearby cafe/pub? 🤔

London Pledgers’ Co-working Circle (Bring your most curious +1)

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸30 Aug 2025 12:19 UTC

2 points

1 comment1 min readEA link

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 31 Jul 2025 20:13 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: 6 years of building an EA-aligned career from an LMIC
Rika, as a fellow Philippines passport-holder, I am deeply inspired.
This will be my go-to resource to share with impact-minded immigrants, and one of my resources for personal resilience :)

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸 8 Jun 2020 13:18 UTC
9 points
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on: EA Handbook, Third Edition: We want to hear your feedback!
Lightly edited from an email chain I had with Aaron
The content and high-level format of it being “hosted” on the forum looks super promising!
It also made me wonder whether the scope the project should increase:
Does it make sense to translate everything in the 3rd Edition of the EA Handbook? What sort of considerations arise from here?
According to your post, this could be a “living document that grows and changes as the movement does”, which means most, if not all material in there are by nature high fidelity. I believe with this new edition, a lot of the traditional fear of irreversible lock-in, translation difficulties, and out-of-dateness don’t apply, and most countries can benefit a lot from an ongoing translation effort.
The way I’m intending to do this for EA Spain is to allow relatively new-but-engaged members to take up like a “miniproject” translating some of these texts to be shown on EA Spain’s website, so it serves as both an engagement and educational tool at the same time.

Lorenzo Fong Ponce 🔸

Lon­don Pledgers’ Co-work­ing Cir­cle (Bring your most cu­ri­ous +1)

London Pledgers’ Co-working Circle (Bring your most curious +1)