Animal Welfare Fund

The Fund focuses on projects that primarily address farmed animals, as well as projects that could affect other large populations of nonhuman animals. Some examples of projects that the Fund could support:

• Supporting farmed animal advocacy in Asia
• Researching ways to improve the welfare of farmed fish
• Promoting alternative proteins in order to reduce demand for animal products
• Advocating against the use of some cruel practice within the industrial agriculture system
• Growing the field of welfare biology in order to improve our understanding of different ways to address wild animal suffering

The Animal Welfare Fund has historically supported many different interventions, including advocacy in neglected countries, research that improves our understanding of relevant issues, and campaigns that push large corporations to improve their farm animal welfare policies. In recent payouts, the Fund has made a number of small startup grants to emerging organizations, as well as grants to more established players in the space.

The Animal Welfare Fund has recommended several million dollars' worth of grants to a range of organizations, including:

Supporting emerging animal welfare groups in a range of countries

The Fund has supported corporate and policy campaigns and movement building for farm animal welfare issues around the world, with grants to advocacy organizations working in 26 countries, including Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Czechia, Greece, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, Ukraine, and the United States.

Supporting research to improve the focus and efficacy of animal advocacy

In addition to funding direct work on animal welfare, the Fund also supports research that improves our understanding of how to most effectively help animals. This research has focused on better understanding the well-being of wild animals, which species are most promising to focus on, and  which interventions are the most effective at reducing animal suffering.

Supporting campaigns to reform corporate policies

Tens of billions of animals suffer as a result of their use in food production. By tackling this issue at the level of commercial supply chains, corporate campaigns can be high-leverage opportunities to improve the lives of tens of billions of animals. The Fund has granted to a range of organizations with relatively strong track records of securing commitments from large food companies; these organizations include Compassion in World Farming USA and Sinergia Animal.

Supporting research on and advocacy for alternative proteins

Finding culinary alternatives to meat is an important step toward reducing the suffering of animals raised for food. While commercial alternative protein companies are generally able to raise private funding, other organizations that build support for alternative proteins (like academic groups and grassroots organizations) are relatively underfunded. The Fund has granted to organizations around the world, including in the UK (CellAG), Israel (The Modern Agriculture Foundation), and globally (Cellular Agriculture Society).

Animal welfare is a hugely important area due to its scale and neglectedness.

Annually, hundreds of billions of vertebrate animals are subject to factory farming. Roughly 75 billion terrestrial farmed animals are raised and slaughtered each year, as well as tens of billions of farmed fish. Farmed invertebrate animals (for example, shrimp and lobsters) may number in the trillions.

Many experts now agree that numerous species of animals are very likely conscious and capable of feeling pain. Current practices within animal agriculture are likely to cause extreme suffering over the course of animals’ lives. Moreover, there exist hundreds of trillions of wild animals, many of which likely experience significant suffering that could be reduced through human intervention.

The field of animal advocacy receives only a few percent of total charitable donations, with most of that money going to the comparatively few companion animals in shelters. This leads to some groups of animals being highly neglected in relation to their numbers and likely capacity for suffering.

You don’t support working on farmed animal suffering and/or corporate reforms, or you wish to support only a particular type of work

Thus far, much of the Fund’s grant money has gone toward work on reducing farmed animal suffering through positive yet incremental changes to this cruel system. You might believe that it is wrong to support such changes (rather than working to directly eliminate the system). In that case, some of the Fund’s grants may not be a good match for your worldview.

The Fund also supports many different types of work (from research to advocacy); if you think one type of work is more promising than others, you may prefer to give directly to organizations which focus on that work.

The Fund has made a range of grants. Some were aimed at improving farm animal welfare, while others were not (e.g. the March 2019 grant to Wild Animal Initiative for research on interventions to improve the welfare of wild animals). If you would prefer to focus only on animals in a particular context (e.g. only farmed animals, or only wild animals), you may prefer to give directly to organizations which focus on that context.