There are many factors going into that issue, but I think the biggest are the bottlenecks within the pipeline that brings money from OP to individual donation opportunities. Most directly, OP has a limited staff and a lot of large, important grants to manage. They often don’t have the spare attention, time, or energy to solicit, vet, and manage funding to the many individuals and small organizations that need funding.
LTFF and other grantmakers have similar issues. The general idea is that just there are many inefficiencies in the grantmaker → ??? → grantee market. The market is especially inefficient for funding opportunities that are small (because the fixed costs of granting remain high) and weird (because the downside risk is magnified for large grantmakers).
Worse, I hear that a big issue is that everyone asks this same question “Why aren’t you already funded by [funders that are not me]?” of new ventures who lack existing personal connections to the big funders, which leads them to never get off the ground.
Quite a few people in the animal welfare and EA spaces are concerned that the two parties ACE and OpenPhil, i.e., ACE staff and Lewis Bollard, control the vast majority of funding in the EAA space, and a very large portion of funding in the farm animal space as a whole.
I had hoped that expanding the Animal Welfare Fund to a committee would address this concern, but 3⁄4 members are with either ACE or OpenPhil. This seems especially disappointing given criticisms of ACE in the EAA community: 1 ,2 , and 3 .
Why were more non-ACE/non-OpenPhil members not added, and are there plans to diversify in the future?