In charge of several nonprofit campaigns #WoDEF #EndOfSpeciesism and organizer of Les Estivales de la question animale š³ļøāš
Mata'i Souchon
Karma: 30
Thanks for this post!
Organisations would be forced to make significant cuts in their staff and reduce salaries, impacting their ability to achieve programme goals, and retain and attract the talent it so desperately needs.
I witnessed this kind of consequence first-hand in one of the organizations I work for, when funding of around $20k that ACE had been giving us annually for 4 years was not renewed.
On an organization-wide scale, one solution would have been to make a greater effort to diversify our funding. The obstacle to this is that funders tend to want to allocate their donations to the project itself, and not to diversification fundraising efforts. Whatās more, as funding is scarce and competitive, the amounts allocated are frequently lower than the amounts requested, which means that we can barely afford to run the project, and not actually develop the overall capacity of the organization to fundraise.
So we find ourselves relying on the same funder(s) every year, with no time to look for new ones. When we asked ACE if they would be willing to support us in our fundraising diversification efforts, we were told that they generally consider it a ārisk strategyā (without ruling it out). I can hear that, but I still think itās essential for the future of the movement to diversify its funding sources to avoid the pitfalls you describe so well in your post.
Perhaps the current funders of EAA, aware of their monopolistic position, should agree to bet more on this ārisk strategyā by explicitly and publicly expressing their interest in funding monitoring, evaluation and fundraising positions in grantee organizations?
Thank you for these interesting insights!
As a worker in community building for animal welfare, I concur with this observation:
Social conditions are not very favourable for animal advocacy at this point in time: Letās leave the numerical estimates for a while and look at the state of the āmovementā. It is rare to see continuous gatherings with waves of people advocating for animal welfare. Protests for farmed animals gather at best a hundred people or slightly more. Usually, there are only ten or so peopleāand some of them are the paid staff members of the organisations, and some of them are EA conference attendants
That said, I think a main question is whether this can be overcome (and at what cost). My perception is that weāve barely tried to massify the movement and bring about a cultural change in society: for the moment, the bulk of funding has gone towards lobbying efforts targeting companies and politicians, but not so much towards the general public. I sometimes dream of seeing Open Phil publish a call for projects for efforts of this kind, with significant funding at stake: then perhaps we could start to see to what extent these social and cultural conditions are immutable or not.
On average, respondents allocated the following shares to each cause: Global Health and Development (29.7%), AI Risks (23.2%), Farm Animal Welfare (FAW) (18.7%), Other x-risks (16.0%), Wild Animal Welfare (5.1%), and Other causes (7.3%).
In the traditional breakdown used in EA, the animal cause is split into two (Farm Animal Welfare and Wild Animal Welfare), but if we consider the two together, it appears that concern for animals actually reaches 23.8%, ahead of AI-related risks (23.2%).
Iām rather surprised by this result, as it is quite different from the funding breakdown.
Iām also leaning towards thinking of the movementās objectives in terms of āreducing as much animal suffering as possibleā rather than āending factory farmingā. That said, Iām more hesitant about what you draw from this distinction, concerning the more or less reasonable levels of ambition we might want to aim for.
When I hear animal sanctuary managers criticize effective altruism and justify their appeals for donations by explaining that āeach one countsā, Iām hardly convinced: sure, every animal saved is a victory, but is it really the best we can do with these donations? It seems doubtful, given the derisory impact compared to the scale of the problem.
I find myself raising a similar objection here to the question of how ambitious we should be. Definitely, āIf only 30% of the companies fail to meet their cage-free goals because of our work, instead of 60%, that is a win to celebrate.ā, but is that really the best we can do with the money we spend? Maybe it is, yes. But the low impact relative to the scale of the problem still makes me wonder if we canāt do better than that, by looking for other ideas for even more cost-effective interventions, including those directed towards a longer-term impact, which seek to take us towards a society where weāve reduced suffering so much that thereās no more factory farming (or even no more farming at all, or where we actively seek to take animalsā preferences into account beyond the simple avoidance of suffering). And it seems to me that this questioning stems from the very principles of EA: to seek an ambitious impact, without stopping at what weāve already tried so far, even if it didnāt seem so bad.
The harsh reality for funders and project leaders is that itās excruciatingly difficult to predict what might have the greatest impact in reducing suffering, even if only on the scale of a few decades. Could redirecting all the money devoted to corporate campaigns towards a patient effort of cultural influence through elite education and lobbying to spread antispeciesist values reduce suffering much more dramatically on the scale of a few decades, with greater cost-effectiveness? The uncertainty is so large that I have the impression that weāre tipping over into a debate of confronting more or less optimistic intuitions, in which itās really difficult to reach firm conclusions.
Therefore, I find it hard to be convinced by the passage where you emphasize your doubts about interventions aimed at long-term abolition (āThe hope of ending factory farming is sold via specific interventions or combinations of interventions. People in the movement then fundraise and work on those interventions, which I think are often a poor use of resources compared to other interventions.ā). It seems to me that one could say something quite similar based on the same uncertainties: the hope of reducing suffering in the short term is sold via specific interventions or combinations of interventions. People in the movement then fundraise and work on those interventions, which may be a poor use of resources compared to other interventions (which aim to reduce suffering much more drastically, but over a longer period of time).
Since in the end, we still have to choose which interventions to fund or engage in, I believe itās best to recognize that these choices are based on intuitions, and to make them explicit (while trying to assess their relevance): do I have the intuition to be risk-averse and focus on interventions whose impact can be measured in the short term? Or am I prepared to risk allocating fewer resources to avoiding hours of intense suffering for todayās hens, in order to fund projects that aim to reduce suffering much more drastically, but on a century-long scale, and with an expected value that becomes absurd to calculate, as it can both hit the ceiling or turn out to be negative? Do I have a hunch that we should choose our battles using RPās moral weights, or am I having trouble with the postulates on which their calculations are based? Etc.
In this respect, I find it interesting to move forward in this debate by asking:
- How each of us goes about approximating the probability of finding interventions that would be so effective in reducing suffering as to bring about the end of factory farming in, say, 50 yearsā time?
- How does one go about assessing what does or does not constitute a āpoor use of resourcesā?