How can we accomplish as much good as possible?
Open Philanthropy’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 sharing more information. 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
Open Philanthropy identifies outstanding giving opportunities, makes grants, follows the results, and publishes our findings. Our main funders are Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook and Asana.
We also partner with other donors. We’re passionate about learning and maximizing our impact and excited to connect with others who share these passions.
Prior to becoming an independent organization in June 2017, Open Philanthropy was operated as a partnership between Cari and Dustin's foundation, Good Ventures, and GiveWell.
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.
