EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)28 Des 2024

“Funding Diversification for Mid-Large EA Organizations is Nearly Impossible in the Short-Medium Term” by MarcusAbramovitch

Summary

There's a near consensus that EA needs funding diversification but with Open Phil accounting for ~90% of EA funding, that's just not possible due to some pretty basic math. Organizations and the community would need to make large tradeoffs and this simply isn’t possible/worth it at this time.

Lots of people want funding diversification

It has been two years since the FTX collapse and one thing everyone seems to agree on is that we need more funding diversification. These takes range from off-hand wishes “it sure would be great if funding in EA were more diversified”, to organizations trying to get a certain percentage of their budgets from non-OP sources/saying they want to diversify their funding base[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] to Open Philanthropy/Good Ventures themselves wanting to see more funding diversification[9]. Everyone seems to agree; other people should be giving more money to the EA projects.

The Math

Of course, I [...]

---

Outline:

(00:34) Lots of people want funding diversification

(01:11) The Math

(03:47) Weighted Average

(05:03) Making a lot of money to donate is difficult

(09:18) Solutions

(09:21) 1. Get more funders

(10:35) 2. Spend Less

(12:49) 3. Splitting up Open Philanthropy into Several Organizations

(13:52) 4. More For-Profit EA Work/EA Organizations Charging for Their Work

(16:23) 5. Acceptance

(16:59) My Personal Solution

(17:26) Conclusion

(17:59) Further Readings

The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:
December 27th, 2024

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/x8JrwokZTNzgCgYts/funding-diversification-for-mid-large-ea-organizations-is

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(250)

“Possible mistake EAs are making and shout out to Pause AI UK” by Michelle_Hutchinson

I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what's most impactful for us to work on and focus hard...

29 Jun 6min

“Coming Around To Political Donations” by Jeff Kaufman 🔸

Five years ago I read a post on the EA Forum arguing that "election campaign contributions might be a way in which you can have a substantial impact as a small donor". It struck me as weird but plausi...

12 Jun 4min

“animal welfare has an evidence problem” by matthes

Why I stopped donating to animal welfare charities but feel more motivated than ever to redirect money and talent to the cause. I have wanted to write this post for a while. It is an uncomfortable thi...

6 Jun 26min

“After making sure we don’t all die, this should be the first priority” by Yaqi Grover

A new article went viral on Twitter today: Nan Ransohoff's "The Third Wave of American Philanthropy" (link). Worth reading first. Nan is right about the shape of what's coming: hundreds of billions in...

31 Mai 6min

“My disagreements with CEA’s approach to stewarding EA” by hbesceli

[Cross posted from my substack] In their EA Forum post last year, CEA described their ‘principles-first approach to stewardship of the EA community’. I'm a big fan of principles-first stewardship in ...

29 Mai 27min

“Donating 80% While It Still Counts” by Jeff Kaufman 🔸

Julia and I had been giving half since 2014, but in 2025 we drew on our savings to donate 81%. It looks to us like we're in a critical window for keeping the introduction of very powerful AI systems f...

27 Mai 11min

“Why now might be the best time ever to start an animal charity” by Aidan Alexander, Aaron Boddy🔸, Ambitious Impact

TL;DR: AIM is running its first incubation round focused exclusively on animal welfare, in partnership with Aaron Boddy (co-founder of Shrimp Welfare Project). It'll run in early 2027, and we’re on th...

26 Mai 7min

“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 fun...

22 Mai 33min