The Open Philanthropy Project has ambitions of influencing very large amounts of giving in the future (hundreds of millions of dollars a year or more). To date, we haven’t made nearly enough recommendations to reach this level of giving, and this is not ideal. In a perfect world, we’d be recommending far more giving. However,…
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The lack of controversy over well-targeted aid
There are a number of high-profile public debates about the value of overseas aid (example). These debates generally have intelligent people and arguments on both sides, and they rightly give many people the sense that “Does aid work?” is a complex question with no simple answer. However, we believe these debates are sometimes misinterpreted, causing…
Open Philanthropy Project update
This post gives an overall update on progress and plans for the Open Philanthropy Project. Our last update was about six months ago, and the primary goals it laid out were six-month goals. Summary: U.S. policy (previous update): we have prioritized hiring and are ahead of the goal we set. We made a full-time hire…
Incoming Program Officer: Lewis Bollard
We’re excited to announce that Lewis Bollard has accepted our offer to join the Open Philanthropy Project as a Program Officer, leading our work on treatment of animals in industrial agriculture. Lewis currently works as Policy Advisor & International Liaison to the CEO at The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). Prior to that,…
The process of hiring our first cause-specific Program Officer
Earlier this year, we announced Chloe Cockburn as our incoming Program Officer for criminal justice reform. Chloe started her new role at the end of August. This hire was the top priority we set in our March update on U.S. policy. It represents the first time we’ve hired someone for a senior, cause-specific role. Chloe…
Key questions about philanthropy, part 3: Making and evaluating grants
This post is third in a series on fundamental (and under-discussed) questions about philanthropy that we’ve grappled with in starting a grantmaking organization (see previous link for the series intro, and this link for the second installment). This post covers the following questions: When making a grant, should we focus most on evaluating the strategy/intervention,…