The GiveWell Blog

Update on how to help Japan: March 24

Updated 3/25/11 12:15pm – see “Update on OCHA and Reliefweb” section below Last week, we issued our recommendation for donors regarding disaster relief/recovery in Japan. Since then, we’ve been considering new information, investigating our view further, and getting feedback from many. This post is a clarification and update of our position. Our bottom line position…

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Update on how to help Japan: No room for more funding. We recommend giving to Doctors Without Borders to promote better disaster relief in general

The situation in Japan is tragic and worrying, and our hearts continue to go out to those affected and responding. On Friday, we recommended that donors wait to see how the situation unfolds before giving. At this point we are ready to make a recommendation, though of course this is subject to change as the…

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Japan earthquake/tsunami relief donations

Japan has been hit by a devastating earthquake and tsunami, and our hearts go out to those affected and responding. Charities have been quick to solicit funding for the relief/recovery effort. Here we present our recommendations to donors, both in terms of which charities should be preferred and in terms of whether giving to this…

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Your dollars at work: Update on top-rated charity VillageReach

VillageReach is the first (hopefully not the last) charity for which (a) GiveWell has raised enough money to make a qualitative difference in VillageReach’s activities; (b) GiveWell has a clear enough picture of the room for more funding situation to be able to say with some confidence what that difference is. We intend on providing…

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Evaluating GiveWell by finding the best charity

One of the challenges of GiveWell is evaluating the quality of our own research. There are no accepted standards of what charity recommendations should be or how they should be assessed. Over the last year, we’ve been developing a method for self-evaluation based on structured writeups from people external to GiveWell (i.e., people who are…

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