In charge of several nonprofit campaigns #WoDEF #EndOfSpeciesism and organizer of Les Estivales de la question animale š³ļøāš
Mata'i Souchon
Karma: 26
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.
Thanks for this post!
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?