Time Sensitive Do Gooding Opportunities

Donation matching for effective animal charities + help starting local groups, especially at universities.

A lot of my interactions with prominent bloggers involve me appearing in their rooms ex nihilo at odd hours of the night and suggesting they write about something very impactful (e.g. why people should take the Giving What We Can pledge). Yet sometimes when I say this, they say to me, “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” So here I’m going to tell you about some high-impact opportunities: one to get support for running a local EA group and the other a donation-matching opportunity for effective animal donations. And act now, because offers end soon!

1 Donation matching

A funder is temporarily matching donations to Animal Charity Evaluators’ (ACE) movement grants program. For those unaware, ACE is basically the GiveWell of animal welfare. They do high-quality research to find the best charities in the animal sector. They publicize which charities are effective and give out grants to effective animal charities. You can see some of the grants they’ve awarded here—many go to incubate fledgling organizations with the potential to be very impactful. Their movement grants program has been endorsed by Giving What We Can.

The basic pitch for giving to the grant matching challenge is straightforward: animal welfare is a really big deal. By the billions, animals undergo hellish torture in factory farms—their bones are broken, they’re boiled alive, they’re selectively bred so they can barely move, they’re kept in crowded conditions where disease spreads rapidly, and so on. To within a rounding error, all the suffering currently in the world is experienced by animals.

Many organizations stop lots of animal suffering for little money, often sparing animals from multiple years in a cage per dollar. In light of this, it makes sense to fund effective animal charities. But you probably don’t have the time to comprehensively investigate which animal charities are the most effective. So it makes sense to give money to people who carefully research which organizations help animals most effectively and give out grants to those organizations.

The matching program is also conditional. A donor has agreed to match the first $300,000 in donations. In other words, this donor will give up to $300,000—matched with how much other people give. People have already given $260,000. The donation window runs through the 10th of this month. (Edit: an earlier version of this post said that they would only donate at all if the full $300,000 was raised. This was false, sorry! They’ll match however much was given).

In addition, a group called Mobius has agreed to match every new monthly recurring donation, up to $10,000. So if you set up a new monthly recurring donation, your gift will be matched twice!

I’ve chipped in $500. My best guess is that each dollar donated spares many animals from a lifetime of suffering. So please, if you can, donate.

2 Organizer support program

As is known, this blog is very hip and cool. A sizable chunk of its readers are in university; this is because my readers tend to be young, and smart (also, in general, very cool). Oh, and they also tend to be deeply moral. Thus, inquiring minds want to know: how can they make a big impact on the world while they’re still in university?

Here is one good answer to that age-old question, asked since the days of Gilgamesh: you can be an organizer for your university’s effective altruism group. Oftentimes EA events are organized by only a few dedicated people across an entire university, and it may be the case that your university has no existing EA group at all (SAD!). This could be the case even if there’s plenty of latent interest among the student body, just waiting to be tapped. If you get just a few more people involved in EA through your organizing, this will have enormous value. And if the people you get involved are as impactful as you, just one new recruit can double your lifetime impact.

Friend of the blog Noah Birnbaum—who, like most of my readers, is very smart and cool and young and handsome—has a piece on the EA Forum about why people should become university organizers. The whole thing is worth reading, but here’s a particularly important bit:

1. Scope – … a few counterfactual EAs potentially means millions of dollars going to either direct work or effective charities. Getting one more cracked EA involved can potentially double your impact!

   1. According to this post from 2021 by the Uni Groups Team: “Assuming a 20% discount rate, a 40 year career, and $2 million of additional value created per year per highly engaged Campus Centre alumnus, ten highly engaged Campus Centre alumni would produce around $80 million of net present value. The actual number is lower, because of counterfactuals.” It should be noted that campus centre alumni is referring to numbers estimated from these schools.

   2. They also included an anecdote of a potential near-best-case scenario that I think is worth paraphrasing: The 2015 Stanford EA group included: Redwood CEO Buck Shlegeris, OpenPhil Program Director Claire Zabel, Full-Time EA Journalist Kelsey Piper, and former CEO of Redwood and Constellation Nate Thomas. However, the Stanford group went dark in 2016 – for years, there was only one active member and few events were run. “As a result, we probably lost a few Bucks, Claires… Kelseys and Nates. That’s a lot of impact missing.”

And there are a bunch of other benefits. Organizing gives you valuable experience and looks good on your resume. You’re likely to meet incredibly cool people while doing it. The kinds of people who get involved in EA are disproportionately moral and smart; they make very good friends. These connections will also make it easier to remain an active EA by getting you more deeply embedded into the community. Some of my favorite people that I met at university were people I met through the EA club.

Running your university’s EA club, as I found out the hard way, is pretty difficult. I was very bad at it. When I was the president of the EA club at my university, it basically died. This was bad! Fortunately, the Centre for Effective Altruism has a program called the OSP, short for Organizer Support Program. It’s called that because it’s a program that supports organizers.

The program allows you to have meetings with mentors who advise you on how to run your local EA group. This is useful. The mentors have lots of experience with organizing, so they give useful advice. They also provide resources, like lists of readings for fellowships. To get their help, you have to apply. Applications close Sunday. So if you’re going to apply, you should do it soon, through this link.

If you’re not in university, you can still consider starting a local EA group, where you can still get assistance through OSP. There are people in every place that have the potential to become passionate EAs—but somebody has to take the first step in reaching out to them. That person very well could be you. Paraphrasing externality-illiterate tree gremlin The Lorax unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, the EA group at your university isn’t going to get better, it’s not.