Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund

The Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund recommends grants that aim to improve the work of projects that use the principles of effective altruism, by increasing their access to talent, capital, and knowledge. While the other three Funds support direct work on various causes, this Fund supports work that could multiply the impact of direct work, including projects that provide intellectual infrastructure for the effective altruism community, run events, disseminate information, or fundraise for effective charities. This will be achieved by supporting projects that:

• Directly increase the number of people who are exposed to principles of effective altruism, or develop, refine or present such principles
• Support the recruitment of talented people who can use their skills to make progress on important problems
• Aim to build a global community of people who use principles of effective altruism as a core part of their decision-making process when deciding how they can have a positive impact on the world
• Conduct research into prioritizing between or within different cause areas
• Raise funds or otherwise support other highly-effective projects
• Improve community health by promoting healthy norms for interaction and discourse, or assist in resolving grievances

This includes a broad range of projects in global wellbeing (including animal welfare), longtermism, as well as cause-general work.

The Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund (EA Infrastructure Fund) recommends grants that aim to improve the work of projects using principles of effective altruism, by increasing their access to talent, capital, and knowledge.

The EA Infrastructure Fund has historically attempted to make strategic grants to incubate and grow projects that attempt to use reason and evidence to do as much good as possible. These include meta-charities that fundraise for highly effective charities doing direct work on important problems, research organizations that improve our understanding of how to do good more effectively, and projects that promote principles of effective altruism in contexts like academia.

The EA Infrastructure Fund was formerly named the Effective Altruism Meta Fund.

The EA Infrastructure Fund has recommended several million dollars worth of grants, to a range of organizations, including:

80,000 Hours

80,000 Hours aims to solve the world’s most pressing problems by getting more talented people working on them. To do this, they carry out research into how talented individuals can maximize the impact of their careers, produce online advice, identify readers who might be able to enter priority areas, and provide these readers with free in-person advice and connections to mentors, job openings and funding. For a more in-depth look at their impact, check out the Open Philanthropy Project evaluation of 80,000 Hours.

Forethought Foundation

The Forethought Foundation works towards building an academic research field for global priorities in economics and philosophy. It aims to promote academic work that addresses the question of how to use our scarce resources to improve the world as much as possible, with a focus on long-termism — the idea that the primary determinant of the value of our actions today is their effects on the very long-run future. The Fund team believe that academia is an excellent means of distributing important and impactful reasoning from very far upstream

Founders Pledge

Founders Pledge encourages founders and investors to sign a legally binding pledge to donate a percentage of their personal exit proceeds to charity. Once the pledge is realized, Founders Pledge supports pledgers to decide where to give in order to have the most positive impact. Founders Pledge has raised over $1.9bn in pledges since 2013, and successfully moved nearly $2m to EA priority causes.

Support for grassroots effective altruism community projects

Building a community of people who make principles of effective altruism a core part of their lives means that more people will be applying their resources towards solving the world’s most pressing problems. The Fund has supported a range of grassroots organizations, both directly (e.g. EA Sweden, EA Norway), and through programs like CEA’s Community Building Grants programs, which provides support for local effective altruism groups.

Choosing to give to highly effective charities can greatly increase the positive impact of your donations. ‘Infrastructure’ refers to the idea that creating additional resources and support to projects aiming to improve the world can multiply this impact.

Donating to improve the infrastructure available to effective projects (instead of to the projects carrying out this work directly) is sometimes called 'meta charity'.

Three of the best opportunities to multiply impact (of which we are currently aware) are through improving the quality and quantity of talent, information and capital available to solve the world’s biggest problems.

Improving talent

One of the most important factors in making progress towards solving the highest priority issues is the talent working on those issues. Some highly effective organizations are more talent-constrained than they are capital-constrained. In such cases, hiring the right talent is even more important than raising additional capital. Because of this, funding organizations that support and encourage talented people to work on high priority issues can significantly multiply the impact of your donation.

Improving information

Choosing a high-impact cause area is often the most important driver of impact. Prioritization research could change our perception of a cause area or reveal promising new funding opportunities. As a result of research findings, many more donations may be directed to high-impact funding opportunities, meaning that the impact of a donation to fund the research itself would be multiplied.

Improving capital

Say that a $100,000 donation to a highly effective direct intervention can be used to save the lives of 15 people. Then imagine that a $100,000 donation to a meta charity that drives capital to that highly effective direct intervention is used to raise $1,000,000 more in donations. Assuming no diminishing returns, these donations can be used to save the lives of 150 people. In this example, exactly the same donation would be 10 times more effective when donated to the meta organization. (Note that this is a hypothetical to illustrate the concept, and that, in practice, estimates of these multipliers will be subject to substantial margins of error.)

Past meta initiatives have achieved sizable success, such as 80,000 Hours, GiveWell or Founders Pledge. With reasonably high confidence, we can say that donations to these organizations have caused significantly more resources to be invested in the highest priority areas than would have occurred through direct donations.

This said, finding and vetting meta opportunities can be both challenging and time-consuming.

• The most intuitive meta donation options (that require the least vetting by potential donors), such as funding GiveWell’s operations, are often fully funded. Funding opportunities for these groups often appear only briefly and for specific projects.
• Although there are a large number of early-stage opportunities, careful evaluation is required to identify the most credible and high-quality projects that demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of effectiveness principles.
• Meta initiatives can be particularly challenging to evaluate and their stated metrics can require significant interpretation. Taking into account attribution, probability and discounting is important both quantitatively, when data is available, and qualitatively, when it is not.
• Evaluating the team and leadership of a meta project requires context, experience and often a significant time commitment.

You don’t agree with the rationale for the Fund, or the views of the Fund management team

The main reason you might choose not to donate to this fund is if you do not agree with the views of the fund management team. For example, you may not be convinced of the arguments in favour of supporting meta charities, or you may want to donate only to a select subset of meta charities. In particular, you may prefer that your money go directly toward helping others, with as little ambiguity as possible.

You have concerns about conflicts of interest or grantmaker independence

All members of the fund management team are actively involved in the effective altruism community and have both professional and personal relationships with many of those working at meta organizations that may receive grants from this fund. Nick Beckstead (an advisor to the Fund) is a member of the Centre for Effective Altruism's board.

The Centre for Effective Altruism, which manages EA Funds (including product, website and financial infrastructure), works to build the effective altruism community and has received grants from this fund.