Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments. You can view previous open threads here. The post March 2023 open thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog ..read more

For this post, a number of GiveWell staff members volunteered to share the thinking behind their personal donations for the year. We’ve published similar posts in previous years.1See our staff giving posts from 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013. Staff are listed alphabetically by first name. You can click the below links to jump to a staff member’s entry: Andrew Martin Audrey Cooper Elie Hassenfeld Erin Crossett Isabel Arjmand Jeremy Rehwaldt Kameron Smith Lauren Imholte Maggie Lloydhauser Natalie Crispin Natalie Kanter Olivia Larsen R ..read more

In September, we announced the Change Our Mind Contest for critiques of our cost-effectiveness analyses. Today, we’re excited to announce the winners! We’re very grateful that so many people engaged deeply with our work. This contest was GiveWell’s most successful effort so far to solicit external criticism from the public, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the participation of people who share our goal of allocating funding to cost-effective programs. Overall, we received 49 entries engaging with our prompts. We were very happy with the quality of entries we received—their authors br ..read more

We wrote back in July that we expected to be funding-constrained this year. That remains true as we approach the end of the year, putting us in the unusual position of leaving impact on the table. We’ve set a goal of raising $600 million in 2022, but our research team has identified $900 million in highly cost-effective funding gaps. That leaves $300 million in funding gaps unfilled. By donating this year, you can help us not only meet but exceed our goal—and say yes to more excellent opportunities to save and improve lives. Additionally, our giving guidance for donors has changed this year. F ..read more

As little as six months ago, we were in the position of having more funding available than we could spend on opportunities that met our very high cost-effectiveness bar. Today, the opposite is true—we don’t expect to have enough funding to support all the cost-effective opportunities we find. In this post we will: provide an update on GiveWell’s projected funding position, explain how we have been successful in identifying cost-effective opportunities, and share our initial thoughts about what this update means for GiveWell’s forward-looking grantmaking strategy. The state of funding We wrot ..read more

Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments. You can view previous open threads here. The post December 2021 open thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog ..read more

For this post, a number of GiveWell staff members volunteered to share the thinking behind their personal donations for the year. We’ve published similar posts in previous years.1See our staff giving posts from 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013. Staff are listed alphabetically by first name. You can click the below links to jump to a staff member’s entry: Andrew Martin Audrey Cooper Elie Hassenfeld Isabel Arjmand James Snowden Maggie Lloydhauser Natalie Crispin Olivia Larsen Roman Guglielmo Andrew Martin (Senior Research Associate) I’m planning to give 100% of my donation to ..read more

You can have a remarkable impact by supporting cost-effective, evidence-based charities. Just looking at the approximately $100 million[1] GiveWell had discretion to grant in 2020—a subset of all the money we directed to the charities we recommend—the impact of our donors is impressive. We estimate these grants will: Save more than 24,000 lives Treat over 6 million children with a full course of antimalarial medication Provide vitamin A supplementation to over 8.6 million children Deliver over 4.4 million long-lasting insecticide-treated nets (LLINs) to protect against malaria Vaccinate 118,0 ..read more

A little over a decade ago in 2010, GiveWell directed around $1.5 million to the charities we recommended.[1] In 2021, we expect we’ll raise at least $500 million, and may raise as much as $560 million or more.[2] We never anticipated that we’d grow this large this quickly. We’ve seen rapid growth from donors of all sizes, the most recent of which is a commitment of $300 million from Open Philanthropy. While this growth comes with challenges—we’re working hard to hire enough researchers, apply here!—it’s a testament to our donors’ trust in us and enthusiasm for our mission. But these big numbe ..read more

We believe malnutrition is a very promising area for charitable funding in the future. In 2021, we directed nearly $30 million to two organizations—The Alliance for International Medical Action (ALIMA) and International Rescue Committee (IRC)—working on malnutrition, and we expect to direct more funding to malnutrition programs in the future. (We have published a write-up about one of these grants here and will publish write-ups about the other grants in the near future.)[1] To give a sense of what we expect, we would not be surprised if GiveWell directs as much funding to malnutrition in the ..read more