The GiveWell Blog

The role of philanthropic funding in politics

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] As noted previously, I’ve been working on improving our broad understanding of the role that philanthropy can play in influencing and informing policy. One of the questions I’ve been focused on is “what sorts of activities can one fund in order…

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Exploring policy-oriented philanthropy

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] Over the last few months, I’ve been working on improving our broad understanding of the role that philanthropy can play in influencing and informing public policy. We feel that this is one of the major categories of philanthropy that we’re currently…

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Geoengineering research

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] We’ve completed a medium-depth writeup on geoengineering research – large-scale interventions in the climate to attempt to reduce climate change or its impacts – focusing on research around efforts to artificially cool the planet. This writeup outlines the basic case for…

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Deep investigations of new causes

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] As discussed previously, GiveWell and Good Ventures have identified several philanthropic causes that seem like promising candidates for “deep dives” – investigations deep enough to be headed toward major giving recommendations. (In this post, as in the previous one, “we” should…

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GiveWell’s funding needs

Building GiveWell’s staff has long been one of our top priorities, and one of our most difficult challenges. In 2013, we’ve seen progress on this front like never before. Our staff currently stands at 10 full-time (not “trial”) employees, compared to 5 at the start of 2013 and a maximum of 7 at any point…

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