For this post, a number of GiveWell staff members volunteered to share the thinking behind their personal donations for the year. We’ve published similar posts in previous years.¹See our staff giving posts from 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013. Staff are listed alphabetically by first name.

You can click the links to jump to a staff member’s entry: Araceli Steger, Calum Richards, Chandler Brotak, Dilhan Perera, Elie Hassenfeld, Erin Crossett, Julie Faller, Lauren Imholte, Maggie Lloydhauser, Natalie Crispin, Paige Henchen, Sarah Eustis-Guthrie, Steph Stojanovic, Teryn Mattox.

Araceli Steger (Head of People)

I benefited greatly from the generosity of others throughout my life, which strongly influences my approach to giving today (both time and dollars). My family and I consider a combination of organizations we have personal experience with, supporting our local community and, more recently, looking closely at impact and effectiveness. While we plan to continue to support the organizations we’ve supported historically, we’re excited to make our first gift to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund this year and generally take a more GiveWell-style approach to scrutinizing the effectiveness of our giving moving forward. As a new employee, I feel compelled to demonstrate my support for our work beyond my employment, and I am excited to directly support our grantees.

Calum Richards (Talent Acquisition Specialist)

This year I’ve chosen to aggressively pay off graduate school debt in lieu of donating significantly. I’m not sure if that was the right decision—I’ve really struggled with the question of whether in my personal life/financial situation it’s better to give now or later. But, I plan to increase my giving in future years.

This year I’m making small donations to two organizations:

• Good Food Institute, which works to “make alternative proteins . . . as delicious and affordable as conventional meat.” I think the development of meat alternatives will ultimately lead to the largest reductions in animal suffering. I plan to eventually ramp up my giving to animal welfare causes to offset the impacts of my omnivorous diet (one approach to calculating offsets is here).
• METR, which works on “assessing whether cutting-edge AI systems could pose catastrophic risks to society.” I’m worried about potential catastrophic risks from artificial intelligence, and I expect that the majority of my future giving will be directed toward AI safety work. METR is doing important work in that space, like developing risk evaluations and responsible scaling policies.

Chandler Brotak (Communications Specialist)

This year, my personal philanthropy was strongly influenced by the devastation Hurricane Helene caused to my hometown of Asheville, North Carolina. Like thousands of others, my family was directly impacted by the storm, and many of the places I’ve known and loved since I was a child are severely damaged or completely gone. I directed my donations to local organizations, like the animal shelter where we adopted our family dog, the food bank where I volunteered throughout my school years, the pottery studio owned by a former classmate, and the pride organization where my brother works. While I know it will take years to fully recover from this disaster, it’s important to me that I play a small role in the initial rebuilding of the place that raised me.

Dilhan Perera (Senior Research Associate)

My partner and I make a monthly donation to several charitable funds with the intention of improving the lives of others as much as we can while also prioritizing our own health and well-being and looking out for our young child’s interests. We have taken the Giving What We Can pledge, though (to be totally transparent!) haven’t increased our contributions in the past year as our incomes have risen. We plan to make up for this in the coming year while settling some other big financial decisions.

The composition of our giving hasn’t changed in the past year, though we’d like to review it soon. Our donations are split between GiveWell’s All Grants Fund (40%), the Effective Altruism Animal Welfare Fund (40%), and Longview Philanthropy’s Emerging Challenges Fund (20%). The allocations roughly reflect a mix of factors: the weight we collectively place on the problems each fund attempts to address, the contributions we try to make through our careers, and our beliefs about how tractable each class of problems is likely to be.

We also make smaller donations throughout the year to local nonprofits in London and to fundraising by friends and family. We make these donations primarily because we feel that contributing to collective action is an important part of living in a community, and we don’t feel like this comes at the expense of donating to help address the world’s biggest problems.

We also felt compelled this year to find ways to reduce suffering in Gaza, particularly suffering experienced by children. So far we’ve made donations to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund but feel uncertain about whether this is the best way to help through donations.

Elie Hassenfeld (Co-Founder and CEO)

This year, my family is planning to give 80% of our annual donation to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund, 10% to The Humane League, and 10% to GiveDirectly.

We’re giving to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund because it gives GiveWell the most flexibility to direct funds where we (GiveWell staff) think they will do the most good. This may mean supporting programs at Top Charities, but it could mean funding newer organizations, research, or more speculative opportunities that are high (expected) impact. I am very excited about the potential impact of the grantmaking opportunities we’re finding.

Factory farming inflicts enormous unnecessary and preventable suffering. Although I have chosen to prioritize human welfare in my career and my giving, I also believe that animal welfare is an important and neglected cause area, so we will allocate some of our donations to the Humane League.

Finally, we are giving to GiveDirectly, as we have in previous years. This year, GiveWell re-evaluated the cost-effectiveness of unconditional cash transfers, and we now estimate that donations to GiveDirectly are 3-4x higher than we previously did (though 2-3x less cost-effective than where GiveWell will direct marginal funds). More detail in our blog post.

I also continue to believe that GiveDirectly plays a critical role in providing a highly legible, transparent, and straightforward opportunity to help people in low-income countries.

Erin Crossett (Program Officer)

My family is still figuring out our end-of-year giving plans, but I expect that a large portion of our 2024 giving will go toward GiveWell’s All Grants Fund. Beyond GiveWell, we also continue to support GiveDirectly, the Humane League in their work to reduce animal suffering, and non-profit journalism organizations like ProPublica and the Marshall Project.

Unlike previous years, this year I anticipate that a larger share of our giving will go toward helping people in our neighborhood deal with acute hardship caused by astronomical healthcare costs and a punitive criminal justice system. I’d love to live in a society with a stronger social safety net that better protects people in these instances.

Finally, the war in Gaza continues to weigh on us heavily. I feel pretty helpless in my ability to mitigate human suffering there and unsure of what the “best” giving opportunities are to provide relief. We’ve donated to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, UNRWA, and a few individual GoFundMe’s, though I remain really uncertain about the impact of these donations and am eager to find other, more effective ways to try to bring an end to the war.

Julie Faller (Senior Program Officer)

My husband and I split our giving into two buckets: recurring donations (so we don’t forget!) and end-of-year donations.

Most of our dollars go to recurring donations supporting two organizations: GiveWell (~75%) and GiveDirectly (~25%). I found GiveWell nearly a decade before I started working here when looking for opportunities to support evidence-based programs. Four years into my time as a staff member, I’m more convinced than ever that GiveWell-recommended programs offer excellent opportunities for impact.

But for me, GiveWell recommendations aren’t just about the head; they’re also about the heart. Our donations reflect my family’s belief that all people have inherent and equal moral worth. By supporting GiveWell-funded programs, we’re trying to stand with ​​small-scale farmers working for their livelihoods, parents overcoming barriers to get their babies vaccinated, and the many people involved in delivering life-saving preventative interventions and life-improving care in all kinds of circumstances. Like all of us, they have their good and bad days, and plenty of medium days. I think of our donations as helping create the opportunity for our fellow people to have more and better days.

Our second recurring donation supports GiveDirectly, an organization I admire for its transparency and respect for recipients’ autonomy.

For end-of-year giving, we usually make several smaller donations. We haven’t decided on these yet, but expect them to largely support a range of US organizations working on maternal, reproductive, and child health with smaller amounts to organizations we’ve personally benefited from (e.g., educational and cultural institutions).

Lauren Imholte (Philanthropy Advisor)

We’ve decided to streamline our giving by directing our entire charitable contribution to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund this year. This decision reflects my family’s confidence in GiveWell’s rigor and ability to identify and fund highly effective interventions. The flexibility of the All Grants Fund feels right for us.

The longer I work at GiveWell, the more confident I am in our work and its impact. Watching my daughter grow through her second year has reinforced the importance of giving and its potential to save young lives.

We’ve simplified our giving strategy this year by focusing solely on the All Grants Fund because we believe this approach will maximize our impact, but also because life with a toddler is busy, and like many aspects of our lives right now, we’re finding value in streamlining where we can.

Maggie Lloydhauser (Philanthropy Advisor)

This year, as in previous years, my husband and I will give meaningfully to GiveWell’s recommendations via the All Grants Fund. We’re also slightly increasing our donations to several local organizations.

By now, I know that making these gifts triggers the same mental and emotional cycle for me each year:

1. Ruminate negatively on the expensive circumstances of any given year; lightly consider delaying or forgoing my gifts.
2. Reflect on how astonishingly lucky I am to be born as one of the most fortunate people on earth.
3. Calculate the percentage of our income we plan to give and allocate amounts to different organizations. Make gifts.
4. Bask in extreme gratitude and sense of abundance.

My decision to continue funding the All Grants Fund this year is reinforced by my close view of the rigor, care, and truth-seeking our researchers bring to our work. I have been particularly impressed this year by the ways our work has been strengthened by seeking outside input on our work, particularly from the experts most likely to meaningfully disagree with our positions.

My personal connection to our work this year has been nourished by moments of connection with individuals in our profoundly generous donor community, the safe arrival of another beautiful nephew thanks to top-tier medical access, and the ease with which my children were able to access ORS (an intervention GiveWell funding supported this year) during bouts of the stomach flu.

We live in a rural town where roughly 40% of the population lives below the poverty line. This year, our local donations will be approximately 20% of our total giving. If we lived in a large city or a wealthy area, we would likely give nearly exclusively to GiveWell; given the very small pool of people who can contribute to supporting and bettering the community where we live, we feel it’s important to increase our local giving by supporting:

• the remarkable local land conservancy that protects the outdoor spaces we love most,
• the food pantry that addresses hunger in my town, and
• the local library that supports high-quality children’s enrichment.

Natalie Crispin (Program Officer)

This year, I will be giving to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund. I’ve given to the All Grants Fund in the past, and this year I am trying out giving to the Top Charities Fund to get the more concrete gratification of hearing about which grants my donation specifically went to.

I’ll also be giving to the Effective Altruism Animal Welfare Fund, and possibly other organizations working to address the immense scale of suffering on factory farms.

Paige Henchen (Chief of Staff)

I’m proud to be a longtime GiveWell donor (since 2011). This year I’ll continue to do the majority of my charitable giving via GiveWell. I’m choosing to give unrestricted because it’s helpful for GiveWell to have operating support spread across many donors; I expect that a large portion of what I give to GiveWell’s Unrestricted Fund will eventually be disbursed via grants to other organizations and programs thanks to our excess assets policy. If it’s needed for GiveWell’s operations, I’m also happy for that use.

This year I’m continuing to support two small startup organizations working in global health and development. I’m also making a contribution to GiveDirectly, another organization I’ve supported for many years. I appreciate GiveDirectly’s role in the larger effective giving ecosystem. I also have made a number of monetary contributions to political campaigns this year, as well as small gifts to things like my child’s school fundraiser.

Sarah Eustis-Guthrie (Senior Program Associate)

I’m thrilled to be a part of the phenomenal work at GiveWell, and I’ve given a portion of my donations to GiveWell-supported charities since 2016. I firmly believe that cost-effectively saving and improving the lives of the world’s poorest people is one of the best ways to spend charitable dollars.

I also strongly believe in diversifying my impact across cause areas and levels of risk. In recent years, I’ve given the majority of my donations to early-stage organizations, particularly those that advance the welfare of farmed animals. Donations to recently launched organizations can be particularly impactful, as such organizations typically find it more challenging to find support, while the farmed animal welfare space is massively underfunded.

This year, I supported Animal Policy International, which advocates for higher welfare standards for imported animal products; FarmKind, an effective giving organization for animal welfare; and Ansh, which saves newborn lives in India.

Steph Stojanovic (Director of Outreach)

This year my family will be making a nominal donation in support of GiveWell’s All Grants Fund. We made a larger contribution last year, and are (very boringly) figuring out our long-term finances/tax situation as we somewhat recently moved jurisdictions. We’re not going to meet our 10% commitment to giving this year, but intend to catch up in future years. We thought it was important to at least make a nominal donation to keep up the annual habit (and as a member of the outreach team, I guess I feel a heightened pull to avoid becoming a lapsed donor).

Teryn Mattox (Director of Research)

I am extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to make the world a better place through both my day-to-day work and my charitable giving. My family’s giving is largely the same as it was last year; below, I’m sharing an updated version of what I’ve written the past several years.

I am so proud of and excited by the work we do at GiveWell, and I think the All Grants Fund is one of the best ways donors can save and improve human lives with their money.

My family also strongly weighs the welfare of animals in the moral calculus that drives our giving. Since I joined GiveWell, we’ve transitioned all of our significant giving to organizations promoting (largely farmed) animal welfare. I feel comfortable with this allocation given the amount of time and energy I devote in my day-to-day work to furthering GiveWell’s work improving the lives of the global poor.

The reason we feel compelled to do this is based on the intensity of the suffering inflicted upon farmed animals, the staggering numbers of factory-farmed animals alive at any given moment, the potential impact of our donations in reducing this suffering, and our beliefs about the importance of animal suffering.

We’ve given to a variety of organizations including the Effective Altruism Animal Welfare Fund, the Humane League, Fish Welfare Initiative, and other assorted organizations supported by the Animal Welfare Fund or Animal Charity Evaluators. We also have a number of small, recurring monthly donations that we don’t consider part of our core giving, but are more like extra “fun money” we spend to support our local community in Oregon.