How can we accomplish as much good as possible?
The Open Philanthropy Project’s mission is to give as effectively as we can and share our findings openly so that anyone can build on our work. Through research and grantmaking, we hope to learn how to make philanthropy go especially far in terms of improving lives. We’re passionate about maximizing the impact of our giving, and we’re excited to connect with other donors who share our passion.
Focus Areas
We believe it’s important to make long-term commitments to causes. We’ve cast a wide net for potential focus areas and chosen the most important, neglected, and tractable areas we could find.
Our Research
We share our findings openly so that anyone can build on our work. Read about the lessons we’ve learned, the causes we’ve investigated, the conversations we’ve had, and more.
Our Giving
Learn about our past grants and read about our current priorities across U.S. policy, global catastrophic risks, scientific research, and global health & development.
What open means to us
Open to many possibilities
The advice we heard most often when we started giving was “focus on something you’re passionate about.” In our case, we’re passionate about improving others’ lives as much as we can, and our level of excitement about an issue depends on how much good we believe we’ll accomplish by working on it.
So, instead of starting with a predefined set of focus areas, we’re considering a wide variety of causes where our philanthropy could help to improve others’ lives. We’re prioritizing based on three criteria: importance, neglectedness, and tractability.
Open about our work
We believe philanthropy could have a greater impact by becoming more transparent. Very often, key discussions and decisions happen behind closed doors, and it’s difficult for outsiders to learn from and critique philanthropists’ work. We envision a world in which philanthropists increasingly document and share their research, reasoning, results and mistakes to help each other learn more quickly and serve others more effectively.
We aim to make it easy for new philanthropists and outsiders to learn about our giving.
Who we are
The Open Philanthropy Project is a collaboration between Good Ventures and GiveWell in which we identify outstanding giving opportunities, make grants, follow the results, and publish our findings.
Good Ventures is a philanthropic foundation whose mission is to help humanity thrive. GiveWell is a nonprofit that finds outstanding giving opportunities and publishes the full details of its analysis to help donors decide where to give. In 2015, GiveWell tracked more than $110 million in donations to its “top charities” based on its research.
We also partner with other donors.
Our process
We’re dedicated to learning how to give as well as possible, and we’re still early in the process. Read about what we’ve done so far.
What’s new
Read about our latest research, grantmaking, and lessons learned on our blog.
