For this post, GiveWell staff members wrote up the thinking behind their personal donations for the year. We made similar posts in previous years.1See our staff giving posts from 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013. Staff are listed in order of their start dates at GiveWell.
You can click the below links to jump to a staff member’s entry:
- Elie Hassenfeld
- Natalie Crispin
- Josh Rosenberg
- Devin Jacob
- Catherine Hollander
- Andrew Martin
- Christian Smith
- Isabel Arjmand
- James Snowden
- Dan Brown
- Olivia Larsen
- Amar Radia
This year, I’m planning to donate to GiveWell for granting to top charities at its discretion.
I feel the same way I did last year, when I wrote, “GiveWell is currently producing the highest-quality research it ever has, which has led to more thoroughly researched, higher-quality recommendations that have been compared to more potential alternatives than ever before.”
I asked Holden Karnofsky, GiveWell’s co-founder, whether he thought there were promising opportunities for individuals with long-termist views; after checking with him, I believed that the Open Philanthropy Project and other donors were covering most of the opportunities I would find most promising.
I also considered giving to animal welfare organizations. I looked briefly at Animal Charity Evaluators’ research but ultimately didn’t feel like I had enough time to think through how their recommendations compared to giving to GiveWell, so I defaulted to GiveWell. I hope to give this more consideration in the future.
I will be giving my annual gift to GiveWell for granting at its discretion to top charities. We expect that all of our top charities will be constrained by funding in the next year and that several will have unfunded opportunities to spend funds in highly cost-effective ways (at least 5 times as cost-effective as cash transfers). Our current best guess is that GiveWell will grant the funds it receives for granting at its discretion to Malaria Consortium, which would allow it to expand its work preventing child deaths from malaria in Nigeria or other countries. There is also a possibility that we will identify an opportunity that is more cost-effective than how Malaria Consortium would use funding at the current margin. Over the next few months, we will be discussing with our top charities how they plan to use funding from Good Ventures and other funders and what that means for how they would use additional funding. Giving to GiveWell for granting at its discretion allows for flexibility to take advantage of those opportunities.
I am very grateful for all the work, thoughtfulness, and hours of debate that my colleagues put into GiveWell’s recommendations this year. I am excited to support the most effective charities I know of.
I’m planning to give the same way that I did last year:
- 80% to GiveWell for granting at its discretion to top charities. GiveWell’s top charities are the most cost-effective ways to help people that I know of. I see Malaria Consortium’s work on seasonal malaria chemoprevention (the current default option for discretionary funding) as a robust and highly effective giving opportunity.
- 10% to animal welfare charities. I believe that animal welfare is a particularly important and neglected problem.
- 10% to long-term future-oriented causes. I have not yet chosen a donation target in this cause area. If I do not find an opportunity I am satisfied with after a small amount of additional research, I will enter this portion of my giving into a donor lottery.
I focused most of my giving on global health and development since GiveWell’s top charities have the most pressing funding gaps I am aware of. If I knew of an especially strong case for a particular giving opportunity in another cause area, I would be open to changing my allocation in the future.
I plan on making approximately 80% of my charitable donations in 2018 to GiveWell, with 100% of that money allocated to GiveDirectly. Compared to my colleagues at GiveWell, I value near-term improvements in material well-being more than I value reducing deaths. Donating to GiveDirectly is the best means of supporting this goal that I know of.
I struggle each year when attempting to assess whether I should bet on the possible long-term income effects of deworming. To date I have been unable to convince myself I should make this bet, even though I find little to argue with in our work on the expected value of donations to charities implementing deworming programs. I am making a decision to ignore the difference in expected value between a donation to a deworming charity and a donation to GiveDirectly due to the greater certainty of impact via the latter. I think my approach to charitable giving is conservative relative to other staff at GiveWell and many of our donors but I also think that my approach is reasonable given my specific ethical commitments.
I also support other organizations with gifts each year. This year, approximately 10-15% of my giving will go to organizations that do not meet GiveWell’s criteria. These organizations work in a number of areas including:
- Immigration policy, activism, and legal aid – International Refugee Assistance Project, RAICES, and the National Immigration Law Center
- Nonprofit news – primarily CALmatters, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and ProPublica
- Local issues I care about such as transit infrastructure – eg, Bike East Bay
- Other political causes
I choose to keep the political contributions I make private as some of the causes I support are controversial and I would not want my political beliefs to have any potential impact on GiveWell’s work.
In the course of my day-to-day work duties at GiveWell, I also frequently make small donations to our charities when testing various payment platforms. To date, these donations account for approximately 5-10% of my remaining planned gifts in 2018. These gifts are distributed among our recommended and standout charities haphazardly. I could refund these transactions, but choose not to do that as I think all of our recommended charities do excellent work and I am happy to support them.
I plan to give 75% of my total charitable giving to Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention program. I value averting deaths quite highly and I believe, based on GiveWell’s assessment, that contributing toward filling Malaria Consortium’s funding gap will accomplish a lot of good in the world. In previous years (2017, 2016, and 2015), the majority of my gift has been directed to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), but I believe Malaria Consortium currently has a more pressing funding gap for its seasonal malaria chemoprevention work.
I plan to give 10% of my total giving to AMF to continue their work. I understand that giving predictably is helpful for organizations’ planning and I don’t wish to abruptly alter my support for AMF. I also think that AMF continues to represent an outstanding giving opportunity as one of GiveWell’s top charities.
I plan to give 5% of my total giving to StrongMinds, an organization focused on treating depression in Africa. I have not vetted this organization anywhere nearly as closely as GiveWell’s top charities have been vetted, though I understand that a number of people in the effective altruism community have a positive view of StrongMinds within the cause area of mental health (though I don’t have any reason to think it is more cost-effective than GiveWell’s top charities). Intuitively, I believe mental health is an important cause area for donors to consider, and although we do not have GiveWell recommendations in this space, I would like to learn more about this area by making a relatively small donation to an organization that focuses on it.
I plan to give the remaining 10% of my charitable giving this year in conjunction with my partner to an organization working on criminal justice reform in the United States. We are going to discuss and review organizations together between now and the end of the year and make a joint gift in this space. I plan to consult previous recommendations made by Open Philanthropy Project’s program officer focused on criminal justice reform, Chloe Cockburn, as well as checking with friends who are better informed of the needs in this space than I am.
I think there’s a strong case for donating to GiveWell to grant to top charities at its discretion this year.
Our top charities have substantial funding gaps for highly cost-effective programs, even after taking the $63.2 million that we’ve recommended that Good Ventures allocate between our top charities into account. These funding gaps include expanding Malaria Consortium’s work on seasonal malaria chemoprevention in Nigeria, Chad, and Burkina Faso, extending HKI’s vitamin A supplementation programs in several countries over the next three years, and extending Deworm the World’s programs in Pakistan and Nigeria.
As Natalie and James have noted, it seems likely that donations given to GiveWell at the end of 2018 to allocate at its discretion will be directed to Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention program. I’m planning to donate to GiveWell to allocate at its discretion because I expect that GiveWell will either direct those funds to Malaria Consortium or to another funding gap it judges to be even more valuable to fill.
I’m planning to make my year-end donation to Malaria Consortium for its seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) program. As my colleagues have mentioned, Malaria Consortium appears to be in a great position for scaling up a highly-effective intervention in areas with substantial malaria burdens.
I decided not to give to GiveWell for granting at its discretion because I think there’s a chance GiveWell will decide deworming programs look more worthwhile than SMC on the margin. I take a more skeptical stance than most of my colleagues on the value of deworming programs. While I’m not confident, I would guess that our process for modeling the value of deworming relative to malaria prevention puts deworming in too favorable a light.
My giving this year looks very similar to last year’s. It’s important to me for the bulk of my giving to go to organizations where I’m confident that my donation will have a substantial impact, and I don’t know of any giving opportunities in that vein that are as strong as GiveWell’s top charities. Each year I also give to a handful of other organizations, some in international development and others operating in the United States. I intend each of those donations to be large enough to be meaningful to me and to signal support for these programs, while still leaving the vast majority for GiveWell-recommended charities. In all, 80% of my charitable budget is going to GiveWell’s top charities and 20% to other causes, which is the same as my donation last year.
I’m giving 75% of my total year-end donation to grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion. I strongly considered designating my donation to Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) program instead. I’m very excited about Malaria Consortium’s opportunity to provide SMC in Nigeria; I’ve been particularly impressed by Malaria Consortium as an organization over the past year; and I have more confidence in SMC as an intervention than I do in some others. It’s hard for me to imagine preferring for my donation to go elsewhere when it’s time for GiveWell to grant out its discretionary funding from the fourth quarter of 2018. But, I believe that if GiveWell does decide to give the next round of discretionary funding elsewhere, I’m more likely than not to agree with that decision. I hold this belief in part because my moral weights and overall outputs in our cost-effectiveness analysis are quite similar to the median staff member, and while I’m concerned about the evidence for deworming, I think that concern is adequately reflected in my cost-effectiveness analysis inputs.
An additional 5% of my donation will go to GiveDirectly. I look forward to continuing to follow the work they do, particularly their cash benchmarking project, their work with refugees, and their continual research to improve the effectiveness of their programs.
I plan to distribute the remaining 20% of my donation across the following organizations:
- International Refugee Assistance Project, which advocates for refugees and displaced people with a focus on those from the Middle East.
- StrongMinds, which is the most promising organization I know of focused on mental health in low- and middle-income countries.
- Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which takes a comprehensive, intersectional view of women’s health and reproductive justice.
- Cool Earth, which works with local communities to protect rainforests and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
As I wrote last year, I’d be somewhat surprised if these organizations were competitively cost-effective with GiveWell’s top charities, and I haven’t vetted them with an intensity that comes anywhere close to the rigor of GiveWell evaluations. I choose to support these programs in order to promote more justice-focused causes, further my own civic engagement, and signal support for work I think is important.
I also make small donations throughout the year to grassroots organizations working in the Bay Area like Causa Justa :: Just Cause, Initiate Justice, and the Sogorea Te Land Trust. These donations, which are motivated primarily by community engagement and relationship-building, come out of my personal discretionary spending, rather than what I budget for charitable giving.
As always, I’m grateful for the thoughtfulness of my colleagues, the work that went into producing this year’s recommendations, and the conversations we’ve had that have informed my own giving.
I’m planning to donate to GiveWell for allocating funds at its discretion because (i) I prefer GiveWell to have the flexibility to react to new information, and (ii) in the absence of new information, I expect additional funds will be allocated to Malaria Consortium, the charity I would have given to. I expect Malaria Consortium would use those funds to scale up seasonal malaria chemoprevention in Nigeria, Chad and Burkina Faso. According to the Global Burden of Disease, Nigeria has the most deaths from malaria of any country, and Burkina Faso has the highest rate of deaths from malaria given its population size. This drives my view that donations to Malaria Consortium are likely to be more cost-effective than donations to the Against Malaria Foundation, which sometimes distributes nets in countries with a lower malaria burden.
I may also continue to give a smaller proportion of my donations to organizations working on improving animal welfare, and focused on the long-term future, but haven’t yet decided whether to do so, or where to give.
I will give 75% of my 2018 charity donation to GiveWell to allocate to recommended charities at its discretion. This is my first year working for GiveWell and I’ve been very impressed with the quality of work that goes into our recommendations. My moral values seem to be quite close to the median values across staff members in our cost-effectiveness analysis, and so I see no reason to deviate from GiveWell’s choice on that basis. As Natalie and James note, our best guess is that these funds will be allocated to Malaria Consortium to scale up its seasonal malaria chemoprevention programs.
I will give 15% of my donation to No Means No Worldwide, a global rape prevention organisation. I spent a reasonable amount of time during my PhD researching gender based violence. This encouraged me to donate to an organisation tackling sexual violence, particularly because the frequency of sexual violence globally is staggering. I have not vetted No Means No Worldwide with anything like the rigor of a GiveWell evaluation, but I have been impressed by what I have read so far (e.g. they are evaluating their program using RCTs, and I like that part of their approach is to promote positive masculinity amongst boys).
I will give 6% of my donation to Stonewall (UK), an organisation tackling discrimination against LGBT people. Whilst I have focused most of my donation on global health and development, I would also like to support a more justice-focused cause. I have fairly limited information with which to choose amongst charities in this area as I’m not aware of a GiveWell-type organisation to help direct my donation. However, I would like to see more done to tackle homophobia in sport, and the main organisation I am aware of that has tried to do this is Stonewall (UK) (through its Rainbow Laces campaign).
I will give the remaining 4% of my donation to Afrinspire. I have donated to this charity for a number of years. To my knowledge, the money I donate is used to help pay for school costs for orphaned children in Kampala (through the Jaguza Initiative). I do not expect this to be as cost-effective as other charitable giving opportunities, but I do not think it would be responsible to unexpectedly decrease this donation now that I am paying more attention personally to cost-effectiveness.
This year, I plan to give 95% of my year-end donation to GiveWell for granting at its discretion. This is my first year working at GiveWell full-time, and it will be my first time contributing to GiveWell’s discretionary fund.
In previous years, I have chosen to support specific top charities among GiveWell’s recommendations. Knowing which charity I was supporting in advance of my donation helped me more clearly conceptualize the impact I was making. Since starting at GiveWell, however, I’ve seen the level of detail and thought that the research team puts into analyzing each top charity’s funding gaps and identifying where a marginal dollar will have the largest impact. I’m convinced that the additional good associated with GiveWell being able to adapt to additional information and allocate my donation to the highest-impact charity we see when the grants are disbursed outweighs my desire to know where my donation will go ahead of time.
I also expect to allocate 5% of my year-end donation to helping factory farmed animals. This will be my first donation to an animal-focused charity, and it is a decision I went back and forth on. I believe that animals suffer, and I believe that I should act to alleviate that suffering; for example, by not eating animal products. Due to the scale of factory farming, the intensity of factory farming, and the neglectedness of the cause, I think it’s reasonable that interventions there might be orders of magnitude more cost-effective at averting the suffering of animals than GiveWell’s charities are at averting the suffering of humans. However, I’m very uncertain about how to compare helping animals to helping humans. I’m uncomfortable about the idea of allowing a human to suffer, even if I can alleviate the suffering of many animals with the same donation. I haven’t fully engaged with this discomfort yet, but I’m planning to make a donation targeted at helping animals this year to help me both clarify my own values and learn more about the effective animal advocacy space. I haven’t yet decided how to allocate this donation, but I expect that I’ll either donate to the Animal Welfare Fund through Effective Altruism Funds or through outsourcing the decision to a trusted friend who knows more about effective animal advocacy than I do.
This year, I plan to give 75% of my donations to GiveWell to allocate at its discretion. I believe that this will ensure that my donations go the furthest in global health and development. In previous years, I have given to either one of GiveWell’s top charities, or to the Global Health Effective Altruism fund. This year, my greater understanding of the advantages in allowing my donations to be channelled at GiveWell’s discretion, coupled with my U.S. taxpayer status, have caused me to prefer to give to GiveWell for regranting.
I plan to give the remaining 25% of my donations to an organization working on animal welfare but have not yet decided which one. It will likely be one of Animal Charity Evaluators top charities, and I expect to rely on the advice of a friend who has thought about effective animal charities far more than I have. I also considered giving some money to organizations focusing on the long-term future, but my view is that these organizations are not funding constrained.