The GiveWell Blog

Scientific research funding

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] One of our priorities over the last few months has been to learn, broadly speaking, about scientific research and the role philanthropy can play in it. Along with political advocacy (which we’ve been writing about recently), we feel that this is…

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Update on GiveWell’s funding needs

We continue to seek operating support, and we’ve seen some confusion on the part of donors about whether we think that’s the highest-impact giving opportunity available. This post provides an update on our fundraising; it is aimed at close followers of GiveWell, particularly those who have a high degree of trust/alignment with us and are…

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Staff members’ personal donations

For this post, GiveWell staff members wrote up the thinking behind their personal donations for the year. Holden Karnofsky There are good arguments that I shouldn’t give anything this year. I tend to think that future giving opportunities will be better than this year’s, even accounting for the costs of delaying. I expect the best…

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Obstacles to “giving as consumption”

GiveWell’s traditional work (the work behind our current top charities) and our work on GiveWell Labs reflect two very different visions of giving. The first, giving as consumption, sees giving as analogous to making a purchase. For every $X one spends, one gets some desirable outcome (such as a life saved), and the goal is…

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Good Ventures matching gift to GiveDirectly and grants to top charities

Good Ventures has announced: Grants to our top charities: $2 million to GiveDirectly, $1.5 million to Deworm the World Initiative, $750,000 to Schistosomiasis Control Initiative. A match, up to $5 million total and $100,000 per donor, on donations made to GiveDirectly from today through January 31, 2014. Good Ventures spells out its reasoning here. We…

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