“Announcing the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund” by Rethink Priorities

TL;DR

Today, based on our multi-year prioritization research, we launch the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund (CCF). The fund pools donors’ contributions and allocates them to high-impact giving funds across Global Health and Development, Animal Welfare, and Global Catastrophic Risks.

Key highlights from this post:

• We believe that strategic cross-cause prioritization is an important step in doing good at scale.
• This fund is for donors who want their donation to go where a marginal dollar is likely to do the most good across cause areas, all things considered.
• We modeled key uncertainties that matter for cross-cause prioritization: moral weights, time discounting, risk attitudes, aggregation across ethical views, AI-related uncertainty, and empirical uncertainty within each giving opportunity.
• We present the current recommended allocation of marginal resources across high-impact funds in each of the three cause areas mentioned above.
• In addition, we’re introducing you to the first version of the Donor Compass, a tool to help donors explore cross-cause giving, powered by our cross-cause prioritization model. It is a short quiz that outputs custom giving allocations based on the user's moral and empirical assumptions.

You can dive deep into our rationale and methodology for the CCF in the announcement below, or [...]

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Outline:

(00:11) TL;DR

(01:46) Cross-cause prioritization in effective giving is underdeveloped

(02:22) Giving is full of moral and empirical uncertainty

(04:27) How EA has historically handled this

(06:29) Why thinking in cause areas isn't enough

(06:34) Why not just pick the best cause and fund it?

(07:18) At the end of the day, interventions are what's funded -- not causes

(08:37) What would address the prioritization problem

(08:55) We need explicit modeling

(10:36) The barriers to cross-cause prioritization are lower than they once were

(11:59) Our solution: an explicit and transparent cross-cause prioritization model

(12:06) The model

(14:03) Giving opportunities currently included in the model

(16:10) The Cross-Cause Fund

(16:35) Who is it for?

(17:42) How does it work?

(18:39) Our current recommended allocation across cause areas

(20:15) Donor Compass

(20:19) What is it?

(20:51) How to use it

(21:41) Methodology behind our model and tools

(22:10) Fund selection

(22:55) Fund-by-fund cost-effectiveness estimation

(24:43) Data Viewer

(25:01) Defining worldviews

(26:48) Outputting an allocation

(28:03) Future cross-cause prioritization plans

(31:03) Support the research behind the cross-cause prioritization model

(31:46) Conflicts of interest statement

(32:25) Acknowledgements

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First published:
May 20th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YgbTWGyfwkoBtvT2R/announcing-the-rethink-priorities-cross-cause-fund

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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