This year we’ve dealt with some particularly intense manifestations of what one might call the “giver’s dilemma.” Imagine that two donors, Alice and Bob, are both considering supporting a charity whose room for more funding is $X, and each is willing to give the full $X to close that gap. If Alice finds out about…
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Quick update on Ebola (full update to come later)
At the moment, we don’t see highly time-sensitive giving opportunities that we are likely to recommend around responding to the Ebola outbreak in west Africa. We still plan to put out a detailed blog post describing what we’ve done to investigate the situation and what we think the best options for donors are, but we…
Update on Open Philanthropy Project
Our last major public updates on the Open Philanthropy Project were our May and June posts on global catastrophic risks and U.S. policy. This post summarizes our progress since then and where we currently stand on our goal of committing to causes. Summary of currently ongoing activities Deep dives on priority causes for U.S. policy….
Investigating the Ebola response
Should you donate to efforts to contain the Ebola outbreak in west Africa? With hundreds of millions of dollars coming in from other donors, will your donation make a difference? How does this compare to giving to GiveWell’s top charities? These are difficult questions. It’s always hard to estimate how much good a donation does;…
Expert philanthropy vs. broad philanthropy
It seems to me that the most common model in philanthropy – seen at nearly every major staffed foundation – is to have staff who specialize in a particular cause (for example, specializing in criminal justice policy). Often, such staff have a very strong background in the cause before they come to the foundation, and they generally…
Guest post from Tom Rutledge
The following is a guest post from one of our Board members, Tom Rutledge, that he wrote to reflect on his personal experiences as a GiveWell supporter. I was a Jerk for GiveWell When I first learned about GiveWell, I was a real jerk about it. I blame the preceding years. Before GiveWell, I had…