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Grace Adams

Hello and welcome to our May Newsletter!

This month we're experimenting with a video summary of our newsletter. Watch it and tell us whether you think we should continue with this format...

May 2022 Newsletter

This month we're experimenting with a video summary of our newsletter. Watch it and tell us whether you think we should continue with this format in the future via 

-Luke Freeman & the rest of the Giving What We Can team.

Hi and welcome to our May newsletter and updates!

This month we're trying out a new video and audio introduction to our newsletter, where we give you the highlights and most important news! You'll find links to everything we talk about below.
Let us know what you think - and whether we should continue this for the coming months.

At Giving What We Can we have some exciting news - we have formally taken over the EA funds donation platform while EA Funds will continue to do the grantmaking activities. So if you are looking to make donations to effective charities in the US, UK or Netherlands you can now visit 

We have just released a new YouTube video on Global Health and Development. We recommend you check it out if you're interested in this area and share it with your friends who might benefit from hearing about effective giving in global health and development.

The Giving What We Can staff will be joining our monthly meet ups this month and we'd love to say hi and get to know you if you're available!

 on why they didn't launch to support Ukrainians affected by the war. They saw the opportunity as impactful but ultimately didn't have the capacity to launch the program without deprioritising others. Instead, they chose to continue work on launching a program in Yemen, which the UN has called "the world's worst humanitarian crisis" and where over 22 million people need emergency aid.

Charity Entrepreneurship has launched career coaching for impact oriented entrepreneurs, so if you're interested in working in or starting an effective organisation, this could be a great opportunity for you!

A new article from Vox's Future Perfect column explains that a fridge in the US consumes more energy in a year than an individual in many countries in order to demonstrate global energy inequity.

And finally, Will MacAskill, co-founder of Giving What We Can was recently on the 80,000 Hours podcast where he discussed balancing frugality with ambition, whether you need longtermism, and mental health under pressure with host Rob Wiblin.

That's all for now - there are many more articles linked in the newsletter and don't forget to let us know what you think of this format!

Members Seren Kell, Rishub Jain and Arvind Raghavan were featured in this article from Positive News about effective giving and effective altruism!

Come meet the Giving What We Can staff as well as other community members in our meet up this month! This is a great opportunity to ask the staff to show you their pets, about working at Giving What We Can or anything else on your mind.

 (New York: Sat 6:00 pm, Sydney: Sun 8:00 am)

 (London: Sun 10:30 am, Mumbai: Sun 3:00 pm, Singapore: Sun 5:30 pm)

Our open forum is an event where you can come along with questions about effective giving or just come along to meet others interested in effective giving. Alternates between different timezones each month.

 (Sydney 9:00 am, New York 7:00 pm, San Francisco 4:00 pm)

Giving What We Can has formally taken over the EA Funds donation platform, so if you are looking to make donations to effective charities in the US, UK or Netherlands you can now visit 

We are currently seeking expressions of interest for a 

Will MacAskill on balancing frugality with ambition, whether you need longtermism, and mental health under pressure

 - Will MacAskill and Rob Wiblin, 80,000 Hours Podcast

Most students who would agree with EA ideas haven't heard of EA yet (results of a large-scale survey)

 - Lucius Caviola, Erin Morrissey, Joshua Lewis, EA Forum

Effective altruism and the current funding situation

Announcing: CE Career Coaching for Impact-focused Entrepreneurs

 - Karolina Sarek, Charity Entrepreneurship

GiveWell has published the following pages on grants it made or recommended:

 to Nutrition International to support vitamin A supplementation (VAS) campaigns in Chad.

Two grants to Against Malaria Foundation (AMF): 

 to support long-lasting insecticide-treated net (LLIN) distribution in three countries, and 

 for LLIN distribution in three Nigerian states primarily supported by President's Malaria Initiative (PMI) funding.

 to maintain or expand seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) programs in four countries, and 

 to implement SMC in Nampula province, Mozambique.

 to Fortify Health, which supplies mills in three Indian states with equipment and materials to fortify wheat flour with iron, folic acid, and vitamin B12.

GiveWell published short notes on why it decided to deprioritize 

unconditional cash transfers during pregnancy

corticosteroids to improve birth outcomes in at-risk pregnant women

targeted azithromycin distribution to children discharged from hospitals

GiveWell is also still looking for candidates for its open

From marshes to meat: Reflections from a career in conservation

Studies show that chickens are smarter than you think

New study on whether animal welfare reforms affect wider attitudes towards animals

The horrific bird flu that has wiped out 36 million chickens and turkeys, explained

The problem of global energy inequity, explained by American refrigerators

Have we been thinking about economic growth all wrong?

800,000th donation received, US$460,000,000 raised and 400 million people able to be protected - Thank you for your support!

James Tibenderana on the state of the art in malaria control and elimination

Laying foundations of good health in school classrooms across India

Many think climate change is the world's top problem because it threatens humanity's survival. Is this right?

My thoughts on nanotechnology strategy research as an EA cause area

Messy personal stuff that affected my cause prioritization (or: how I started to care about AI safety)

How to give future humans a voice in government

EU pioneers carbon removals certification: Key recommendations and principles

You can now support Giving What We Can's operations using our donation platform

This funding helps us to inspire donations to high impact charities

 with Giving What We Can and effective altruism.

Discuss effective giving and effective altruism on the 

Do you have questions about the pledge, Giving What We Can, or effective altruism in general? Check out our 

This month we're experimenting with a video summary of our newsletter. Watch it and tell us whether you think we should continue with this format...

Sonia Albrecht

Sonia shares why she started giving effectively and what she looks for when choosing a charity.

Member Profile: Sonia Albrecht

We recently spoke with Sonia Albrecht from Davis, California. She shared with us her effective giving story, including her journey to effective giving, what motivates her to give, her experience with a disability, and how she approaches effective giving as a Christian.

Due to a disability, I spent most of my adult life living below the American poverty line without much hope of getting out. Eventually, I recovered enough to go to college, and I now plan to use my career in computer hardware design to help people who cannot access the treatment that saved my life.

We have a perspective in much of the USA that the richest 1% of Americans should give a lot more to charity, but the richest 1% of humanity shouldn’t. Many people don’t realize that they are part of the richest 1% in the world, but 

, a single American with no children making $58,000 or more per year is.

As a student, I thought I wasn’t making enough to donate a lot more, but I discovered during the chaos of the 2020 presidential election that donating large amounts can be a far more rejuvenating use of money than anything else, even for Americans making much less than the richest 1% of humanity does. However, I later learned that the organizations I’d donated to weren’t particularly effective. I started googling charity effectiveness and stumbled upon the charity evaluator GiveWell and the wider effective giving community. It was so exciting to see such complicated problems addressed with so much scientific rigour, so I’ve been donating to GiveWell recommended charities ever since.

I’m teaching myself to live more frugally without compromising my productivity the way I did when I was poor, so that I can donate more. More importantly, I’m working harder at school so that I can maximize my future income. After graduation, this will enable me to donate most of my income to charity. I also hope to make a difference directly with my career by contributing technological solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. I’m living on less and working harder, but I feel like I’m living on more. My life is more full of meaning, and I am free from comparing my income primarily to other rich-world people.

For me as a Christian, effective giving is fundamentally about the call to see everyone as equal in the eyes of God. This means being one of the few rich-world people who donate to international charities. For example, 

only 6% of American donations went abroad in 2017

, which doesn’t treat everyone as equal in terms of resources per person. If you consider that many international charities do more than 

 than typical rich-world ones, the importance of treating every human being as equally valuable becomes even more clear.

I am tremendously grateful for the help I’ve received from comparatively ineffective charities such as American soup kitchens. However, my experience makes me empathize more, not less, with people who have none of these rich-world options. Even when I lived at half the American poverty line, 

. When rich world people shun international charities, we demand that people even poorer than I was shoulder the burden of providing these services to the poorest members of our human family instead. In a perfect world, all charities that do more good than harm would be funded more. However, I can make a far bigger difference by donating to charities where the funding crisis is most severe.

Unfortunately, we understand so little about faraway circumstances that international charities are susceptible to being ineffective. However, 

 have identified international charities that rise above this problem. After looking into these studies and seeing the dedication to constant open-minded self-improvement in the effective giving community, I came to have even more confidence in the international charities recommended by Giving What We Can than in local charities. Local charities are less likely to be underpinned by high-quality academic studies, and our personal experiences with the few people we know well are very limited compared to the thousands of experiences summarized in even one study.

Maybe my donations will enable enough children to fulfil their full potential, that if their children face a disability such as mine, their country will be able to provide them with the healthcare that mine has.

" series which profiles a selection of the Giving What We Can community. The Giving What We Can is a community of people from all walks of life, with different perspectives and motivations for giving – all united by their desire to make a significant commitment to use their income to effectively helping others. Read more 

 to help inspire others to give more, and more effectively.

For more information about Giving What We Can we recommend you check out our 

Luke Freeman

EA Funds donation platform is moving to Giving What We Can

Since late 2021 Effective Altruism Funds (EA Funds) and Giving What We Can (GWWC) have been going through a restructure. EA Funds has moved towards focussing primarily on grantmaking and GWWC has taken over the management of the donation platform.

. Over the coming months the donation specific functionality of funds.effectivealtruism.org will be retired and redirected to GWWC's version of the donation platform (the pages related to the four EA Funds and grantmaking will continue on funds.effectivealtruism.org and the homepage will become more grantee focused). A new GWWC website is currently under development which will include a fully integrated donation experience (as well as improving our pledge dashboard and signup process).

As well as the donation platform, GWWC will continue to support the donor lottery, EffectiveCrypto.org and any of the other formerly EA Funds activities relating to fundraising while maintaining our existing work promoting effective giving (e.g. pledge, community, guides, talks, marketing campaigns and research).

EA Funds will continue to manage the grantmaking activities of their four Funds and will at some point post an update about their plans moving forward and this includes some of the reasoning for this restructure decision. GWWC has also recently posted an 

 which is very relevant to this decision.

We will be consulting with donors, stakeholders and the broader community about the future of the donation platform and how we can best support effective giving within the community.

Please don't hesitate to get in touch with any feedback, suggestions, requests, or concerns.

We look forward to this next chapter and are excited to continue our mission to create a world where giving effectively and significantly is a cultural norm!

Alana Horowitz Friedman

Can one person really make a difference? If we combine our inherent desire to make a difference with the careful thinking needed to make it happen, it turns out there are easy, concrete steps we can take to positively impact many lives over the course of our lifetime.

Can one person really make a difference?

Did you grow up believing you could change the world? I did. Whether this was due to my parents’ particular brand of hippy idealism or simply a mark of my generation, I was sure one person could make a difference. I even chose a college based partly on their marketing slogan: “Think one person can change the world? So do we.”

But upon arriving at college, I quickly lost faith in that belief. The “make a difference” opportunities available to me were largely limited to “raising awareness” about various issues by sitting at a table in a public place and accosting passersby.

I think my story is fairly common. How many of us are raised with “youthful idealism” only to be rudely awakened to the “reality” that comes with growing up? At least that’s the story we are often told — that “making a difference” is just a naive pipe dream. But is it?

Of course, history shows us a handful of exceptions. Norman Borlaug, who pioneered high-yield and disease-resistant wheat, is credited with preventing mass famine, 

. Another, lesser-known example is Viktor Zhdanov, who proposed and successfully lobbied for a global campaign to eradicate smallpox, 

a disease that was then taking around 2 million lives per year

. Then there are high-profile pioneers like Martin Luther King Jr and Mohandas Gandhi, both of whom are very well-known for bringing about substantial — even revolutionary — societal change.

But these were exceptional individuals, of course. To truly make a difference, do we need to tackle the world’s biggest problems with the courage of Gandhi, the intelligence of Borlaug, the determination of Zhdanov, and the luck of being in the right place at the right time?

In other words, can ordinary people like you and me really have much of an impact?

It turns out we can. And it doesn’t have to involve risking our lives, overthrowing a political regime, or curing a deadly virus epidemic. All we need is the desire to make a difference and the foresight to think carefully about it.

If you are reading this, you probably know that you’d like to make a difference. But many of us are unaware of our extraordinary power to do so.

The philosopher Peter Singer’s now famous “drowning child” thought experiment gets at this disconnect between desire and action:

Imagine you are walking by a pond on your way to work or school, and you see a drowning child. You can jump in and rescue the child, but you would ruin your clothes in the process. Do you save the child?

The answer, for most of us, is a resounding yes! Of course we would rescue the child, even if we were wearing an expensive suit or designer shoes. And we would feel pretty great about it too. After all, saving a life is not a bad way to spend a morning.

Singer then points out that there are “drowning children” all over the world, and although we aren’t literally walking by them, we 

A staggering number of children die every day from causes like diarrhea and malaria

. Cheap and effective interventions exist to prevent these deaths, and we can help fund them.

In other words, we can be the difference between people receiving treatment or going unaided. And we can do so with sums that most would consider to be far less than the value of a human life.

At this point, you may be raising a series of practical objections: Can my actions be anything more than a drop in the bucket given the scale of the problem? Will my actions really matter if others do nothing?

This is all well and good for the ultra-wealthy. But I’m just an ordinary person earning a modest salary! How much difference could I really make?

Let’s address that last question first, because its answer explains what gives many of us such extraordinary power to help others.

If you’re like me, you likely don’t think of yourself as rich. But because of the vast differences between wealthy and lower-income countries, those of us earning a modest income in wealthy countries usually fall within the top 1.5% of income earners worldwide. You can see exactly how you stack up 

Blog

May 2022 Newsletter

Member Profile: Sonia Albrecht

EA Funds donation platform is moving to Giving What We Can

Can one person really make a difference?

April 2022 Newsletter

Is the world really getting worse?

Why philanthropy isn’t just for billionaires

Member Profile: Martin Skadal

March 2022 Newsletter

Announcing our 2022 strategy and how you can help (and we're hiring!)