Sam Anschell

Cel­e­brat­ing the Dogged Search to Do Good

• Sam Anschell 9 Apr 2026 14:57 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Effec­tive Giv­ing for En­vi­ron­men­tal Causes

  I’m so happy you’re interested in effective climate giving! Here are a few of my favorite resource for learning about environmental/​climate giving opportunities:
  
  Giving Green’s top climate nonprofits and related research, such as Clean Air Task Force.

  Founders Pledge’s writing and recommendations around climate philanthropy.

  Coefficient Giving’s Air Quality and Lead Exposure Action funds and related reports (Air Quality, Lead exposure reduction).

  For a donor starting to explore small gifts to cost-effective climate work, I would recommend the Giving Green Fund.

  Feel free to DM me if you have any questions!

What Ques­tions Do Poli­cy­mak­ers Ask About For­eign Aid?

An­nounc­ing Highly En­gaged EAs!

• Sam Anschell 14 Mar 2026 22:48 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: jackchang110’s comment on: Strangers call­ing: the value of warm re­sponses to cold outreach

  Hi Jack, I’m sorry to hear you’ve had a hard time finding EAs to talk with. It’s wonderful that you’re working to reduce S-risks; I hope you feel proud to be someone who is motivated to dedicate your career to such an important cause.

  In my experience, people working in technical roles or on catastrophic risks tend to work especially long hours, so I don’t think the lack of responses is a reflection on you whatsoever. If you’re looking for resources on refining your outreach messages, here are a few I like:

  • 80,000 Hours’ advice on cold-emails

  • Severin’s Advice for interacting with busy people:

  • Neel and Jemima’s Advice for Sending Cold Messages to Busy People at EAG (conferences are a great way to have lots of conversations)!

  I’m not very familiar with the career landscape for S-risks or CS-related earning to give roles, but if there’s anything you’d find helpful to speak with me about, feel free to grab a time on my calendly here: https://​​calendly.com/​​sam-anschell/​​30min

• Sam Anschell 13 Mar 2026 18:53 UTC

  13 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: In­com­ing money, in­tegrity, and col­lec­tive ac­tion problems

  [Commenting in a personal capacity]

  I really appreciate this post, and I agree that the community should be mindful of both risks.

  I think the instinct to share giving opportunities with Anthropic employees or other value-aligned prospective donors usually comes from a good place. And I would be excited to see more people apply to roles supporting donors who reach out for giving advice at the worldview level.

  But to add to Elliot’s point about the value of coordination, here are a few other considerations:

  • Before (and up to six months after) a company IPOs, there are limited opportunities for employees to convert stock options into equity or transfer equity into a DAF. If prospective donors have limited bandwidth for their giving, certain moments are uniquely valuable for them to engage. And for illiquid donors, there can be long lag times between the intent to give and the disbursement of funds; donations directed by institutional funds can sometimes help smooth this.

  • My understanding is that many prospective donors are excited to complement the work that institutional funders support. Hearing from these institutions about the promising opportunities they’re not able to fund can be an efficient way to learn about where more funding can be especially valuable. When a time-poor prospective donor receives an unsolicited proposal from one organization, it’s hard to know how this opportunity fits into the broader field.

  • As potential donations directed by institutional funders crystalize, orgs may have new opportunities to apply for funding from institutional funders. To Abaham’s point, bringing on regrantors or external consultants with fresh perspectives helps build capacity and catch blind spots. I expect that full-time grant investigators would have more context on a proposal than the donors themselves, and could more productively engage in object-level conversations with orgs applying for funding.

• Sam Anschell 3 Feb 2026 0:26 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Eli Rose🔸’s comment on: Prepar­ing for a Flush Fu­ture: Work, Giv­ing, and Conduct

  Yes that’s right! I’ll message them to see if they’re able to share more info on this thread

Prepar­ing for a Flush Fu­ture: Work, Giv­ing, and Conduct

• Sam Anschell 23 Dec 2025 20:16 UTC

  25 points

  8 ∶ 1

  on: Offer­ing higher salaries than so­cial-sec­tor peers

  Hi Seema, thanks for this thoughtful post! I work as a grantmaker at Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Phil) and I’ve had similar thoughts in the past. Last year, CG began offering a modest severance package for staff who leave voluntarily to mitigate the golden handcuffs effect. Anecdotally, a number of colleagues have left for lower-paying jobs at other impactful nonprofits over the past year. It’s hard to say whether staff would pursue other opportunities more often if CG paid less, but it’s been reassuring to see that some staff feel comfortable leaving and the decision is celebrated by the org.

  CG’s HR team also regularly conducts benchmarking exercises to sense-check that staff compensation is in line with other foundations and roles with similar levels of responsibility. Overall, CG (and I strongly suspect GW) spends considerably less on opex than peer foundations. Staff fly economy, bureaucracy is low, and people have the tools they need to work efficiently so the ratio of money moved per FTE is high.

  A number of CG and GW staff members choose to donate some of their pay, and CG/​GW may have this in mind when setting compensation. Personally, I’ve passed up pay or donated a little over half my income this year. Some staff use part of their pay for childcare, which helps them achieve their professional ambitions while maintaining work-life balance.

  I share the concern that the ecosystem effects of drawing talent through high salaries may be under-appreciated. But when I zoom out, I directionally think that increasing compensation in the social impact space is valuable. For example, there has been a push to increase salaries in the animal advocacy field in recent years and my understanding is that this has increased professionalism and decreased workplace harassment—employers have a larger talent pool to draw from, and have an easier time replacing problematic employees.
  
  Of course, there are always tradeoffs, and I sometimes feel uncomfortable that orgs working to end poverty offer lavish compensation (even by US standards). But all things considered, I think there are fair reasons why an org like GiveWell would choose the compensation structure it does.

  On an unrelated note, I help organize Princeton’s Effective Altruism student group. We and the School for Moral Ambition club would love to host you at an event to discuss your work when you’re back from sabbatical—it’s wonderful to have a fellow randomista on campus!

• Sam Anschell 18 Nov 2025 19:49 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Epistemic Spot Check: Ex­pected Value of Donat­ing to Alex Bores’s Con­gres­sional Campaign

  Thank you for doing and sharing this work! I’ve had a hard time developing a clear understanding of the impact of political donations, and I found this post helpful

Strangers call­ing: the value of warm re­sponses to cold outreach

• Sam Anschell 4 Jun 2025 0:57 UTC

  15 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: levin’s Quick takes

  A friend recently shared this reason for not giving (fear of an expensive medical crisis). I think if a good resource existed with the base rates of events that can cause financial hardship and solutions for reducing their likelihood (e.g., long term care insurance), this might help some people feel more comfortable with giving.
  
  I passed this along to someone at GWWC and they said this is on their list of ideas to write about.

• Sam Anschell 16 May 2025 21:22 UTC

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jason’s comment on: $100,000 bounty for find­ing >$1M in le­gal and col­lab­o­ra­tive cor­po­rate dona­tion match­ing opportunities

  Thanks for this comment Jason, you raise a valid point. I do think this will be challenging — part of the motivation behind this bounty was that friends and I don’t think we could facilitate large-scale corporate donation matching through our own connections. However, there is some precedent for companies matching non-staff funds, and I can imagine a few theories of success:

  Last year, Walmart launched a campaign to match up to $2.5M in customer donations to the Red Cross. Amazon, Google, Facebook and others have run similar matching programs for specific nonprofits that are open to the public. PayPal has run public Giving Tuesday donation matching campaigns similar to Facebook’s old Giving Tuesday format.

  There is a law in India requiring certain companies to donate at least 2% of net profits to registered nonprofits; many US companies set aside a pot of resources (in tech it is often 1% of profits) for giving. So in some cases, CSR leadership merely decide how to allocate existing resources for corporate philanthropy (though in other cases, encouraging a company to give could grow the total amount they donate). With low confidence, I would guess that causes are often chosen by a single passionate senior leader at a company or by an internal champion persuading a small group of senior decisionmakers.

  I’m unsure about the extent to which retail donors’ matching funds incentivize companies to give, but I would guess that it helps at least somewhat. Executives might be excited by a $10M company-branded initiative that only “costs” the company $5M. I also think there are ways to frame retail donor co-funding as coming from community members or customers, rather than from strangers.

  I don’t have a view on whether it’s more tractable to persuade companies to pledge a pot of matching funds or to change their employee donation matching policy. I could imagine that an initiative allowing employees to lend their unused donation match for an org-wide giving event would be meaningful to many staff members, and could lead to greater orgwide morale gains than a “use-it-or-lose-it” donation match policy. I could also imagine that certain early-stage startups may be openminded about designing their donation match to include a public matching component.

  Ultimately, I’m unsure about how realistic this idea is or how likely the bounty is to get claimed. But we wanted to offer this bounty in case it might cause someone reading this post to work some magic and grow the set of resources going to great nonprofits!

$100,000 bounty for find­ing >$1M in le­gal and col­lab­o­ra­tive cor­po­rate dona­tion match­ing opportunities

• Sam Anschell 16 Apr 2025 1:57 UTC

  7 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Quick takes

  Can confirm; Zipline is ridiculously cool. I saw their P1 Drones in action in Ghana and met some of their staff at EA conferences. Imo, Zipline is one of the most important organizations around for last-mile delivery infrastructure. They’re a key partner for GAVI, and they save lives unbelievably cost-effectively by transporting commodities like snakebite antivenom within minutes to people who need it.

  Their staff and operations are among the most high-performing of any organization I’ve ever seen. Here are some pics from a visit I took to their bay area office in October 2024. I’d highly recommend this Mark Rober video, and checking out Zipline’s website. If any software engineers are interested in high-impact work, I would encourage you to apply to Zipline!

Ad­vice to my EA new­comer self

Sam An­schell’s Quick takes

• Sam Anschell 7 Apr 2025 18:23 UTC

  31 points

  9 ∶ 0

  on: Sam An­schell’s Quick takes

  If you put a substantial amount of time into something, I think it’s worth considering whether there’s an easy way to summarize what you learned or repurpose your work for the EA Forum.

  I find that repurposing existing work is quick to write up because I already know what I want to say. I recently wrote a summary of what I learned applying to policy schools, and I linked to the essays I used to apply. The process of writing this up took me about three hours, and I think the post would have saved me about five hours had I read it before applying. And I’m just one reader!

  I get the sense that there are a lot of Forum readers who don’t vote or comment on posts, but still get value from what they read. Benefits from Forum posts are diffuse, and I think authors can find it difficult to internalize the full social value of their writing. I also expect that the residual value of certain posts (e.g., those with timeless, original, practical advice) may be underrated. I’ve been sending this post (and its previous iteration) to friends for years, and I’m pretty confident that next year it will still be my favorite piece of writing encouraging perseverance in pursuit of impactful work.

  I find it handy to be able to send a bunch of people a link, rather than having the same conversation multiple times. For example:

  • I’ve sent the “writing about my job” posts I’ve written to a couple hundred jobseekers who’ve reached out about an informational call. I think this helped make the time we spent on the phone much more productive.
    

  • I sent an information-dense post I wrote about high-value ways to help loved ones with their finances to a few hundred people in my life. If one person takes action to augment a family member’s finances due to the post, the post will have been worth writing.
    

  Finally, it feels really cool to have a collection of your writing out in the world! EA is a pretty tight-knit professional community, and putting your writing out there can be a great way to build a reputation.^[1]

  1. ^

     I feel unabashedly proud when someone I meet asks “wait, are you the guy from the sportsbetting post?”

Policy school can be a re­ally good deal. The case for go­ing and tips for applying

• Sam Anschell 4 Apr 2025 0:30 UTC

  17 points

  9 ∶ 0

  on: Three Or­ga­niz­ers Walk Into a Liberal Arts College

  Woah, huge congratulations on getting 80 pledges! That’s a really incredible achievement—I hope you all feel proud :)

  I would guess that established uni groups at big schools don’t get 80 pledges per year; you might consider reaching out to GWWC (community@givingwhatwecan.org) to brainstorm how to make the most of this momentum.

  I don’t have experience in student group organizing (not starting an EA group at my college is my biggest regret in life), but I’d recommend looking into whether your campus career center is open to co-hosting events and working with students on applying to high-impact roles.

  At the liberal arts school I went to, events hosted by the career center tended to be pretty well-attended. Plus, you can lean on the job boards from 80k, Probably Good, and Animal Advocacy Careers to direct students to real world opportunities.

  Another idea is to look into whether you can teach a student forum about EA for college credit! It really lowers the bar for students to commit to weekly meetings/​readings if they can substitute it for another class.
  
  And if students in your club are ever interested in talking to someone about entry-level operations or grantmaking work, I’m always excited to call!