Recently, we did something that may strike many GiveWell followers as out of character. We recommended a $100,000 grant to the US Cochrane Center, despite the fact that we have done relatively little investigation of it so far (compared with our investigations of current top charities)—and have many unanswered questions. Good Ventures, which helped with…
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Recent board meeting on GiveWell’s evolution
[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] This year, GiveWell has been evolving in a couple of significant ways: We’ve been exploring giving opportunities that may involve restricted/project-specific funding (as opposed to unrestricted support of charities), as well as giving opportunities that could be relatively speculative, hard to…
Some history behind our shifting approach to research
The approach that GiveWell took from 2007-2011 had two crucial qualities: We have been passive. That is, we have focused on finding the best existing organizations and supporting them with no-strings-attached donations, rather than a more “active” approach of designing our own strategy, treating charities as partners in carrying out this strategy, and restricting donations…
GiveWell and Good Ventures
Last year, we met Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz of Good Ventures, a new foundation that is planning eventually on giving substantial amounts (Dustin and Cari aim to give the majority of their net worth within their lifetimes; Dustin is the co-founder of Facebook and, more recently, Asana). We immediately established that Good Ventures and…
Objections and concerns about our new direction
GiveWell has recently been taking on activities that may seem to represent a pretty substantial change of direction, especially for those who think of us as a “charity evaluator focused on saving the most lives per dollar spent.” Within global health and nutrition, we’re considering restricted funding for specific projects, not just recommendations of particular…
Meta-research
[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] We previously laid out our working set of focus areas for GiveWell Labs. This post further elaborates on the cause of “meta-research” and explains why meta-research is currently a very high priority for us – it is our #2 highest-priority focus…