We envision a world in which philanthropists increasingly document and share their research, reasoning, results, and mistakes to help each other learn more quickly and serve others more effectively.
In this space, we often cross-post items from the blog of our partner, Open Philanthropy, to give readers a fuller picture of the reasoning behind our work.
In February, we launched the Regranting Challenge, aiming to add $150 million in funding to the budgets of outstanding grantmakers at other foundations. We saw the Challenge as an opportunity to maximize our impact, by: Adding funding to high-impact work that… Read More
Topics: Global Health & DevelopmentOpen Philanthropy’s Global Health and Wellbeing team continues to investigate potential areas for grantmaking. One of those is education in poorer countries. These countries have massively expanded schooling in the last half century. but many of their students lack minimal numeracy and literacy. To support the team’s assessment of the… Read More
Topics: Education, Global Health & DevelopmentWe were gratified to receive over 150 good-faith submissions to Open Philanthropy’s Cause Exploration Prizes, where we invited people to suggest a new area for us to support or respond to our suggested questions. We hoped that these submissions would help us find new ways to carry out our mission —… Read More
Topics: Global Health & DevelopmentWe recently published two shallow investigations on potential focus areas to the Effective Altruism Forum. Shallow investigations, which are part of our cause selection process, are mainly intended as quick writeups for internal audiences and aren’t optimized for public consumption. However, we’re sharing… Read More
Topics: Global Health & DevelopmentEarlier this year, I wrote that Open Philanthropy was looking for someone to help us direct funding for our newest cause area: We are searching for a program officer to help us launch a new grantmaking program. The program would support… Read More
Topics: Global Health & DevelopmentHistorically, economic growth has had huge social benefits, lifting billions out of poverty and improving health outcomes around the world. This leads some to argue that accelerating economic growth, or at least productivity growth,[1] should be a major philanthropic and social priority going forward. Read More
Topics:When investigating a grant, Open Philanthropy staff often make probabilistic predictions about grant-related outcomes they care about, e.g. “I’m 70% confident the grantee will achieve milestone #1 within 1 year.” This allows us to learn from the success and failure of our past predictions and get better… Read More
Topics:Update: We’ve now announced the recipients of these prizes. At Open Philanthropy, we aim to give as effectively as we can. To find the best opportunities, we’ve looked at many different causes, some of which have become our current focus areas. Even after a decade of research, we think… Read More
Topics:This post compares our progress with the goals we set forth a year ago, and lays out our plans for the coming year. In brief: We recommended over $400 million worth of grants in 2021. The bulk of this came from recommendations to support GiveWell’s top charities and from our… Read More
Topics:We are searching for a program officer to help us launch a new grantmaking program. The program would support projects and organizations in the effective altruism community (EA) with a focus on improving global health and wellbeing (GHW). Background We have an existing program in effective altruism community growth. Like our new… Read More
Topics: Effective Altruism, Global Health & Development