Leadership 2017 Holiday Giving Plans

The winter holiday season is a time for reflection, resolution, family, and, for many in the effective altruism movement, charitable giving. Staff of the organizations we respect—including GiveWell, Animal Charity Evaluators, the Centre for Effective Altruism, and the Open Philanthropy Projection, for example—publicize their end-of-the-year giving plans around this time, so we do the same here.

Cullen O’Keefe, President

As part of my commitment as a student–member of Giving What We Can, I have pledged to donate at least 1% of my spending money for this year. I have already surpassed this for 2017, and plan to give around 50% of the additional cash inflow or surplus that I have for this year from various sources, while saving the rest for career investment and personal financial security.

I plan to split my donations roughly evenly across the following four categories: global poverty, farmed animal welfare, long-term human flourishing, and effective altruism promotion.

Global Poverty

I plan to give to two global poverty charities during the rest of this year: the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) and Charity Science Health (CSH).

AMF distributes long-lasting insecticide-treated nets to malarial regions in the Global South. They are consistently a top GiveWell charity for cost-effectiveness, transparency, and evidentiary basis. GiveWell, in whom I put a lot of trust, recommends that donors give 100% of their donations to AMF, so I plan on largely following that, at least insofar as I give to global poverty charities.

The exception is CSH. CSH implements a GiveWell priority program: text message reminders for vaccination. They are an EA-aligned charity with the explicit goal of becoming a GiveWell top charity in the next few years. They are also pre-committed to ceasing operations if they fail to hit cost-effectiveness targets, which I think shows admirable altruism. CSH received GiveWell incubation grants in 2016 and 2017, and is likely to receive another in 2018. However, they are currently funding-constrained due to the fact that they are implementing a randomized controlled trial, which is expensive. Thus, they need additional donor dollars: dollars that could reasonably likely yield a new GiveWell top charity. This “incubation” approach to giving can be very high-impact.

Farmed Animal Welfare

Improving the welfare of the 50 billion animals raised and slaughtered in factory farm conditions is a major moral issue. I plan to give my animal welfare donations to The Humane League, an Animal Charity Evaluators top charity.

Future of Humanity

I think that shaping the future of humanity for the better is overwhelmingly morally important. I plan to dedicate my career to it. However, right now there seems to be a consensus that many major organizations of this type are talent- rather than funding-constrained. So, in this field I am going to punt to the Centre for Effective Altruism’s Long-Term Future fund, whom I trust to figure out where in this field donor dollars are needed.

Effective Altruism Promotion

I also plan to give to organizations that promote effective altruism, because this likely has huge potential multiplier effects. So, I again plan to donate through an EA fund: this time, splitting my donations 2:1 between the Centre for Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours.

Carolyn Killea, Vice President

I gave 10% of my summer associate income through the pledge already, so I don’t have plans to give much more (probably $20 here and there to effective charities that speak to some of my friends as gifts to them (Tostan, Fistula Foundation, and Brooklyn Bail Fund are all likely)).

I also have a pint of blood and two more units of platelets left in me for the year but I’m not sure that counts as effectiveness or holiday-related, it’s just a thing I do with my friends.

Vivian Dong, Programming Director

Earlier this year, I fulfilled my HLS EA summer pledge by giving to the Against Malaria Foundation. I have not yet finalized where I’ll be making my holiday donations, but I anticipate that I will give 5% to The Humane League, 10% to GiveDirectly, and the remainder to AMF.

Given that the impact of my donation will be small as I am donating a small amount, I have not spent and do not plan to spend significant time looking through data to determine where I ought to donate. Instead, I have relied upon the judgment of Givewell, which is recommending this year that 100% of marginal donation dollars be spent towards AMF. I am comfortable with relying upon Givewell’s judgment because t he research continues to support the efficacy of malarial nets. I am concerned by reports of emerging insecticide resistance, which AMF plans to study through its distribution of a new type of net treated with a different type of insecticide.

I plan to give 10% of my donation to GiveDirectly because I continue to believe that giving poor people money is, probably, the best way to make them less poor. I’m not sure this approach is scalable, but this uncertainty also counsels in favor of donating to GiveDirectly (they’ve trapped me!), since they are using some funds to run a major randomized controlled trial studying the effects of basic income. Further, the effects of GiveDirectly and AMF are incommensurable. I would like to continue to support both charities whose main effect is to avert death and charities whose main effect is to improve quality of life given the absence of a principled trade-off ratio between the two.

I also plan to donate to an animal welfare organization this year, for the first time in my life. I am not a good ally to animals. I know that factory farming is horrific, but it doesn’t compel me emotionally. I hope that learning more about animal advocacy efforts via committing to donate to the cause each year will make becoming consistently vegetarian, and eventually becoming vegan, easier for me.

I have never made a discretionary donation to a political organization. This year, I considered doing so, and apparently many GiveWell staffers actually did so. I ultimately decided against it because I don’t think my money would have made any difference comparable to that from giving to a EA charity. I think civic virtue is an individual obligation, however, and have made more of an effort this year to volunteer my time for political causes. I hope to do more than just get-out-the-vote stuff next year.

Adam Savitt, Treasurer

For my year end donation, I am donating the same amount of money that I spent on recreational books on Amazon over the past year. I’m splitting my giving amongst the following charities, and hoping that this will also have the side effect of curbing what can only be described as a pathological spending habit:

1. Against Malaria Foundation (a top charity on GiveWell)
2. The Good Food Institute (a top charity on Animal Charity Evaluators)
3. Alliance for Safety and Justice (recipient of an Open Philanthropy Project grant in the Criminal Justice Reform category)
4. Machine Intelligence Research Institute (recipient of an Open Philanthropy Project grant in the Potential Risks from Artificial Intelligence category)

Eric Martínez, Development Director

This year I have decided to split my donations evenly among three highly effective charities, two of which promote the immediate and long-term alleviation of human suffering, and one of which dedicates itself to the advocacy of animal welfare. All three reflect EA’s mission to maximize our positive impact on the world, as well as of course my own conception of what that means and how to achieve it. Here is a little more about my rationale behind donating to each charity:

Against Malaria Foundation: In terms of providing an immediate and positive impact on human welfare, it is difficult to find a single charity that can match the efficacy of AMF, as randomized controlled trials have demonstrated their capacity to save a human life with as little as $3,500, 1/2000^th the cost that US government agencies such as the EPA and FDA are willing to spend on analogous life-saving infrastructure for American citizens.
Oxfam International: As Brad Hurley wrote in “Why I Still Give to Oxfam,” just as important as saving human lives is improving the conditions in which those lives are lived. As a top charity by evaluators such as One for the World, Oxfam effectively serves that end.
Mercy for Animals: Suffering is suffering, regardless of the creature enduring it, and as a top charity by ACE (Animal Charity Evaluators), Mercy for Animals engages in a variety of effective measures to reduce the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest number of animals.

Grace Zhu, Employer Relations Director

This Thanksgiving I donated to the American Cancer Society. Despite its domestic focus, American Cancer Society funds and conducts research that will likely benefit cancer patients across the globe. Moreover, it shares expert information and knowledge about prevention, which is important for people who have been personally impacted by cancer. I also recommend Against Malaria Foundation, which is highly cost-effective and sadly underfunded.

Matt Reardon, President Emeritus

Every holiday season I struggle to bring out the budding philanthropist I know lies just beneath the surface of my outwardly apathetic 30-something siblings and 70-something father (now featuring 70-something girlfriend), so I make donations to highly effective charities in their names. Subtle appeals to religiosity (Mercy for Animals), New York Times readership (Himalayan Cataract Project), and unqualified effectiveness (Against Malaria) have all let me down in years past, so now it’s humor’s turn. We all have roughly encyclopedic knowledge of Seinfeld — except Emily, who I think had friends growing up or something — so I’m going with GiveDirectly. It’s money… for people.

To be clear, GiveDirectly is very real and in fact probably the best marketed of EA-recommended charities. I think it appeals to left-people’s sense of rich-people’s-money-belongs-to-everyone, but it also makes people living in pretty difficult circumstances very happy and gives them some practical basis for believing the future will be brighter and that humans really do care about one another in some fundamental, dare I say, unconditional sense.

They do unconditional cash transfers. They also pilot basic income experiments in Kenya, Uganda, and Texas for some reason. I wouldn’t click my links either. Seinfeld is a good show though. You should absolutely Hulu that.