About this page
GiveWell aims to find the best giving opportunities we can and recommend them to donors. We tend to put a lot of investigation into the organizations we find most promising, and de-prioritize others based on limited information. When we decide not to prioritize an organization, we try to create a brief writeup of our thoughts on that charity because we want to be as transparent as possible about our reasoning. The following write-up should be viewed in this context: it explains why we determined that (for the time being), we won't be prioritizing the organization in question as potential top charity. This write-up should not be taken as a "negative rating" of the charities. Rather, it is our attempt to be as clear as possible about the process by which we came to our top recommendations.A note on this page's publication date
The last time we examined the charities working primarily in the U.S. was in 2010. As of 2011, we have de-prioritized further work on this cause. The content we created in 2010 appears below. This content is likely to be no longer fully accurate, both with respect to what it says about the organization and with respect to what it implies about our own views and positions.Published: 2010; Updated: 2011
We credit Harlem Children's Zone with rigorously evaluaing one of its charter schools.1 For more on this evaluation, see our blog posts on the Harlem Children's Zone:- Fryer and Dobbie on Harlem Children's Zone: what they found.
- Fryer and Dobbie on the Harlem Children's Zone: significance.
- Followup on Fryer/Dobbie study of "Harlem miracle."
Sources
- Dobbie, Will, and Roland G. Fryer, Jr. 2009. Are high-quality schools enough to close the achievement gap? Evidence from a bold social experiment in Harlem (PDF).
- Harlem Children's Zone representatives. Phone call with GiveWell, January 18, 2011.