The GiveWell Blog

Key questions about philanthropy, part 1: What is the role of a funder?

This post was updated on July 6 with language edits but substantially unchanged content. As a new funder, we’ve found it surprisingly difficult to “learn the ropes” of philanthropy. We’ve found relatively little reading material – public or private – on some of the key questions we’re grappling with in starting a grantmaking organization, such…

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Incoming Program Officer for criminal justice reform: Chloe Cockburn

We’re excited to announce that Chloe Cockburn has accepted our offer to join the Open Philanthropy Project team as a Program Officer, leading our work on criminal justice reform. She expects to start in August and to work from New York, where she is currently based. She will lead our work on developing our grantmaking…

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History of philanthropy case study: Pew and drug safety legislation

Tamara Mann Tweel, who has been working for us on our history of philanthropy project, has completed a case study of a Pew Charitable Trusts (“Pew”) program focused on drug supply chain safety legislation in 2012. The report concludes: Pew put drug supply chain safety concerns on the legislative agenda in 2011 and actively built…

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Funder-initiated startups

We’ve come across many cases where a funder took a leading role in creating a now-major nonprofit. This has been surprising to us: it intuitively seems that the people best suited to initiate new organizations are the people who can work full-time on conceiving an organization, fundraising for it, and doing the legwork to create…

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Our updated agenda for science philanthropy

We’re hoping to set the Open Philanthropy Project’s initial priorities within scientific research this year. That means being in a place roughly comparable to where we currently are on U.S. policy and global catastrophic risks: having a ranked list of focus areas and goals for hiring and grantmaking. The process is going to have to…

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Co-funding partnership with Kaitlyn Trigger and Mike Krieger

We are excited to announce a new co-funding partnership with Kaitlyn Trigger and her fiancé Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram). They have committed to learning with us and supporting the Open Philanthropy Project’s work over the next two years. It’s an opportunity for us to experiment with a new type of partnership and a lower-volume,…

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