The New York Times recently profiled Chess in the Schools: The Chess-in-the-Schools program has sought to foster analytical skills on the theory that these will help students succeed academically. The group teaches 20,000 children a year and calculates that it has taught 425,000 children since 1986. Children gather to learn the game at the group’s…
The GiveWell Blog
All GiveWell Highlights Posts
Medicine and philanthropy
David Leonhardt’s excellent piece on health care reminded me of the debates within philanthropy. For most of human history … [doctors’] treatments consisted of inducing vomiting or diarrhea and, most common of all, bleeding their patients … Yet patients continued to go to doctors, and many continued to put great in faith in medicine ……
Evaluating microfinance charities
When we think about microfinance, we don’t ask “which person” or “which story” to fund; we think about which organization to fund. As explained at our discussion of microfinance myths, we don’t think the traditional story donors are told is accurate. We do think microfinance could be helping people in other ways – or hurting…
High-impact nonprofits are rare, but worth funding
Following up on Thursday’s Alliance for Effective Social Investing meeting, Sean at Tactical Philanthropy writes: A high performance nonprofit is a very well run organization. It has outstanding leadership, clear goals, an ethic of monitoring performance and making adjustments as needed, and it is financially healthy. A high impact nonprofit is one whose efforts have…
Two worlds
Why are people so excited about one study of one charter school showing improved performance on math tests? (Our coverage of the study here). It’s because in academic circles, improving academic performance is seen as an extremely thorny problem with a very long list of past failures. (See pages 1-2 of the paper for an…
Small, unproven charities
Imagine that someone came to you with an idea for a startup business and offered you a chance to invest in it. Which of the following would you require before taking the plunge? Familiarity with (or at least a lot of information about) the people behind the project Very strong knowledge of the project’s “space”…