Our general advice on disaster relief giving: 1. Give cash, not clothes (or other goods). Giving away unwanted items makes donors feel good, and relief agencies can be under substantial pressure to accept their gifts-in-kind. But shipping and sorting these gifts can be a substantial expense and hassle, and such gifts can literally get in…
The GiveWell Blog
All posts by Holden
The track record of policy-oriented philanthropy
[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 is the track record of policy-oriented philanthropy?” Specifically:…
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…
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…
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…
Discrepancies between our views and our website
There are times when the views expressed on our website can become out of sync with the internal views of staff. Because of the way we run our process, this effect is most pronounced in October and November, just before our annual recommendations refresh. At that time of the year, we’re generally taking the final…