I am proud to announce the winner of the 2007 Holden Award for Excellence in Imperfection. This award has a rich history dating back to 3 minutes ago. The rules are as follows: The first charity to make a negative correction to its GiveWell review wins the award. Since we’ve published our review drafts, we’ve…
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What a “life saved” means
The goal of Cause 1 is to save lives in Africa, and we estimate that a good strategy can save a human life for somewhere in the ballpark of $1000. Sounds like an unbelievable deal, right?
Not to everyone. I was recently talking to a Board member and mentioned how much cheaper it seems to be to change/save lives in Africa vs. NYC. He responded, “Yeah, but what kind of life are you saving in Africa? Is that person just going to die of something else the next year?”
I think it’s interesting how (a) completely fair, relevant and important this question is for a donor; (b) how rarely we see questions like this (“Sure I helped someone, but what kind of life did I enable?”) brought up and analyzed. Here’s what we know right now:
Welcome to your virtual site visit
Monday I visited Year Up, our #1 ranked charity in the cause of employment assistance. Although they quite understandably declined my request to videotape the visit, I’m going to share as much of my impressions as I can here. Although I think informal/intuitive evidence is generally overrated (relative to facts about life outcomes), I do still think it’s valuable.
Cheap ways to save lives
Our research for saving lives in Africa comes out soon. While we’ve mostly stuck to finding the best organization – rather than generalizing about “how to save lives” – we’ve formed a couple informal opinions along the way, and this seems like a good time to share. First off, I think bed nets are a…
Must-read if you’re interested in NYC education
Eduwonkette gives a clear examination of data that is generally anything but. This post is more about public policy than charity, but it shows – at a glance – a lot of the problems with the traditional approach to charity (giving as an act of the heart without the brain; trusting charities that mean well,…
Here’s to fear of failure
A favorite saying of foundation people is, “You can’t be afraid to fail. You have to be ready to take bold risks.” I’ve thought about it, and I think they’re going too easy on themselves. I put it to you: we need both funders of innovative projects and funders who focus on what already works….