Answering on behalf of Shrimp Welfare Project :)

Our overheads (i.e. salaries, travel/conferences), and program costs for our work in India are currently covered by grants until the end of 2026. This means that any additional funds are put towards our Humane Slaughter Initiative. (For context, our secured grants also cover the cost of some stunners, but HSI as a program is still able to absorb more funding.)

Each stunner costs us $55k and we ask the producers we work with to commit to stunning a minimum of 120 million shrimps per annum. This results in a cost-effectiveness of ~2,000+ shrimps helped / $ / year (i.e. our marginal impact of additional dollars is higher than our historical cost-effectiveness).

Although we’re very excited by how cost-effective it is in its own right, ultimately we want to catalyse industry-wide adoption by deploying stunners to the early adopters in order to build towards a tipping point that achieves critical mass. In other words, over the next few years we want to take the HSI program from Growth to Scale.

We’ve had some good indications recently that HSI does contribute to “locking-in” industry adoption, with Tesco and Sainsbury’s recently publishing welfare policies, building on similar wins in the past (such as M&S and Albert Heijn).

If anyone wants to reach out to me directly, you can contact me at aaron@shrimpwelfareproject.org. You can also donate to SWP through our website, or book a meeting with me via this link.

Answering on behalf of The Humane League (THL)! THL currently has room for funding of $10.5 million to grow our Open Wing Alliance and our Animal Policy Alliance. 

Open Wing Alliance (OWA)

We have developed a robust expansion plan for the OWA through 2030, which we would be able to put into place with significant additional funding. The goal is to free one billion hens from cages by 2030 and achieve a critical tipping point in the fight to eradicate the battery cage. . 

To achieve this, we aim to strengthen the OWA by recruiting new member organizations in high priority regions around the globe. But to do that, we first need to build internal capacity. Our current model—having a single regional OWA coordinator to support many member groups with differing needs across an entire continent—is no longer sustainable. But we see great interest from groups in the OWA’s offerings, so we know we are poised to build an even more robust global coalition. 

To meet the need, we need to create small teams in key regions around the world to support the specific needs of groups in each region, including in Asia-Pacific, the Americas, and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa). We would need to hire more campaigners, corporate negotiators, animal welfare scientists, and regional support team members. We estimate we will need an additional $8 million in 2025 and beyond. In addition, we would also need to scale up our core supporting teams (Operations, Communications, and Development) in order to meet the needs of the expanded OWA and Global Teams—a lesson learned from historical THL growth periods.

In addition, we also aim to provide much-needed grant funding to animal protection groups. Each year, we hope to distribute $2 million to $2.4 million in OWA grants. (In 2024, we provided more than $2 million in grant funding to 38 OWA groups.) These grants are transformative and flexible, covering general operating support, staff expenses, and campaign materials. But as of November, we have no committed funding for OWA grants in 2025 and beyond. Consequently, these grants will come from THL’s final 2025 annual operating budget budget. 

Animal Policy Alliance

Another program primed for expansion is our Animal Policy Alliance, a coalition of organizations across the United States fighting for meaningful change for animals through public policy. 

Launched by THL in 2022, the APA organizes, unites, and empowers local and state-level animal advocacy groups focused on issue-based advocacy and legislative change for animals raised for food. The APA has been behind some significant victories for animals, including getting octopus farming banned in Washington and California. 

Our current goals for the APA include growing it from 23 to 30 active members, building power, and providing grants that will permit APA groups to carry out meaningful work. 

While we distributed $500k in grants to APA members in 2022, we’ve been unable to sustain that level in the years since. But we are confident that in 2025 we could effectively deploy up to $750k in grants to APA members. The need for funding among our member groups is strong, and there are dozens of groups eager to expand their advocacy for farmed animals. But as of November, we have no committed funding for APA grants in 2025 and beyond, and any funds available will depend on THL’s 2025 operating budget. Any regranting funds we receive could allow us to maintain momentum as we build progressively stronger US policy protections for farmed animals. 

As we expand the alliance and rebuild our grant program, we would also need to expand the APA team and core teams, which we estimate would cost $1 million in 2024 and $1.5 million in 2025.

For full details of THL’s room for more funding, check out this post!

TL;DR: MATS is fundraising for Summer 2025 and could support more scholars at $35k/scholar

Ryan Kidd here, MATS Co-Executive Director :)

The ML Alignment & Theory Scholars (MATS) Program is twice-yearly independent research and educational seminar program that aims to provide talented scholars with talks, workshops, and research mentorship in the fields of AI alignment, interpretability, and governance and connect them with the Berkeley AI safety research community. The Winter 2024-25 Program will run Jan 6-Mar 14, 2025 and our Summer 2025 Program is set to begin in June 2025. We are currently accepting donations for our Summer 2025 Program and beyond. We would love to include additional interested mentors and scholars at $35k/scholar. We have substantially benefited from individual donations in the past and were able to support ~11 additional scholars due to Manifund donations.

MATS helps expand the talent pipeline for AI safety research by empowering scholars to work on AI safety at existing research teams, found new research teams, and pursue independent research. To this end, MATS connects scholars with research mentorship and funding, and provides a seminar program, office space, housing, research management, networking opportunities, community support, and logistical support to scholars. MATS supports mentors with logistics, advertising, applicant selection, and research management, greatly reducing the barriers to research mentorship. Immediately following each program is an optional extension phase in London where top performing scholars can continue research with their mentors. For more information about MATS, please see our recent reports: Alumni Impact Analysis, Winter 2023-24 Retrospective, Summer 2023 Retrospective, and Talent Needs of Technical AI Safety Teams.

You can see further discussion of our program on our website and Manifund page. Please feel free to AMA in the comments here :)

Hi! :-) I chose the option of creating an independent post, but thought maybe I should also comment here to link to it? 

Cruelty --> Liability: Legal Impact for Chickens’s room for funding & marginal impact

Thank you so much for doing this, @Toby Tremlett🔹 !

Answering on behalf of AVA International :) I just wrote this post Close the match and enable impactful advocates to benefit from AVA! about how we would use donations from Marginal Funding Week. Thank you for setting this up and all the best to everybody who is fundraising! 

Answering on behalf of Arthropoda Foundation. We've summarized our funding priorities here. Everything we raise will go toward funding insect welfare science (as we have no staff or overhead), with a particular focus on humane slaughter, nutrition and living conditions, and implementable welfare assessment tools.

We are facing a funding cliff at the end of this year—the multiyear grant that kickstarted Giving Green is coming to an end. We have a good relationship with this funder and they feel the grant has been a success, but they’ve expressed that they may want to scale back their giving in the upcoming grant cycle. We are looking to new individual donors to fill the gap—and to support our continued growth.

All additional funding until our $500k gap is closed will go towards paying our seven staff members and continuing the work we're currently doing.

In the world in which this multiyear funder renews at the same level and we close the remainder of this gap, our use of the next marginal funds depends on how much additional funding we raise, so here are three possible answers:

• ~$10k: streamline our operations by spending money to get back time, e.g. pay for tools to manage our donor lists and media outreach instead of manually finding, cleaning, and arranging this data.
• ~$50k: hire a communications firm to improve our branding and redesign our website. We have gotten user feedback that our website is hard to navigate, and we think that this reduces donors’ trust and willingness to give.
• ~$200k: hire an additional staff member with guaranteed runway for ~2 years. We envision this being one of the below roles:
  • a researcher, to expand our capacity to evaluate grants if and as the Giving Green Fund continues to grow
  • a communications/events specialist, to increase our capacity to reach new audiences. Our 4 events this year have garnered positive feedback and fundraising leads but we don't have capacity to run more than this.

We estimate that every $1 donated to Giving Green yields ~$15 to our recommended organizations!

Answering on behalf of Faunalytics:  we posted Faunalytics’ Funding Gap of $385,000 to address how we would use donations from Marginal Funding Week. Thank you for organizing this, and best wishes to everyone involved in their fundraising efforts.

Answering on behalf of PIBBSS, as ED of Operations.

We have our Manifund page, which goes in-depth here:

In brief, PIBBSS is an AI Safety org that does both field-building and research, mostly focused in non-prosaic directions. We organize (in ascending order of seniority of attendees and cost) reading groups, summer fellowships, horizon scanning, and research affiliate programs.

Marginally, funds that you donate would most likely go to either affiliate salaries or fellowship costs (~20.000 USD per marginal fellow for three months based on last year's costs). This requires us to get funding for our fixed costs, but we are fairly optimistic, although our runway expires in ~6 months. If you are a large funder, please get in touch, as we have the capacity for ~3 million or more in field-building and research over the next 18 months.

Reach out with any questions!

The Marginal Funding Opp: Closing the Hunger Gap for More Smallholder Farmers in Africa 

By 2030, the World Bank forecasts that 9 out of 10 of the world’s $1-a-day poor will reside in Sub-Saharan Africa, predominantly in rural places. This incredible demographic concentration of extreme poverty presents a unique impact opportunity for One Acre Fund, as we now have operations in ten countries which collectively hold over two-thirds of the continent’s estimated base of ~50 million smallholder farmers.  

Through bottom-up modeling of new territory expansion, increased market penetration, and new partnerships, One Acre Fund established a realistic pathway to reach 10 million farm families by 2030, representing approximately 10% of the planet’s $1-a-day poor.

>> However, we have been forced to slow our growth plan for 2025 due to lack of sufficient funding; in order to continue expanding our program to reach new farming families, we require additional support.

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The Challenge

Seventy percent of the world’s poor are rural families who make their living through small-scale farming. They consume nearly everything they grow often with little surplus left over to sell for income. Crop yields are particularly low in Sub-Saharan Africa, and many families face an annual “hunger season,” a period of meal-skipping and substitution before the next harvest. Without access to credit or enough income to spend on modern farming tools and training, these families struggle to break generational cycles of poverty.

Our Approach

We have pioneered a holistic market bundle of financing, high-quality farm inputs, on-farm training, and market support that enables smallholder clients to dramatically improve their yields, increasing their income on supported activities by an average of 40%+. This income boost enables clients to alleviate hunger and extreme poverty, increase their resilience to external shocks, and unlock their full potential — as farmers and as providers for their families. 

Continued scaling our our model to additional farmers in 2025 will require:

1. Hiring and training of local full-time Field Officers: Our core program is delivered by local Field Officers, primarily farmers from the communities we serve. Staff undergo intensive training in pedagogy and project management and receive ongoing training at weekly meetings.
2. Community engagement: Before launching operations in any community, One Acre Fund’s Field Officers work to develop close relationships with local village officials, leaders and Government officials at varying levels. They explain the merits of our program, invite visits during key activities in program delivery (e.g., input distribution, field training), and work to resolve any questions or concerns among local authorities.
3. Farmer enrollment and Farmer Group formation: Field Officers engage in a farmer enrollment process, marketing our program to prospective farmers and facilitating contract signing. The first stage in our enrollment process is recruiting volunteer Farmer Group Leaders — this is often done by tapping into existing networks of community leaders. Each One Acre Fund Group Leader then mobilizes a group of 8-16 potential clients. After learning the details of the program, Farmer Groups who elect to join One Acre Fund sign a contract, and select their input types and land size.
4. Procurement and distribution of farm inputs and other life-improving products: One Acre Fund has strong relationships with manufacturers and input suppliers in Sub-Saharan Africa and globally. We procure thousands of tons of high-quality inputs, store them in dozens of warehouses, then distribute them in 5-10 ton allotments to market points (typically within 1 mile of our clients) where farmers can pick them up.
5. Provision of loans: Unlike other organizations serving our target population, rather than handouts, we provide the option of purchasing farm inputs and other technologies on credit. This gives our clients a commanding voice in our program delivery and enables our sustainable business model, with the majority of program costs covered through farmer loan repayments. As our clients typically have irregular or low incomes, Field Officers collect loan repayments on a flexible basis up until the season’s deadline (a few weeks after each country’s harvest).
6. Training on good agricultural practices (GAP): One Acre Fund Field Officers deliver tailored field-based trainings on a range of improved climate-smart agricultural techniques to boost farmers’ yields and ensure strong impact. In 2025, our Field Officers will conduct ~20 in-field and digital sessions over a typical 10-month season and regularly visit clients’ farms to offer individual guidance on planting practices.
7. Post-harvest support and market facilitation: At harvest time, Field Officers train farmers on proper crop storage techniques and how to connect to local markets. We also equip farmers with optional add-on products to prevent pest-related post-harvest loss. Such support allows them to store a portion of their harvests and sell several months later during the off-season, when supply is low and prices are high. 

Our Impact

We benchmark our success on our ability to make farmers more prosperous. Every year, we rigorously measure our results against a control group in each country of operation. On  average, farmers working with One Acre Fund increase their incomes on supported activities by roughly 40 percent. In 2023, these farmers realized a nearly 150 percent return on their investment. With the improved harvests, farmers are able to end hunger in their homes, and invest profits from surplus sales into education for their children, new businesses, and other productive assets.

Your investment would enable the hardest working farm families on earth to chart their pathway out of poverty and into prosperity.

Claire McGuinness

Strategy & Partnerships Manager

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