Effective Altruism Funds
Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund
The Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund aims to increase the impact of projects that use the principles of effective altruism, by increasing their access to talent, capital, and knowledge.
What problem is the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund working on?
The Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund recommends grants that aim to improve the work of projects that use the principles of effective altruism, by increasing their access to talent, capital, and knowledge.
While the other three EA Funds (Animal Welfare, Global Health and Development, and Long-Term Future) support direct work on various causes, this Fund supports work that could multiply the impact of direct work, including projects that provide intellectual infrastructure for the effective altruism community, run events, disseminate information, or fundraise for effective charities.
What projects does the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund support?
This Fund supports projects that:
- Directly increase the number of people who are exposed to principles of effective altruism; or develop, refine, or present such principles.
- Support the recruitment of talented people who can use their skills to make progress on important problems.
- Aim to build a global community of people who use principles of effective altruism as a core part of their decision-making process when deciding how they can have a positive impact on the world.
- Conduct research into prioritising between or within different cause areas.
- Raise funds or otherwise support other highly effective projects.
- Improve community health by promoting healthy norms for interaction and discourse, or assist in resolving grievances.
This includes a broad range of projects in global wellbeing (including animal welfare) and longtermism, as well as cause-general work.
Recent grant recipients include:
- Charity Entrepreneurship — support for the 2022 cycle of the CE Incubation Program.
- Gus Docker — General support for the Utilitarian podcast.
- Ge Effektivt, Gi Effektivt, and Effektiv Spenden — support for giving platforms enabling users to donate to top global charities from Sweden, Norway, and Germany, respectively.
- Global Challenges Project — salaries and expenses for managed student groups, and contractor salaries for core team.
- Ayuda Efectiva — covering the 2022 funding gap of an organisation promoting effective altruism ideas and services in the Spanish-speaking world.
For more information about how donations are allocated, see the list of past recipients and frequently asked questions on the EA Funds website.
What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund?
We previously included the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund on our list of recommendations because it is managed by the impact-focused grantmaker Effective Altruism Funds. We’ve since updated our recommendations to reflect only funds managed by grantmakers we’ve looked into as part of our 2023 evaluator investigations; while we’ve looked into EA Funds in its capacity as a grantmaker in the reducing global catastrophic risks space and the animal welfare space (and as such, we recommend the Long-Term Future Fund and the Animal Welfare Fund) we’ve yet to look into its grantmaking in other areas. As such, we don't currently include this fund as one of our recommended programs but you can still donate to it via our donation platform.
Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.