Thanks for the post, and I appreciate it is a lot of work to work through so many applications especially on a volunteer basis. I note that the examples are mostly quite small. It may also be useful to have more information and reasoning on the largest grants from a donor perspective?

This resonates with my experience in the financial markets especially in the derivative markets. Quite often the financial market is quite efficient in the first order, but less efficient in second and third order where it is more neglected. And further down the orders the significance diminishes even if neglected.

I think this is a very good summary.

Given the shortage of funding for existing EA organisations,  there is clearly not a lot of money at the moment. But I think if there is a new $1m/yr+ movement building project with exceptional risk adjusted expected impact  it could probably get funding from non-op sources, but that will be at least partially at the expense of existing projects. 

Hi Will,

Thanks for the post. I think the below statement is inaccurate

• A single funder (Open Philanthropy, “OP”) allocates the large majority (around 70%^[2])  of funding that goes to EA movement-building. If you want to do an EA movement-building project with a large budget ($1m/yr or more), you probably need funding from OP, for the time  being at least. Vaidehi Agarwalla’s outstandingly helpful recent post gives more information.

Whilst I agree OP is the large majority as you mention and the concentration of decision making within that could be a problem, you could have movement building project with budget over $1m a year not having funding from OP - Longview is an example.

On Vaidehi’s post, I went back to my record and my donation alone is more than 3x the total in other donors category in her post. If other donors are included it could be out by more than 15x. I am working with Vaidehi to get a more accurate total.

I do agree that it is important to diversify the donor base and the many effective giving initiatives are important in that regard.

This looks useful, thanks!

Thanks Vaidehi. I will take a look when I get a chance and let you know.

Thanks for compiling this. I have asked for access to the spreadsheet. Amongst others  I like to check how much of SFF funding is EA community building vs funding AI and ex-risk research. Also there is a lot of funding from Jane Street donors in addition in Matt Wage just want to make sure they are counted. These are particularly significant in the earlier period.

Yes I think the above is correct. Thanks for that. It is possible GWWC moved to cause neutrality before the review. I think perhaps the point I want to make is that there was a lot of strategic thinking at that time which led to a number of actions including those mentioned in the post.

I am not sure if anything was published officially but I remember being ‘interviewed’ at the time and views were sought from a number of EAs and there were dedicated resources from CEA, a bit like the governance review being conducted at the moment but on strategic focus.

The review’s remit was perhaps more on the future strategy of CEA but given the role played by CEA at the time which included 80,000 hours and GWWC, and other meta organisations were still quite young, quite significant. It led to the reorganisation of CEA and the rephrasing of GWWC pledge from health and poverty to more cause neutral as we have today. Others involved at the time will have more information.