Focus Areas | Open Philanthropy
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Focus Areas
We believe it’s important for philanthropists to make deliberate, long-term commitments to causes (more). A “cause” is the field around a particular problem or opportunity — such as reforming the criminal justice system, preventing pandemics, or reducing the burden of Alzheimer’s disease — in which it’s necessary to develop expertise and networks to make good giving decisions. We refer to the causes we’re prioritizing most highly as focus areas. We’ve cast a wide net for potential focus areas, incorporating information on the history of philanthropy as well as what today’s foundations focus on. We’ve sought focus areas that are strong on some combination of the following criteria:
Importance: How many individuals does this issue affect, and how deeply?
Neglectedness: All else equal, we prefer causes that receive less attention from other actors, particularly other major philanthropists.
Tractability: We look for clear ways in which a funder could contribute to progress.
So far, we’ve concentrated on selecting focus areas in four broad categories: U.S. policy, global catastrophic risks, scientific research, and global health & development. There’s a strong conceptual case that philanthropy could go particularly far in each of these categories, and they include most of the causes we’ve found compelling. Read more about our process here.
Global Health & Development
We believe that every life has equal value—and that philanthropic dollars can go particularly far by helping those who are living in poverty by global standards.
Most of our giving in this category is to organizations recommended by GiveWell, with whom we have a close relationship. We are excited to support evidence-backed, cost-effective interventions to save and improve lives in the developing world. An additional subset of our giving supports scientific research we believe can help address diseases that disproportionately afflict the global poor.
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Thematic areas in Global Health & Development include:
GiveWell-Recommended Charities
Science for Global Health
Learning and Experimentation
Other Global Health and Development
U.S. Policy
Philanthropy can have an especially big impact by helping to improve policy.
Many compelling causes, such as Criminal Justice Reform and Immigration Policy, revolve around opportunities to improve government policy. Better policy could reduce both global and U.S. poverty, increase innovation, accelerate economic growth, and more. Our policy-oriented work focuses on the U.S. currently, for practical reasons.
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Current focus areas in U.S. Policy: