“With support from the philanthropic foundation Good Ventures, Stripe CEO and founder Patrick Collison and other donors, this new Abundance and Growth Fund will drive advocacy, research and policies to reduce burdensome regulatory barriers to infrastructure and housing construction, among other subjects. The foundation is hiring a new program lead to direct the fund.”
[…] Smith, advised by a three-person board and funded by a grant from Open Philanthropy, now works under the Center for Building in North America. It is an effort to improve the way the country builds by dissecting what Smith estimates is over 100,000 pages of technical specifications, and determining which parts might be doing more harm than good.
Pressure is mounting on U.S. building codes from all sides. Advocates for flagging downtowns would like to change the rules to make it easier to convert office buildings into apartments. California is grappling with how stringent codes might be impeding the recovery from the Los Angeles wildfires (and how lax rules might have caused the disaster in the first place). Conservatives are furious over energy-efficiency updates, and some red states have sued the federal government over their enforcement. Modular construction companies are grappling with the country’s fragmented code landscape, in which rules can vary between states and cities.
Some of the biggest players in global health have teamed up to tackle lead — a poison that kills nearly 1 million people every year, but has been largely overlooked in global health priorities.
The Partnership for a Lead-Free Future — which was launched in 2024 by the U.S. Agency for International Development and UNICEF, with financial backing from philanthropic donors such as Open Philanthropy and the Gates Foundation — aims to raise global attention, leadership, and resources to support low- and middle-income countries to end childhood lead poisoning by 2040. It currently involves 30 governments and 36 civil society organizations, foundations, multilateral and private organizations. Their plan: support country-led initiatives to phase out lead in consumer products, promote safe industrial practices, and protect communities vulnerable to lead poisoning through knowledge sharing, evidence gathering, and policy change.
“[Dr. Olufemi] Adewole’s research team is just one of the recipients of a global health and wellbeing grant in 2023 from Open Philanthropy, a foundation established according to the principles of effective altruism — that is, tackling important neglected problems with evidence-based solutions that can save a high number of lives.”
[…]
“Other grantees in the foundation’s global health and wellness portfolio, which totaled roughly $358 million in 2023, include what Open Philanthropy CEO and cofounder Alexander Berger describes as “low-hanging fruit.” “If you look at where deaths from preventable causes, especially easily preventable causes, happen around the world, they’re happening very disproportionately in low- and middle-income countries, especially to young kids,” said Berger.”
“In Cari Tuna’s assessment, the issues governments and companies aren’t paying enough attention to are an opening for impact. “Philanthropy, at its best, identifies society’s blind spots,” Tuna says. Originally a San Francisco–based Wall Street Journal reporter, she left the paper in 2011 to start Good Ventures, approaching her first year much like a reporter would: “I talked to hundreds of people across philanthropy, nonprofits, government, science, academia, trying to learn about the landscape.”
“You can really see how her experience as a journalist has informed her approach,” French Gates says of Tuna. “She’s rigorous about looking at the data and figuring out how to be as effective as possible.” Once connected with GiveWell, she launched Open Philanthropy, a grant-making and philanthropic advisory organization.”
“Good Ventures is now among the top 20 largest foundations in the country, close on the heels of another storied philanthropy from another century, the Rockefeller Foundation.
“Moskovitz and Tuna also offer a powerful philanthropic example to other entrants on the billionaires list, not to mention legions of other young but not-quite-so-fortunate tech entrepreneurs.”
Recent estimates found that philanthropic grantmakers from 157,064 foundations in 23 countries disbursed over $150 billion in funding annually. Much of this giving is based on personal commitments to specific issues and geographies. In this episode of VoxDevTalks, Emily Oehlsen outlines Open Philanthropy’s different approach to prioritising causes – to help others as much as possible with the resources available to it, without any precommitments to particular issues or geographic areas.
“Suppose we make these grants, we do some of those experiments I talk about. We discover, for example — I’m just making this up — but we give people superforecasting tests when they’re doing peer review, and we find that you can identify people who are super good at picking science. And then we have this much better targeted science, and we’re making progress at a 10% faster rate than we normally would have. Over time, that aggregates up, and maybe after 10 years, we’re a year ahead of where we would have been if we hadn’t done this kind of stuff.
“Now, suppose in 10 years we’re going to discover a cheap new genetic engineering technology that anyone can use in the world if they order the right parts off of Amazon. That could be great, but could also allow bad actors to genetically engineer pandemics and basically try to do terrible things with this technology. And if we’ve brought that forward, and that happens at year nine instead of year 10 because of some of these interventions we did, now we start to think that if that’s really bad, if these people using this technology causes huge problems for humanity, it begins to sort of wash out the benefits of getting the science a little bit faster.”
“The constraint right now on factory farming is how far can you push the biology of these animals? But AI could remove that constraint. It could say, ‘Actually, we can push them further in these ways and these ways, and they still stay alive. And we’ve modelled out every possibility and we’ve found that it works.'”
“One [outrageous example of air pollution] is municipal waste burning that happens in many cities in the Global South. Basically, this is waste that gets collected from people’s homes, and instead of being transported to a waste management facility or a landfill or something, gets burned at some point, because that’s the fastest way to dispose of it — which really points to poor delivery of public services. But this is ubiquitous in virtually every small- or even medium-sized city. It happens in larger cities too, in this part of the world.”