EA Funds That Exist (2024a)

Donation guide

This is a list of every effective altruism fund I’m aware of. I’m using “fund” as a bit of a term of art here. A “fund” is when you donate to a specific grantmaker, and they donate the money as they see fit. Grantmakers specialize in charity evaluation, so they’re more likely to know about new exciting opportunities, to know which charities are unexpectedly poorly or skillfully run, and to be able to assess complex data about which interventions are best.

If you know about a fund I don’t know about, please drop a link in the comments. I also appreciate any additional information you have that might be relevant to donation decisions (especially red flags at any fund). I intend to rerun the post every year¹ to help guide donation decisions.

To the best of my knowledge, all these funds are tax-deductible in the United States and the United Kingdom. For people in other countries, Giving What We Can has a helpful guide to donating in a way that gets you tax deductions.

Global Health and Development

Top Charities Fund (GiveWell)

The Top Charities Fund grants money to GiveWell’s top charities: charities that do a lot of good in the world with a high degree of reliability. In general, GiveWell tends to focus on health charities that target the global poor and are backed by randomized controlled trials. At time of writing, GiveWell’s top charities include cash incentives for childhood vaccinations, nets to prevent malaria, medicine which prevents malaria, and Vitamin A supplements. The advantage of the Top Charities Fund over picking your favorite top charity is that it allows GiveWell to allocate funding to the top charity that is currently most in need of money, which you might not be tracking as closely.

Grantmaker: GiveWell as an entity. GiveWell has been evaluated by Giving What We Can and found to provide high-quality recommendations and grants.

Some Random Grants: $11 million to the Against Malaria Foundation to fund nets to prevent malaria. $57 million to the Malaria Consortium for seasonal malaria chemoprevention.

All Grants Fund (GiveWell)

The All Grants Fund gives to a variety of charities—almost all global health and development charities—that GiveWell thinks will have the highest impact. In addition to giving to GiveWell’s top charities, the All Grants Fund gives to new charities and makes grants for research and policy change. The All Grants Fund’s money goes to riskier or more uncertain charities than the Top Charities Fund, but ones that are expected to have a larger effect.

Grantmaker: GiveWell as an entity. GiveWell has been evaluated by Giving What We Can and found to provide high-quality recommendations and grants.

Some Random Grants: $1 million to Dimagi to pilot a mobile app in Nigeria which would help healthcare workers perform preventative-care visits. $1.3 million to Y-RISE to support a randomized controlled trial of a program in Bangladesh which helps entrepreneurs start businesses desalinating water. $300,000 to cover cost overruns for and fund an expansion of a randomized controlled trial of One Acre Fund, which teaches farmers to plant trees.

Unrestricted Fund (GiveWell)

GiveWell’s Unrestricted Fund can go to anything that it wants. In general, Unrestricted Fund grants go to fund GiveWell itself: staff salaries, advertisements, office rent, insurance, work travel, and so on and so forth. GiveWell strives to maintain twelve months of unrestricted assets as runway. The remaining money is usually granted in the same way as All Grants Fund.

Grantmaker: GiveWell as an entity. GiveWell has been evaluated by Giving What We Can and found to provide high-quality recommendations and grants.

Some Random Grants: $19 million as GiveWell’s operating budget. $400,000 to Our World In Data, a website that provides high-quality data about the world’s most important issues. $197,000 to the Center for Global Development to research why, if GiveWell Top Charities are so good, other funders aren’t donating to them.

Global Health and Development Fund (Founders Pledge)

The Global Health and Development Fund aims to improve the lives of the world’s worst-off people. It prioritizes young, early-stage charities, with a particular emphasis on providing time-sensitive funding during tricky funding periods. It also prioritizes higher-risk but potentially higher-payoff work, such as research, economic growth, and promoting effective giving. Giving What We Can tentatively does not recommend the Global Health and Development Fund, because Giving What We Can’s spot-checks of the fund’s evaluations found multiple errors and places where the result was highly sensitive to parameters set only by grantmaker judgment.

Grantmakers: Two:²

• Dominic Finelli, Senior Advisor at Founders Pledge and former advisor to wealthy philanthropists.

• Rosie Bettle, Applied Researcher at Founders Pledge and biopsychologist.

Some Random Grants: $100,000 to Ansh to support kangaroo care for premature and low-birth-weight babies in developing-world hospitals. $100,000 to Taimaka for screening for and treatment of acute malnutrition in Nigeria. $74,000 to HealthLearn for an online training program in prenatal and newborn care for community health workers.

Global Health and Development Fund (EA Funds)

The other Global Health and Development Fund is a bit of a hangover. The All Grants Fund was only rolled out in August 2022. Before then, the EA Funds’ Global Health and Development Fund was the best way to donate to research, policy advocacy, and effective organizations that couldn’t absorb enough funds to be top charities. Nowadays, according to the most recent public comment I was able to find, they’re basically identical. Donate to whichever one is most convenient.

Grantmakers: Elie Hassenfeld, cofounder and CEO of GiveWell, alongside the GiveWell staff. GiveWell has been evaluated by Giving What We Can and found to provide high-quality recommendations and grants.

Some Random Grants: $5,140,000 to the Malaria Consortium to support seasonal malaria chemoprevention. $300,000 to IRD Global to fund its tuberculosis elimination program.

Global Health and Wellbeing Fund (Giving What We Can)

The Global Health and Wellbeing Fund is Giving What We Can’s fund focusing on the global poor. Giving What We Can generally intends to regrant to charities recommended by evaluators that it has evaluated.

Grantmaker: None listed, but it works closely with GiveWell.

Some Random Grants: So far, all of its grants have been made to the GiveWell All Grants Fund.

Maximize Your Impact Fund (The Life You Can Save)

The Maximize Your Impact Fund aims to address all aspects of multidimensional poverty: health (nutrition, child mortality); education; and living standards (sanitation, electricity, drinking water, cooking fuel, housing, and assets like cars or TVs). It believes that all aspects of multidimensional poverty reinforce each other, so the most effective way to help the global poor is to tackle all of them.

Grantmaker: Matias Nestore, Senior Associate, Research and Evaluation at The Life You Can Save

Some Random Grants: 5% of donations to Living Goods, which trains community health workers in Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Uganda. 5% of donations to Breakthrough Trust, which writes school curricula and runs mass-media campaigns about preventing gendered violence in India. 10% of donations to the Against Malaria Foundation, which provides nets to prevent malaria.

Education Fund (The Life You Can Save)

The Education Fund works to improve both the number of children being educated and the quality of education in the developing world. Access to better education helps children earn more later in life and enrich their communities. The Education Fund particularly focuses on girls’ education, which can improve the position of women in patriarchal societies.

Grantmaker: Matias Nestore, Senior Associate, Research and Evaluation at The Life You Can Save

Some Random Grants: 71% of donations to Educate Girls, which campaigns to get Indian girls in school and provide them remedial curriculum if necessary. 29% of donations to Teaching At The Right Level Africa, which campaigns for teachers to teach behind-grade-level children at their learning level and not their grade level.

Health Fund (The Life You Can Save)

The Health Fund focuses on preventing and treating diseases in the developing world, particularly malaria, pneumonia, HIV/AIDS, and diarrhea, as well as nutrition and maternal/child health. It provides grants related to nutrient fortification and supplementation, preventative health, healthcare access, health education, and vaccination.

Grantmaker: Matias Nestore, Senior Associate, Research and Evaluation at The Life You Can Save

Some Random Grants: 15% of donations to Unlimit Health, which works on deworming programs. 2% of donations to CEDOVIP, which runs community-based programs in Uganda aimed at preventing violence. 16% of donations to Sanku – Project Healthy Children, which aims to prevent micronutrient deficiencies among children in Africa.

Quality of Life Fund (The Life You Can Save)

The Quality of Life Fund focuses on economic development in the developing world, especially through infrastructure improvements and supporting businesses. It primarily donates to charities which provide unconditional cash transfers; support for business owners, such as training and providing inputs like seeds or tools; and access to safe water and healthcare, which make people more able to be productive.

Grantmaker: Matias Nestore, Senior Associate, Research and Evaluation at The Life You Can Save

Some Random Grants: 14% of donations to Raising the Village, which has a two-year multidimensional program intended to permanently lift villages out of poverty. 14% of donations to Evidence Action, which incubates and runs a variety of global health and global poverty charities, such as water purification, deworming, and vitamin access. 10% of donations to Village Enterprise, which helps the global poor start businesses.

Women and Girls Fund (The Life You Can Save)

The Women and Girls Fund focuses on improving the position of women worldwide. Its key issues include gender-based violence, women’s education, family planning access, and treatment for childbirth-related injuries.

Grantmaker: Three:

• Matias Nestore, Senior Associate, Research and Evaluation at The Life You Can Save

• Ilona Arih, doctor

• Akhil Bansal, doctor who works in global health

Some Random Grants: 16% of donations to Breakthrough Trust, which writes school curricula and runs mass-media campaigns about preventing gendered violence in India. 4% of donations to CEDOVIP, which runs community-based programs in Uganda aimed at preventing violence. 40% to Educate Girls, which campaigns to get Indian girls in school and provide them remedial curriculum if necessary.

Animal Advocacy

Recommended Charity Fund (Animal Charity Evaluators)

The Recommended Charity Fund supports Animal Charity Evaluators’ Recommended Charities. Animal Charity Evaluators’ charities work to improve conditions for farmed animals and wild animals. Its charities take a variety of approaches, including research, developing alternative meat products, convincing people to eat fewer animal products, and working with corporations to improve conditions for animals. Giving What We Can tentatively doesn’t recommend the Recommended Charity Fund. Animal Charity Evaluators recommends charities that are two orders of magnitude apart in terms of estimated cost-effectiveness without a clear justification. And, while I don’t have space to get into this here, its room for more funding calculations are wild.

Grantmaker: Animal Charity Evaluators as an entity.

Some Random Grants: $45,010 to the Good Food Institute, which facilitates the development of better alternatives to meat, eggs, and dairy. $59,607 to Faunalytics, which researches animal advocacy. $30,412 to the New Roots Institute, which facilitates classes in high school and college about animal advocacy.

Movement Grants (Animal Charity Evaluators)

Movement Grants supports organizations which Animal Charity Evaluators thinks are worthy of funding, but which don’t qualify for Recommended Charity status. Movement Grants particularly prioritizes:

• Small organizations.

• “Weird” species like fish, insects, and wild animals.

• Movement building in countries with a small existing animal advocacy movement.

• Interventions that might not work, but would have a big effect if they do work.

• Newer interventions that haven’t been tested yet.

Compared to the Animal Welfare Fund, Movement Grants is particularly likely to make grants aimed at institutional diet change advocacy (i.e. programs to get institutions like schools to replace animal products with plant products).

Last year, Giving What We Can didn’t recommend Movement Grants. However, this year Giving What We Can re-evaluated Movement Grants and found that Movement Grants has addressed Giving What We Can’s major concerns. It currently tentatively recommends donations to Movement Grants.

Some Random Grants: $45,000 to The European Institute for Animal Law & Policy for litigation in the European Union enforcing current farmed animal welfare laws. $50,000 to Asociación de Emprendedores Veganos de México, which supports vegan entrepreneurship in Mexico. $50,000 to Fórum Nacional de Proteção e Defesa Animal for broiler chicken welfare corporate campaigns in Brazil.

Animal Welfare Fund (EA Funds)

The Animal Welfare Fund funds a variety of interventions aimed at improving the conditions of animals. In 2024, nearly half of its grants went to welfare campaigns (such as corporate campaigns). Most of its funding went to hens or to multispecies work. It also focuses heavily on shrimps and wild animals, because Good Ventures³ has stopped funding work on those species. As of 2023, Giving What We Can tentatively recommends the Animal Welfare Fund as one of the best opportunities for donors in the animal welfare space.

Grantmakers: The full-time fund chair is Karolina Sarek, who previously was the co-founder and Director of Research at Charity Entrepreneurship, which incubates potentially effective charities. In addition to three advisors and the chair, the Animal Welfare Fund is managed by:

• Kieran Grieg, Chief Strategy Analyst at generalist effective altruist research organization Rethink Priorities

• Neil Dullaghan, senior researcher in Rethink Priorities’ farmed animal welfare team

• Zoë Sigle, Director of Programs at Farmed Animal Funders, which caters to people donating over $250,000/year to help animals.

• Urszula Zarosa, former Senior Recruitment & Digital Media Manager at Charity Entrepreneurship.

• Ren Ryba, Research Scientist at Animal Ask, which recommends programs for animal advocacy charities to implement.

Some Random Grants: $60,000 to Don Staniford for covert surveillance of salmon farms. $100,000 to Hive for animal advocacy movement building work. $50,000 to Humánny pokrok for fish and chicken welfare work in Slovakia.

Effective Animal Advocacy Fund (Giving What We Can)

The Effective Animal Advocacy Fund is Giving What We Can’s fund focusing on farmed and wild animal welfare. Giving What We Can generally intends to regrant to charities recommended by evaluators that it has evaluated.

Grantmakers: None listed.

Some Random Grants: Giving What We Can historically split grants 50/50 between the Animal Welfare Fund (above) and The Humane League’s work on corporate campaigns (which lobbies corporations to promise to buy higher-welfare animal products). In the near-term future, it intends to split grants 50/50 between the Animal Welfare Fund and Movement Grants (also above).

Global Catastrophic Risks and Longtermism

Long-Term Future Fund (EA Funds)

The Long-Term Future Fund aims to prevent global catastrophic risks, such as risks from pandemics or advanced artificial intelligence. As of 2023, Giving What We Can recommends the Long-Term Future Fund to people interested in donating to charities that help with global catastrophic risks. The Long-Term Future Fund sees its role in the longtermist ecosystem as:

• Helping people change careers into existential risk work.

  • Going forward, it plans to mostly fund mid-career people and people who have already received some training.

• Funding technical AI safety research, particularly for individuals or groups too small to be funded by Open Philanthropy.

• Offering an independent voice that isn’t beholden to large AI companies.

• Funding new or unusual interventions.

• Funding areas that other funders (i.e. Good Ventures⁴) won’t fund or that pose PR risks.

It provides fictionalized versions of its marginal grants here.

Grantmakers: In addition to four advisors and one guest fund manager, it has:

• Oliver Habryka, Project Lead for rationality website Less Wrong

• Linchuan Zhang, who works at EA Funds

• Caleb Parikh, Project Lead for EA Funds

• Lawrence Chan, researcher at METR, which works on figuring out how to measure whether cutting-edge AIs pose a threat to society

• Lauro Langosco, PhD student at University of Cambridge focusing on AI safety

• Clara Collier, Editor in Chief at Asterisk Magazine

• Thomas Larsen, Executive Director at Center for AI Policy, which (as you might expect) does AI policy research about AI

• Daniel Eth, independent researcher about AI governance

Some Random Grants: $80,000 to David Udell to fund his technical AI safety research. $30,458 to Teunis van der Weij “for AI safety research on personas and sandbagging.” $40,000 to Sviatoslav Chalnev for independent AI interpretability research.

Global Catastrophic Risks Fund (Founders Pledge)

The Global Catastrophic Risks Fund aims to prevent severe catastrophes: those which could kill hundreds of millions or billions of people, or even drive the human race extinct. About half its funding goes to biosecurity, a third to AI risk, 10% to general existential risk, and 3% to nuclear security. It takes a three-pronged approach: preventing global catastrophic risk, mitigating the consequences of global catastrophic risk, and forecasting future risks.

Grantmakers: Christian Ruhl, Senior Researcher at Founders Pledge who specializes in global catastrophic risks.

Some Random Grants: $10,000 to SecureBio to develop technologies that help with biosecurity. $540,000 to the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security to lobby for improving U.S. PPE stockpiles. $429,000 to establish the Conclave on Great Powers and Extreme Risks, a twice-yearly diplomatic summit focused on informal conversations between influential people about global catastrophic risks.

Emerging Challenges Fund (Longview Philanthropy)

The Emerging Challenges Fund aims to prevent existential and global catastrophic risks and to spread and implement key longtermist ideas. It focuses on interventions that have a clear case for how they’re beneficial that can be explained to donors, and on interventions that benefit from being funded by a lot of people instead of a single large donor. It avoids high-risk high-reward interventions or that rely heavily on gut feelings and hard-to-explain intuitions. It has a large network with many connections, including with people outside of longtermism and effective altruism. Giving What We Can recommends the Emerging Challenges Fund to people interested in donating to charities that help with global catastrophic risks.

Grantmakers: Three:

• Simran Dhaliwal, CEO of Longview Philanthropy.

• Carl Robichaud, Nuclear Weapons Programme Director at Longview Philanthropy.

• Page Hedley, AI Programme Director at Longview Philanthropy.

Some Random Grants: $210,000 to the Council on Strategic Risks’ Center on Strategic Weapons, for a fellowship for early-career policymakers, research on deterrence, and a database of tactical nuclear weapons. $733,000 to six organizations which helped draft the EU’s new legislation about artificial intelligence. $50,000 to support informal conversations between influential people in the U.S. and China.

Manifund’s Regranting Program (Manifund)

Manifund’s regranting program allows you to allocate money to one of its six chosen regranters. Although Manifund doesn’t limit which cause areas regranters can spend their money on, all six regranters appear to prioritize artificial intelligence. The regranters are:

• Leopold Aschenbrenner, who runs an investment firm specializing in artificial general intelligence and wrote Situational Awareness.

  • Sample grant: technical AI safety research supervised by Ethan Perez.

• Adam Gleave, CEO and co-founder of FAR AI, an AI safety research organization.

  • Sample grant: literature review of Singular Learning Theory for AI safety.

• Dan Hendrycks, Executive Director of the Center for AI Safety.

  • Sample grant: research on removing hazardous chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear knowledge from AIs.

• Evan Hubinger, Research Scientist at Anthropic.

  • Sample grant: research on removing incentives for performative prediction from AIs.

• Neel Nanda, head of the mechanistic interpretability team at Google DeepMind.

  • Sample grant: EA coworking space in Berlin.

• Ryan Kidd, co-director of AI safety educational program MATS.

  • Sample grant: Athena, a mentoring program for women in AI.

Risks and Resilience Fund (Giving What We Can)

The Risks and Resilience Fund is Giving What We Can’s new fund focusing on global catastrophic risks. Giving What We Can generally intends to regrant to charities recommended by evaluators that it has evaluated.

Grantmakers: None listed.

Some Random Grants: Risks and Resilience Fund splits donations 50/50 between the Emerging Challenges Fund and the Long-Term Future Fund.

Climate Change Fund (Founders Pledge)

The Climate Change Fund tries to prevent and mitigate climate change. It looks for “neglected solutions in a crowded space,” such as technological innovation and targeted advocacy. It tries to avoid “carbon lock-in” by, for example, ensuring infrastructure investments are low-carbon. It provides early donations for promising organizations. It tries to make sure that climate change work continues to happen regardless of which parties are in office.

Grantmaker: Johannes Ackva, researcher at Founders Pledge and climate policy expert.

Some Random Grants: $7.5 million to DEPLOY/US, a U.S. organization which does climate lobbying on the right. $2,010,00 to WePlanet for a grassroots pro-nuclear-energy group. $1,800,000 to Quantified Carbon for work on retrofitting coal plants to work on cleaner energy sources.

Giving Green Fund (Giving Green)

The Giving Green Fund is associated with effective climate change charity evaluator Giving Green. The Giving Green Fund donates to Giving Green’s top charities, which support geothermal energy research, alternative protein research, nuclear power advocacy, aviation and maritime shipping decarbonization, heavy industry decarbonization, and clean air policy.

Grantmaker: Giving Green as an organization.

Some Random Grants: Not publicly available.

Patient Philanthropy Fund (Founders Pledge)

The Patient Philanthropy Fund doesn’t really make grants! The Patient Philanthropy Fund is for you if you think the best opportunities to improve the long-term future are in, well, the future. It intends to invest the money until a key point when the best opportunities to improve the long-term future arrive—whether that is years in the future or centuries. In the meantime, it intends to make small grants each year to stay in practice, to build connections, and to give people a sense of what kind of things it would grant for.

Grantmakers: Five people:

• Sjir Hoejimakers, Director of Research at Giving What We Can (and author of several of the Giving What We Can reports about various charity evaluators).

• Luke Ding, an investor and philanthropist.

• Phillip Trammel, research associate at the Global Priorities Institute and inventor of the idea of patient philanthropy.

• Max Daniel, Senior Program Associate at Open Philanthropy in the Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building program.

• Eva Vivalt, economics professor at the University of Toronto and senior research affiliate at the Global Priorities Institute, who researches why people don’t make evidence-based decisions

Some Random Grants: $2,000 to Longview Philanthropy’s Emerging Challenges Fund. $2,600 to the Centre for Long-Term Resilience for U.K. policy advocacy around AI and biosecurity risks.

Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund (Longview Philanthropy)

The Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund aims to reduce the risk of nuclear war. It works on understanding the nature of nuclear risk (through e.g. forecasting and historical research); figuring out good ways to reduce risk (such as building systems that reduce the risk of accidental launches and improving nuclear diplomacy); telling policymakers how to reduce risk; and building the capacity of the nuclear risk field.

Grantmakers: Carl Robichaud and Matthew Gentzel, coleaders of Longview Philanthropy’s nuclear weapons policy program.

Some Random Grants: I haven’t found a list of its actual grants, but it has supported the Council on Strategic Risks, which lobbies for policies that reduce risk of the most serious nuclear wars; the Nuclear Information Project, which figures out the state of countries’ nuclear weapons programs; and a program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to develop an expert consensus on the most likely ways that we’d escalate to nuclear war.

Miscellaneous

Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund (EA Funds)

The Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund funds effective-altruist community-building work, broadly construed. It focuses on principles-first EA: that is, on making more people want to do good in an ambitious, evidence-based way, and on helping those people make the best decisions they can. It prioritizes cause prioritization research, growing the effective altruist community, and tools that improve decision-making. The Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund does not currently need more donations.

Grantmakers: In addition to five advisors, there are:

• Tom Barnes, applied researcher at Founders Pledge.

• Harri Besceli, who previously worked at the Centre for Effective Altruism providing grants for community builders.

• Alejandro Ortega, freelance AI governance researcher.

Some Random Grants: $168,867 to Rethink Priorities to improve its computer model of cross-cause effectiveness. $4,674 to Jessica Rapson to support her research on effective global development. $16,800 to Sam Faber-Manning to run EA events in San Francisco.

Incubated Charities Fund (Charity Entrepreneurship)

The Incubated Charities Fund makes donations to charities currently being incubated by Charity Entrepeneurship, which helps people found new charities. Charity Entrepeneurship has incubated many promising charities, including the Lead Exposure Elimination Project, the Shrimp Welfare Project, Fortify Health (which campaigns for vitamin-fortified flour in India), and Suvita (which encourages people in India to vaccinate their children). The Incubated Charities Fund allows you to support promising early-stage charities which may have trouble raising money from other sources.

Grantmakers: Charity Entrepreneurship as an entity.

Some Random Grants: Recently incubated charities include ACTRA, which uses cognitive behavioral therapy to reduce reoffending in Latin America; Learning Alliance, which trains teachers in sub-Saharan Africa; and Notify Health, which sends people in sub-Saharan Africa reminders about getting their children vaccines.

1. I missed 2023 so you get a bonus post in 2024.

2. Note that, according to Giving What We Can, the grantmaking team is planned to change shortly after the publication of this blog post.

3. Which funds Open Philanthropy and is the largest funder in the effective animal advocacy space.

4. Which funds Open Philanthropy and has recently stopped funding a lot of “weirder” cause areas.