We are now posting content relevant to the Open Philanthropy Project to the Open Philanthropy Blog, rather than the GiveWell Blog. For a period of time, we will be posting notices here when new content appears, in order to ease the transition. We encourage those interested in the Open Philanthropy Project to follow it via RSS, Facebook or Twitter.
The newest post on the Open Philanthropy Blog is: America’s recently heralded urban “crime wave” may already have peaked
There’s been some interesting discussion on how the world of social science experiments is evolving. Chris Blattman worries that there is too much of a tendency toward large, expensive, perfectionist studies, writing:
each study is like a lamp post. We might want to have a few smaller lamp posts illuminating our path, rather than the world’s largest and most awesome lamp post illuminating just one spot. I worried that our striving for perfect, overachieving studies could make our world darker on average.
My feeling – shared by most of the staff I’ve discussed this with – is that the trend toward “perfect, overachieving studies” is a good thing. Given the current state of the literature and the tradeoffs we perceive, I wish this trend were stronger and faster than it is. I think it’s worth briefly laying out my reasoning.
Our relationship to academic research is that of a “consumer.” We don’t carry out research; we try to use existing studies to answer action-relevant questions. The example question I’ll use here is “What are the long-term benefits of deworming?”
In theory, I’d prefer a large number of highly flawed studies on deworming to a small number of “perfectionist” studies, largely for the reasons Prof. Blattman lays out – a large number of studies would give me a better sense of how well an intervention generalizes, and what kinds of settings it is better and worse suited to. This would be my preference if flawed studies were flawed in different and largely unrelated ways.
The problem is my fear that studies’ flaws are systematically similar to each other. I fear this for a couple of reasons:
1. Correlated biases in research methods. One of the most pervasive issues with flawed studies is selection bias. For example, when trying to assess the impact of the infections treated by deworming, it’s relatively easy to compare populations with high infection levels to populations with low infection levels, and attribute any difference to the infections themselves. The problem is that differences in these populations could reflect the impact of deworming, or could reflect other confounding factors: the fact that populations with high infection rates tend to be systematically poorer, have systematically worse sanitation, etc.
If researchers decided to conduct 100 relatively easy, low-quality studies of deworming, it’s likely that nearly all of the studies would take this form, and therefore nearly all would be subject to the same risk of bias; practically no such studies would have unrelated, or opposite, biases. In order to conduct a study without this bias, one needs to run an experiment (or identify a “natural experiment”), which is a significant step in the direction of a “perfectionist” study.
Even if we restrict the universe of studies considered to experiments, I think analogous issues apply. For example:
2. Correlated biases due to academic culture. The issue that worries me most about academic research is publication bias: the fact that researchers have a variety of ways to “find what they want to find,” from selective reporting of analyses to selective publication. I suspect that researchers have a lot in common in terms of what they “want to find”; they tend to share a common culture, common background assumptions, and common incentives. As a non-academic, I’m particularly worried about being misled because of my limited understanding of such factors. I think this issue is even more worrying when studies are done in collaboration with nonprofits, which systematically share incentives to exaggerate the impact of their programs.
The case of microlending seems like a strong example. When we first confronted the evidence on microlending in 2008, we found a large number of studies, almost all using problematic methodologies, and almost all concluding that microlending had strong positive effects. Since then, a number of “gold standard” studies have pointed to a very different conclusion.
Many of the qualities that make a study “perfectionist” or “overachieving” – such as pre-analysis plans, or collection of many kinds of data that allow a variety of chances to spot anomalies – seem to me to reduce researchers’ ability to “find what they want to find,” and/or improve a critical reader’s ability to spot symptoms of selective reporting. Furthermore, the mere fact that a study is more expensive and time-consuming reduces the risk of publication bias, in my view: it means the study tends to get more scrutiny, and is less likely to be left unpublished if it returns unwanted results.
Some further thoughts on my general support of a trend toward “perfectionist” studies:
Synthesis and aggregation are much more feasible for perfectionist studies. Flawed studies are not only less reliable; they’re more time-consuming to interpret. The ideal study has high-quality long-term data, well-executed randomization, low attrition, and a pre-analysis plan; such a study has results that can largely be taken at face value, and if there are many such studies it can be helpful to combine their results in a meta-analysis, while also looking for differences in setting that may explain their different findings. By contrast, when I’m looking at a large number of studies that I suspect have similar flaws, it seems important to try to understand all the nuances of each study, and there is usually no clearly meaningful way to aggregate them.
It’s difficult to assess external validity when internal validity is so much in question. In theory, I care about external validity as much as internal validity, but it’s hard to pick up anything about the former when I am so worried about the latter. When I see a large number of studies pointing in the same direction, I fear this is due to correlated biases rather than to a sign of generalizability; when I see studies finding different things, I suspect that this may be a product of different researchers’ goals and preferences rather than anything to do with differences in setting.
On the flipside, once I’m convinced of a small number of studies’ internal validity, it’s often possible to investigate external validity by using much more limited data that doesn’t even fall under the heading of “studies.” For example, when assessing the impact of a deworming campaign, we look at data on declines in worm infections, or even just data on whether the intervention was delivered appropriately; once we’ve been sold that the basic mechanism is plausible, data along these lines can fill in an important part of the external validity picture. This approach works best for interventions that seem inherently likely to generalize (e.g., health interventions).
Rather than seeing internal and external validity as orthogonal qualities that can be measured using different methods, I tend to see a baseline level of internal validity as a prerequisite to examining external validity. And since this baseline is seldom met, that’s what I’m most eager to see more of.
Bottom line. Under the status quo, I get very little value out of literatures that have large numbers of flawed studies – because I tend to suspect the flaws of running in the same direction. On a given research question, I tend to base my view on the very best, most expensive, most “perfectionist” studies, because I expect these studies to be the most fair and the most scrutinized, and I think focusing on them leaves me in better position than trying to understand all the subtleties of a large number of flawed studies.
If there were more diversity of research methods, I’d worry less about pervasive and correlated selection bias. If I trusted academics to be unbiased, I would feel better about looking at the overall picture presented by a large number of imperfect studies. If I had the time to understand all the nuances of every study, I’d be able to make more use of large and flawed literatures. And if all of these issues were less concerning to me, I’d be more interested in moving beyond a focus on internal validity to broader investigations of external validity. But as things are, I tend to get more value out of the 1-5 best studies on a subject than out of all others combined, and I wish that perfectionist approaches were much more dominant than they currently are.
In addition to evaluations of other charities, GiveWell publishes substantial evaluation of itself, from the quality of its research to its impact on donations. We publish quarterly updates regarding two key metrics: (a) donations to recommended charities and (b) web traffic. This post is being published late due to staff focusing on updating GiveWell’s charity recommendations in the fourth quarter; it also includes a preliminary view of our money moved since the end of our third quarter.
Preliminary estimate of 2015 money moved (since February 1, 2015)
As of early January 2016, we have tracked about $98 million in money moved to our recommended charities. Excluding Good Ventures, we have tracked about $28 million (of which, roughly half has come from donors giving $1 million or more).
These data are preliminary. We expect that in some cases we are currently overstating our impact (e.g. due to double counting or incorrect attribution of our influence) and in other cases we are understating our impact (since there are several weeks left in our metrics year and there are delays entering data); overall, we would guess that we are currently underestimating our annual money moved. We plan to publish our annual metrics (covering February 1, 2015 – January 31, 2016) in March, at which point we will have more confidence in our data and be able to share more details.
GiveWell’s web traffic / money moved through Q3 2015
The tables and chart below present basic information about our growth in money moved and web traffic in the first three quarters of 2015 compared to the previous two years (note 1).
Money moved by donors who have never given more than $5,000 in a year increased about 80% to $2.44 million. The total number of donors in the first three quarters increased about 80% to about 8,300 (note 2). These growth rates are reasonably consistent with the growth we previously reported in our first and second quarter metrics.
Growth in web traffic excluding Google AdWords increased about 25% in the first three quarters. Last year, we saw a drop in total web traffic because we removed ads on searches that we determined were not driving high quality traffic to our site (i.e. searches with very high bounce rates and very low pages per visit).
GiveWell’s website receives elevated web traffic during “giving season” around December of each year. To adjust for this and emphasize the trend, the chart below shows the rolling sum of unique visitors over the previous twelve months, starting in December 2009 (the first period for which we have 12 months of reliable data due to an issue tracking visits in 2008).
We use web analytics data from two sources: Clicky and Google Analytics (except for those months for which we only have reliable data from one source). The raw data we used to generate the chart and table above (as well as notes on the issues we’ve had and adjustments we’ve made) is in this spreadsheet (note 3, on how we count unique visitors).
Note 1: Since our 2012 annual metrics report we have shifted to a reporting year that starts on February 1, rather than January 1, in order to better capture year-on-year growth in the peak giving months of December and January. Therefore, metrics for the “first three quarters” reported here are for February through October.
Note 2: Our measure of the total number of donors may overestimate the true number. We identify individual donors based on the reported name and email. Donors may not share all of this information or may update it (for example, using a different email), in which case, we may mistakenly treat a donation as if it was made by a new donor. We plan to investigate how large of an overstatement there may be and possibly adjust the total for our next annual metrics report.
Note 3: We count unique visitors over a period as the sum of monthly unique visitors. In other words, if the same person visits the site multiple times in a calendar month, they are counted once. If they visit in multiple months, they are counted once per month.
This post provides an update on GiveWell’s operating budget and funding needs. It is aimed at close followers of GiveWell, particularly those who have a high degree of trust in and alignment with us and are primarily seeking to make the highest-impact gift according to our (admittedly biased) opinion.
In brief:
Below, we provide more details on our current funding situation. For more background on our philosophy on fundraising, see our October 2013 post. We are planning to make a future post – in a month or two, while doing our annual self-evaluation – that goes into more detail on the past and future effects of our increased staff size.
Details
We currently project expenses of $4.9m for December 1, 2015-November 30, 2016. We project $4.9m in revenues over this period.
We currently hold about $3.3m in reserves (and project holding $4.4m after December’s “giving season”).
This file (.xlsx) provides more detail on our forecasts.
Revenue projection
Our revenue projection includes (the numbers below don’t add up due to rounding):
The above implies that if donors who have supported us in the past continue to do so and new donors continue to support us at rates similar to what we have experienced in the past, we will remain in a stable financial position.
Expenses
Our expenses have grown significantly over the past year.
We spent $3.0m in the 12 months from December 1, 2014 to November 30, 2015. We currently project expenses of $4.89m for December 1, 2015 to November 30, 2016. In brief:
At what point would we consider our funding gap closed?
At the point where we hit our excess assets policy, we would regrant any funds given to GiveWell to our recommended charities.
Using a conservative revenue projection (which we believe is appropriate when considering granting out funds), we project 12-month-forward expenses as of November 2016 (i.e., expenses we would incur from November 2016 to October 2017) of $5.0 million more than what we project holding in reserves. Therefore, we would require $5.0 million in additional funding before we would begin to grant out funds.
What will we do if we raise more or less funding than we anticipate?
Raising more funding than we anticipate would reduce the likelihood that senior staff have to spend significant time fundraising in the next year. Staff time put into fundraising is currently quite low (approximately 10 hours/year for each of Elie, Holden and Natalie and some additional support from more junior staff). We currently plan to maintain this limited time commitment to fundraising and are optimistic that posts like this enable us to raise the funding we need without devoting more time to fundraising.
If we raise less funding than we anticipate, Elie and Holden would spend more time on fundraising. If this step didn’t succeed in raising the funding we need, we would consider the following options (likely in this order): (a) slowing or halting planned staff expansion, (b) requesting additional funding from Good Ventures, and (c) laying off staff. Note that we believe these scenarios are highly unlikely given our current situation, but we require continued, growing support to ensure that we avoid them.
Are GiveWell’s projected operating expenses reasonable or excessive in light of its impact?
In 2015, we anticipate more than $90m moved to top charities and anticipate the Open Philanthropy Project funding approximately $16.5m of grants.
We spent $3.2m in 2015 and project total expenses in 2016 of $4.9m. We estimate that 70% ($3.4m) of the 2016 figure is attributable to the Open Philanthropy Project and 30% ($1.5m) to GiveWell. We previously wrote that we believe expenses that are 15% of money moved are well within the range of normal.
What is our recommendation?
For donors who have a high degree of trust in us and are looking to give as effectively as possible from our perspective, we recommend donating to support GiveWell’s operations. Such donations allow us to maintain a diversified donor base and continue operating as we wish to with minimal distractions.
For donors who want to support our work because they value it but are otherwise primarily interested in supporting charities based on neutral recommendations, strong evidence, etc., we recommend giving a portion of the donation to GiveWell. If you’d like to give GiveWell a 10% “tip” to support our operations, you can do so by selecting the box labelled “Add 10% to help fund GiveWell’s operations” on our donations to charities page or by sending us a check and filling out our check donation form with the allocation for your donation. Admittedly, in light of the role the Open Philanthropy Project is playing in our budget, it’s possible that the right figure this year for a “tip” this year is something under 10%.
The Open Philanthropy Project looks for outstanding giving opportunities, but its target audience is large institutional donors – unlike GiveWell’s top charities work, which targets individual donors. Some individuals have expressed interest in hearing whether there are any organizations we’ve come across, in our work on the Open Philanthropy Project, that they might consider donating to.
For this post, I polled the Open Philanthropy Project team and asked whether there are any organizations they think are reasonably strong options for individual donors, based on their Open Philanthropy Project work. The recommendations are listed below, along with some brief reasoning and information about how to donate.
Some caveats to these recommendations:
Summary of the recommendations:
If you decide to support one of these organizations based on our recommendations, please let us know.
What is it? The Alliance for Safety and Justice is a new national organization that aims to reduce incarceration and racial disparities in incarceration in states across the country, and replace mass incarceration with new safety priorities that prioritize prevention and protect low-income communities of color. ASJ aims to build on the successful strategies of Californians for Safety and Justice and its sister organization, Vote Safe, the 501c4 that launched and ran the successful Proposition 47 campaign in 2014. Californians for Safety and Justice’s leadership, Ms. Lenore Anderson and Mr. Robert Rooks, are launching Alliance for Safety and Justice, to take the best of what they’ve achieved in California and support other state advocates in winning substantial reductions in state incarceration. Alliance for Safety and Justice will aim to build durable capacity in partner states for sentencing reform; develop a national networking center of gravity to strengthen reform efforts in as many states as possible across the country; and popularize new safety priorities through crime survivor organizing and strategic communications. Note that ASJ does not yet have a public website.
Why I recommend it: We have new and unprecedented national attention to justice reform, yet we have seen only slight decreases in incarceration in the states (CA and NY aside, and racial disparities and spending are still extreme). The failure to convert attention to wins is due in part to the very limited capacity at the state level to get durable wins – most states don’t have an organization on the ground focused on reducing incarceration at all, let alone one with the capacity to successfully win and sustain reforms. There is almost no civic engagement capacity built on this issue, there are limited mainstream partnerships, and limited political influence (no organized candidate and campaign influencers). ASJ is an ambitious, large-scale effort to address exactly these problems, with the best possible leadership for the job. Lenore’s and Robert’s work on the successful California Proposition 47 campaign was impressive.
Why we haven’t fully funded it: ASJ is seeking to raise upwards of $10 million in the coming year, and the Open Philanthropy Project is limiting the amount we grant on criminal justice reform for the time being as we get to know the space better. I have recommended a grant of $1.75 million from Open Philanthropy along with a $250,000 individual gift from Cari Tuna. If it weren’t for limits to our grantmaking on criminal justice reform, I would have recommended $5 million, and even then I’d want to leave room for other donors. In addition, I think having a diversified donor base would be good for ASJ, so at this point $X from an individual probably helps them more than an additional $X from us.
Writeup forthcoming? Yes
How to donate: Click here, choose “Californians for Safety and Justice” from the drop-down, and put “Alliance for Safety and Justice” in the field following “I want my donation to be dedicated:”
What is it? The Bronx Freedom Fund posts bail for people charged with low-level offenses in the Bronx who can’t afford to pay and who would otherwise be forced to await trial in jail. Bronx defendants who qualify for the Fund can have their bail posted with no contribution from them and spend that time before trial home with their families. Defendants released pretrial are far more likely to have positive resolutions to their cases (those who can’t post bond often end up pleading guilty just to get out of jail), so the benefits include not only less incarceration, but also fewer convictions. The Bronx Freedom Fund discusses the impact of its work here.
Why I recommend it: This is an excellent option for individuals looking to immediately impact incarceration in a relatively concrete and linear way. The Bronx Freedom Fund keeps approximately 150 people out of jail per year with about $90,000 out at a time in bails posted. They could do more with more, including expanding their assistance to other boroughs. The Fund provides an unusually cost-effective model: when defendants make all of their court appearances, bail is returned which means the vast majority (the Fund has a 97% appearance rate) of dollars donated revolves to help multiple cases and lives. The Bronx Freedom Fund also provides assistance to other cities working to start up bail funds. Finally, the benefits aren’t just immediate – the Bronx Freedom Fund has helped lay the groundwork for systemic bail reform, since the high reappearance rates for people released through the Fund demonstrate that money bail, which provides freedom only to those who can afford it, is not necessary to ensure court appearance.
Why we haven’t fully funded it: So far I have prioritized other grants, which I think are a more pressing use of our funds and less of a fit for other donors. I think the Bronx Freedom Fund is an excellent choice, though if I had to choose between it and ASJ, I’d choose ASJ.
Writeup forthcoming? No
How to donate: donate here.
What is it? The Humane League seeks to reduce the suffering of the billions of farm animals confined, mutilated, and inhumanely slaughtered around the world. It has three main programs: institutional cage-free and meat reduction campaigns, online ads to raise awareness of farm animal suffering, and grassroots organizing to build a national movement.
Why I recommend it: As a lean organization that achieves a large amount on a small budget, The Humane League is a good bet for a small donor. I’m impressed by its pragmatic approach: it seems genuinely interested in sparing the most animals from the most suffering per dollar spent. Its corporate cage-free campaigns seem to be particularly cost-effective — generating pledges that will spare millions of hens from extreme confinement for small sums spent — and it’s our priority to support these, though I think the other activities are valuable as well. I believe The Humane League has played an important role in the successful campaigns to date and is positioned to play a major role in more going forward, and can use additional funding productively.
Why we haven’t fully funded it: We’re currently working toward a decision on a grant, but the decision hasn’t been made yet. If we did recommend a grant, it would be to meet THL’s needs for corporate campaigns (what we consider its most effective activities), not its full organization-wide funding gap.
Writeup forthcoming? Yes
How to donate: via Network for Good
What is it? The Farm Animal Protection campaign of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) drives corporate farm animal welfare reforms, institutional meat reduction pledges, and increased public attention to farm animal suffering. It also conducts undercover investigations, lobbies for state laws and federal regulations to protect farm animals, and campaigns for ballot measures to outlaw the cruelest confinement systems in factory farming. (Disclosure: I previously worked at HSUS, and am friends with the leaders of the Farm Animal Protection campaign.)
Why I recommend it: The HSUS Farm Animal Protection campaign has been the key player in driving major animal welfare pledges from U.S. corporate giants. In particular, it has helped secure pledges from over 100 corporations — from Aramark to Dunkin’ Donuts — to ditch gestation crates, battery cages for hens, or both. These reforms have already reduced the suffering of millions of animals, and are on track to reduce the suffering of millions more. Its Meatless Monday campaigns and undercover investigations are raising awareness of factory farming and reducing the number of animals forced to endure it.
Why we haven’t fully funded it: We’re currently working toward a decision on a grant, but the decision hasn’t been made yet. If we did recommend a grant, it would be to meet HSUS’s needs for corporate campaigns (what we consider its most effective activities), not its full funding gap
Writeup forthcoming? Yes
How to donate: you can donate online here.
What is it? The Center for Global Development (CGD) is a think tank based in Washington, D.C. that conducts research on and promotes improvements to rich-world policies that affect the global poor.
Why I recommend it: I see CGD as the leading US think tank focused on global development and as being unusually well-aligned with GiveWell’s values around the importance of evidence-based policy and cost-effectiveness (as well as the obvious overlap in being concerned about how actions of the global rich can be better channeled to improve the lot of the global poor). Several times during its 15-year history, CGD seems to have a played a causal role in decisions affecting billions of dollars directed towards the global poor, though it is of course very difficult to trace the impact of those decisions through to improved humanitarian outcomes. Despite its apparently strong track record, CGD has less unrestricted support than it would like (<25% currently vs ~1/3 ideally), and its communications and (especially) policy teams seem very small relative to other think tanks.
Why we haven’t fully funded it: We’re planning to recommend a 3-year grant of $1M/year, which would close much but not all of the gap between CGD’s current level of unrestricted funding and where they would like to be. This amount is a bit arbitrary: CGD told us that the most unrestricted funding that it would ideally like to receive from a single source is $2M/year, its current largest unrestricted funder is the Hewlett Foundation, at $1.2M/year, and we asked for projections about how they would spend $200K, $500K, or $1M more per year. With general operating support for a mature institution like CGD, we don’t see a particularly obvious point of declining returns, though it is likely that at some point it would begin to save resources for the indefinite future rather than spending more reasonably soon. However, in the long run, we would guess that CGD benefits from having a diverse base of donors, and we would prefer not to provide so much support that CGD might become reliant on us.
Writeup forthcoming? Yes, hopefully within a few weeks. We’ve also made a previous unrestricted grant to CGD and a grant to support CGD’s migration work.
How to donate: Donate here.
What is it? The Center for Popular Democracy, a progressive national advocacy group that works with community groups across the country, is running a campaign (“Fed Up”) that aims to encourage more expansionary monetary policy and greater transparency and public engagement in the governance of the Federal Reserve (“the Fed”).
Why I recommend it: I see three basic reasons to support the campaign’s goals:
And while the Federal Reserve is, appropriately, fairly insulated from outside pressure, the campaign has had surprising success during its first ~18 months in drawing press attention and access to policymakers. Overall, I see this as a substantially more complicated and risky case than the vast majority of grants we make, and I readily recognize that I could be mistaken.
Why we haven’t fully funded it: We think the humanitarian stakes of monetary policy decisions are very high, and that many more funders would be engaged if the stakes were more widely understood, so part of our goal is to create a field of actors in this area that other funders could eventually support. To increase the incentives for other funders to engage, we’re planning to match contributions to the campaign during the next year, up to $1M.
Writeup: A February 2015 grant writeup is here; we’re planning another writeup in the next couple months.
How to donate: Donate here.
What is it? Ploughshares Fund is a public operating foundation that “seeks to reduce and eventually eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons.” Since the U.S. and Russia possess 95% of the world’s nuclear arsenal, Ploughshares Fund has a Washington policy focus. Its annual budget is around $8 million; about $5.5 million is spent on grants, with over $1 million for its own programmatic activity. The organization’s advocacy focuses on global nuclear arms control treaties (including defending existing ones), influencing U.S. nuclear posture, limiting expenditures on nuclear weapons systems, and promoting nuclear arms control champions in the U.S. House and Senate. Ploughshares Fund provides grants for groups and individuals to produce expert reports, articles, op-eds, town hall meetings, briefings for Congress and other advocacy tools.
In addition to ongoing efforts to stop a new nuclear arms race, Ploughshares Fund most recently received attention for its advocacy work on the Iran nuclear deal. It believes its “Iran Campaign” helped create the “political space” required to resolve the nuclear impasse with Iran by convening and funding a network of 85 organizations and 200 experts and advocates. Ploughshares stated to us that this network furnished government officials with expert analysis, produced first-hand reporting on the status of negotiations, provided rapid response fact checks, and mobilized U.S. public support for the final nuclear agreement. For more, see recent articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
Currently, Ploughshares Fund is focused on U.S. policy toward Iran and limiting additional expenditures on the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.
Why I recommend it: Advocacy work – in contrast with policy analysis or demonstration projects – appears relatively neglected in the nuclear weapons policy world. I have a limited understanding of the organizations that work on nuclear weapons policy advocacy issues, but Ploughshares Fund seems like a good bet in that area because:
Nuclear weapons policy work abroad is arguably more neglected than such work in the U.S., but I have too limited understanding of work going on outside of the U.S. to recommend any individual organization.
Why we haven’t fully funded it: We haven’t taken the time to investigate how Ploughshares Fund would use additional funding, and nuclear arms risk isn’t a focus of ours for the time being: we have prioritized biosecurity and pandemic preparedness and potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence more highly.
Writeup forthcoming? No
How to donate: Donate here.
What is it? The UPMC Center for Health Security is a think tank that works to protect people’s health from epidemics (caused by natural pathogens or by accidents or deliberate misuse of biotechnology) and other disasters. Their work includes researching these threats and designing policy to address them, informing decisionmakers, and developing the biosecurity community by connecting experts in science, medicine, public health, law, social science, national security, and other fields. Much of this work is targeted toward mitigating potential global catastrophic risks although a substantial portion of it is also targeted toward smaller threats. A few examples of recent work by UPMC scholars that I am aware of are:
Why I recommend it:
We have identified biosecurity and pandemic preparedness as an area receiving relatively significant attention from the public sector but fairly little philanthropic funding. In this situation we believe that think tanks and advocacy groups may have particularly high impact by influencing and improving the use of government funds through policy research and development, acting as an independent source of accountability, and having the flexibility to work on long-run and/or politically controversial issues.
I do not know every organization working in the field but I perceive the UPMC Center for Health Security to be the most influential think tank working on health security issues and to be generally well-respected in the field. They seem to be the go-to source of expertise for many health security issues and are one of a small handful of organizations that combine expertise in science, medicine, public health, and security. I have heard particularly positive reviews of their Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Initiative, which is one of the only institutions I’m aware of that provides multidisciplinary networking and development opportunities for the biosecurity field.
Why we haven’t fully funded it: We haven’t taken the time to investigate the UPMC Center for Health Security’s track record in detail or how the organization would use additional funding. We’re currently prioritizing hiring over grantmaking when it comes to biosecurity.
Writeup forthcoming? No
How to donate:Write a check to UPMC Center for Health Security and send it to their address at: UPMC Center for Health Security, 621 East Pratt Street, Suite 210, Baltimore, Maryland 21202. The Center also requests that you include a simple explanation of why you decided to contribute.
If you’re currently trying to figure out where you’ll give this year and think it might be helpful to talk to us about your decision, please feel free to contact us at info@givewell.org. We’d be happy to set up a phone call or answer questions over email.
We work hard to put all the relevant information about our recommendations on our website, but we know it can sometimes be hard to fully digest. Talking to donors about their plans for allocating their giving is something we do regularly and we’d be happy to do more of it.
Due to limited staff capacity, it’s possible we won’t be able to speak with everyone who requests a call, although based on past experience we hope to be able to connect with anyone who gets in touch.
We look forward to hearing from you!
