 | |
| Formation | 2007 |
|---|---|
| Founders |
|
| Type | 501(c)(3) organization, ruling year 2007 [1] |
| Purpose | Charity evaluation |
| Location |
|
Region | Global |
President | Elie Hassenfeld |
| Website | givewell |
GiveWell is an American non-profit charity assessment and effective altruism-focused organization. GiveWell focuses primarily on the cost-effectiveness of the organizations that it evaluates, rather than traditional metrics such as the percentage of the organization's budget that is spent on overhead.
In 2006, Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, who worked at a hedge fund in Connecticut, formed an informal group with colleagues to evaluate charities based on data and performance metrics similar to those they used at the fund, and were surprised to find the data often didn't exist. [2] The next year, Karnofsky and Hassenfeld formed GiveWell as a nonprofit to provide financial analyst services to donors. [2] [3] They eventually decided to rate charities based on the metric of how much money it cost to save a life. [4] [5] In the first year, funding to run the nonprofit was provided by a fund called the Clear Fund into which the former members of informal club, now directors of GiveWell, had put around $300,000, with about half of that going to fund the organization. [6]
In the first year, Karnofsky and Hassenfeld advocated that charities should generally spend more money on overhead, so that they could pay for staff and record keeping to track how effective their efforts were; this ran counter to standard ways of evaluating charities based on the ratio of overhead to funds deployed for the charity work itself. [3]
In late 2007, GiveWell's founders promoted the organization on several internet blogs and forums using sockpuppets to ask questions about where to find good information about how to donate and then answering them, recommending GiveWell. [7] GiveWell's board of directors investigated and found that the founders Karnofsky and Hassenfeld had acted inappropriately and as a result, it fined each of them $5000 and Karnofsky was demoted from executive director to a program director. [7] [8]
In 2008, GiveWell received funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative. The Hewlett Foundation continued to be a major funder of GiveWell until March 2014, when the Hewlett Foundation announced that it was ending the Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative based on a 2010 study it commissioned that found that only 3% of donors selected charities based on performance metrics (rather than e.g. loyalty, personal connections, or faith), and a subsequent 2012 study showing that efforts to provide better data were not changing that pattern. [9]
In 2013, GiveWell moved its offices to San Francisco where people in Silicon Valley had become strong supporters of the effective altruism philosophy. [2]
Givewell's approach is data-driven, and they recommend charities which work in the developing world. [10]
American philosopher Leif Wenar has criticized the charity evaluator, saying that it does not sufficiently take into account harms caused by its recommended charities. [11]
In 2011, Good Ventures, founded with $8.3 billion by husband and wife Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, partnered with GiveWell to set up a partner organization called Open Philanthropy, as a vehicle to direct the funding done by Good Ventures. [12] [13] In 2015, Mike Krieger and his fiancee Kaitlyn Trigger pledged $750,000 to Open Philanthropy over two years, with 10% going to fund the operations of the project. [14]
Open Philanthropy has investigated giving money to criminal justice reform [14] and a range of other policy areas, [15] and has funded work into mitigating risks of artificial intelligence, [16] [17] [18] biosecurity, [19] and global health. [20]
In 2017, Open Philanthropy separated from GiveWell, and upon Karnofsky stepping down as Co-Executive Director of GiveWell, Elie Hassenfeld became GiveWell's sole Executive Director. [21]
GiveWell makes annual recommendations of the most cost-effective charities. They estimate that they save an average of one life for every US$3,500–5,500 donated. [22] As of August 2022, the top recommended charities are: [22]
Charity Navigator is a charity assessment organization that evaluates hundreds of thousands of charitable organizations based in the United States, operating as a free 501(c)(3) organization. It provides insights into a nonprofit's financial stability, adherence to best practices for both accountability and transparency, and results reporting. It is the largest and most-utilized evaluator of charities in the United States. It does not accept any advertising or donations from the organizations it evaluates.
Charity is the voluntary provision of assistance to those in need. It serves as a humanitarian act, and is unmotivated by self-interest. Various philosophies about charity exist, with frequent associations with religion.
Candid is an information service specializing in reporting on U.S. nonprofit companies. In 2016, its database provided information on 2.5 million organizations. It is the product of the February 2019 merger of GuideStar with Foundation Center.
Giving What We Can (GWWC) is a group of charities promoting effective giving whose members pledge to give at least 10% of their income to effective charities. It was founded at Oxford University in 2009 by the philosopher Toby Ord, physician-in-training Bernadette Young, and fellow philosopher William MacAskill.
Holden Karnofsky is an American nonprofit executive. He is a co-founder and Director of AI Strategy of the research and grantmaking organization Open Philanthropy. Karnofsky co-founded the charity evaluator GiveWell with Elie Hassenfeld in 2007 and is vice chair of its board of directors.
GiveDirectly is a nonprofit organization operating in low income areas that helps families living in extreme poverty by making unconditional cash transfers to them via mobile phone. GiveDirectly transfers funds to people in Bahamas, Bangladesh, DRC, Liberia, Kenya, Malawi, Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Togo, Turkey, Uganda, USA, and Yemen.
Good Ventures is a private foundation and philanthropic organization in San Francisco, and the fifth largest foundation in Silicon Valley. It was co-founded by Cari Tuna, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and her husband Dustin Moskovitz, one of the co-founders of Facebook. Good Ventures adheres to principles of effective altruism and aims to spend most or all of its money before Moskovitz and Tuna die. Good Ventures does not have any full-time staff, and instead distributes grants according to recommendations from Open Philanthropy.
The Center for High Impact Philanthropy (CHIP) is a center at the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States focused on high impact philanthropy, both in the US and internationally. The Center translates the best available evidence in areas such as education and early childhood development, disaster relief, poverty, democracy, and public health into actionable guidance and educational programs for those looking to make a difference with their giving.
Effective altruism (EA) is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates impartially calculating benefits and prioritizing causes to provide the greatest good. It is motivated by "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis". People who pursue the goals of effective altruism, who are sometimes called effective altruists, follow a variety of approaches proposed by the movement, such as donating to selected charities and choosing careers with the aim of maximizing positive impact. The movement has achieved significant popularity outside of academia, spurring the creation of university-based institutes, research centers, advisory organizations and charities, which, collectively, have donated several hundreds of millions of dollars.
William David MacAskill is a Scottish philosopher and author, as well as one of the originators of the effective altruism movement. He was a Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford, co-founded Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours, and is the author of Doing Good Better (2015) and What We Owe the Future (2022), and the co-author of Moral Uncertainty (2020).
Development Media International (DMI) is a non-governmental organization with both non-profit and for-profit arms that "use[s] scientific modelling combined with mass media campaigns in order to save the greatest number of lives in the most cost-effective way".
Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and How You Can Make a Difference is a 2015 book by William MacAskill that serves as a primer on the effective altruism movement that seeks to do the most good. It is published by Random House and was released on July 28, 2015.
Founders Pledge is a London-based charitable initiative, where entrepreneurs commit to donate a portion of their personal proceeds to charity when they sell their business. Inspired by effective altruism, the mission of Founders Pledge is to "empower entrepreneurs to do immense good".
The Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative (NMI) was an initiative of the Effective Philanthropy Group of the Hewlett Foundation launched in 2006. Its closure was announced in the Chronicle of Philanthropy in April 2014.
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is an Oxford-based organisation that builds and supports the effective altruism community. It was founded in 2012 by William MacAskill and Toby Ord, both philosophers at the University of Oxford. CEA is part of Effective Ventures, a federation of projects working to have a large positive impact in the world.
Open Philanthropy is a research and grantmaking foundation that makes grants based on the principles of effective altruism. It was founded as a partnership between GiveWell and Good Ventures. Its current chief executive officer is Alexander Berger, and its main funders are Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz. Moskovitz says that their wealth, worth $16 billion, "belongs to the world. We intend not to have much when we die."
Igor Kurganov is a Russian born German professional poker player, angel investor and philanthropist. He is the co-founder of Raising for Effective Giving, a philanthropic organisation that promotes a rational approach to philanthropy often referred to as effective altruism, and provides advice on choosing charities based on certain criteria.
Cari Tuna is an American nonprofit businessperson. Formerly a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, she co-founded and works for the organizations Open Philanthropy and Good Ventures.
Charity assessment is the process of analysis of the goodness of a non-profit organization in financial terms. Historically, charity evaluators have focused on the question of how much of contributed funds are used for the purpose(s) claimed by the charity, while more recently some evaluators have placed an emphasis on the cost effectiveness of charities.
An exit grant is a grant made with the clear expectation that the donor will not make any further similar grants to the donee.
The tech community around Silicon Valley has embraced the movement with particular enthusiasm, and GiveWell moved its offices to San Francisco in 2013.
