About Effective Altruism Funds

Effective Altruism Funds (EA Funds) is a platform for moving money to particularly cost-effective and altruistically impactful projects. We make receiving funding for projects that will do a large amount of good in expectation as straightforward as possible and are open to funding a wide array of projects. Please see our public grants database for examples of projects we have decided to fund and our application form to apply for funding.

EA Funds focuses on areas where there is a large problem to solve, where we have a sense of how to make progress, and which are currently under-invested in.

The current funds focus on:

EA Funds aims to make grants that outperform traditional charitable offerings in expectation. This means that some grants will trade off a higher risk of failure for higher expected returns. Before donating through EA Funds, you should understand the risks involved. For more information, please read about how we think about risk.

EA Funds aims to identify and fund cost-effective projects using subject-matter experts, who look for the highest-impact opportunities to do good.

Our funds:

  • Have grantmaking experience in relevant fields. Grantmakers can make informed comparisons between grant opportunities and choose the ones they believe are the best.
  • Take counterfactual considerations, marginal impact, and room for more funding into account. With our grantmaking approach, Grantmakers don’t just grant to projects that seem good in the abstract. Instead, they try to take into account the actions of other funders, and the amount of additional money a project could use.
  • Are a single desk for emerging projects. By having a single place where many projects can apply, potential grant recipients only have to deal with a single point of contact, rather than fundraising from individual donors.
  • Enable lower fundraising overheads for charities. Charities can burn a lot of time fundraising. Instead of fundraising from many individual donors, charities can make a single application for funding.
  • Are connected to other grantmakers working on effective giving. By coordinating with other funders, our grantmakers can share knowledge, avoid duplication of effort, and ensure that funding gaps across our cause areas are filled appropriately.

Learning More

We are part of the wider effective altruism community, a community of people using reason and evidence to do the most good they can with their limited resources.