The US government commissioned an evaluation of its Talent Search program, designed to fight the college enrollment gap by providing advice (mostly on financial aid) to disadvantaged students. The evaluation is pretty thorough, rigorous, and straightforward about what it did and didn’t find, as we’ve come to expect with government-funded evaluations. (This is probably because…
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Final finalists finalized
Our Cause 4 finalists are (in off-the-top-of-my-head order) KIPP, Achievement First, Replications Inc., New Visions for Public Schools, Student Sponsor Partners, Children’s Scholarship Fund, LEAP, Teach for America, the LEDA Scholars Program, the St. Aloysius School, Harlem Center for Education, and Double Discovery Center. Rather than put our reasoning here, I edited it into last…
Finals
Over the last four weeks, Elie and I have read through the ~160 applications we received, and now we’re wrapping up Round One and getting ready to get deeper into the issues and the charities we’ve picked as finalists. Unfortunately, putting the apps themselves on the web is going to take a while, just because…
Helping people: Easy or hard?
I wonder how much of the difference between our approach to charity and others’ approach comes from this very simple fact: We think that improving people’s lives is really hard. It might be easy to brighten someone’s day, even their week. But to get someone from poverty and misery to self-sufficiency and a world of…
Why we wish charities ran LESS like businesses
GiveWell started in the hedge fund world (as a collaboration between coworkers), and our staff and board is heavy on for-profit experience. When we talk about metrics and dashboards, a lot of people assume we’re applying business concepts, and that we want to see charities run more like businesses. That isn’t true. Do businesses conduct…
Driving without a dashboard?
How do you evaluate an organization that does all of this? Elie and I have been wrestling with this problem for the past few days, especially today. We’ve put together what we think is a reasonable final-round application (see below), and sent it to five of our strongest huge-comprehensive-giganto-mega-charities to see how they feel about…