emilygjohnson
Bio
Emily is Senior Philanthropy Manager for The Good Food Institute Europe. GFI was founded upon EA principles and, as such, working at GFI provided Emily's introduction to Effective Altruism. Emily finds it very motivating to dedicate her professional life to raising funds for an organisation which is frequently recommended by EA-aligned evaluators as a highly impactful charity for those interested in mitigating climate change, and improving farmed animal welfare. Personally speaking, the concept of doing the most good possible immediately resonated with Emily once she was introduced to EA, and she has enjoyed attending several EAG conferences, participating in the Introductory EA Virtual Program, and reading core EA books.
The Good Food Institute (GFI) has just answered this question in a detailed post here, using GFI Europe - a priority region for urgent growth - to illustrate how we would use additional funding. Each marginal increase in funding for GFI has the potential to leverage much greater sums in R&D funding for alternative proteins.
As I explain in more detail over on the main post, GFI Europe would use marginal increases in funding on two main categories - additional staffing capacity, and research projects that respond to specific gaps and needs of stakeholders on the critical path for alternative protein adoption. Each additional role or research project meets an important, neglected and tractable need on the path to our overall mission to make alternative proteins the default choice. Therefore, every marginal increase in funding represents further advancement of plant-based and cultivated meat and reduced farmed animal suffering and mitigating climate change, pandemic risk, antibiotic resistance.
The next few years are likely to set the course for decades to come for alternative proteins in Europe. (For an interesting read about the stubbornness of policy changes see here) In such a neglected space, GFI Europe’s ability to track and respond adequately to existential hurdles for alternative proteins is crucial to their success.
If you're interested in supporting GFI, click here or get in touch with me.