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Effective Altruism Foundation — Research and Operations

The Effective Altruism Foundation team at a town hall meeting. (Photo courtesy of EAF.)
Organization Name 
Award Date 
7/2019
Grant Amount 
$1,000,000
Purpose 
To support research and operations.
Topic (focus area) 

Grant investigators: Nick Beckstead and Claire Zabel

This page was reviewed but not written by the grant investigator. EAF staff also reviewed this page prior to publication.

The Open Philanthropy Project recommended a grant of $1,000,000 over two years to the Effective Altruism Foundation (EAF) to support some aspects of its research and general operations. EAF is an organization whose values put a particular emphasis on trying to reduce the risks of future suffering. While preventing suffering is a value we share, we also believe that the speculative and suffering-focused nature of this work means that it needs to be communicated about carefully, and could be counterproductive otherwise. As a result, we have felt ambivalent about EAF’s work to date (despite feeling unambiguously positively about some of their projects).

A major purpose of this grant is to encourage and support EAF and our other grantees in the space in taking approaches to longtermism with greater emphasis on shared objectives between different value systems. We conceive of this grant as falling under our work aimed at growing and supporting the EA community.