So I’ve been watching the ballgame, and it struck me how much sports announcers have impacted my outlook on charity. I can explain. The most common form of “evidence” we get from charities goes something like this: “We don’t have the data, but we’re here, every day. We work with the children, personally. We’ve been…
The GiveWell Blog
All Uncategorized Posts
Want to see what we mean by “bias?”
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…
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…
Two futures
My thoughts on the latest Giving Carnival: Fundraising today is all about the pitch; 10 years from now, I hope it will be about the product. Fundraising today reminds me a lot of car commercials. Car commercials try to convince you that a Ford is better than a Toyota or a Volvo outclasses a Volkswagen…
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…