Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum

Hide table of contents
by CE, Ula Zarosa, Judith Rensing
5 min read 1

96

Global health & developmentAmbitious ImpactCharity incubationOrganization updates
Frontpage

You can now apply to Charity Entrepreneurship’s 2024 Incubation Programs! 

This is the 5th year of running our Incubation Program. With 27 charities started, $2.47M in seed grants disbursed, and a number of our charities being recognized as potentially 20 to even 60 times more cost-effective than top GiveWell charities, we invite you to join our community of high-impact nonprofits by applying to our two upcoming programs: 

February-March 2024, with a focus on farmed animals and global health and development mass media interventions.

August-September 2024 with a focus on the top most cost-effective Sustainable Development Goals as well as organophosphate pesticides and other neurotoxicants . 

[APPLY NOW]

Please submit your applications by September 30, 2023!
Details about the program can be found on our website: https://www.charityentrepreneurship.com/incubation-program

We invite people from all backgrounds, ages, and nationalities to apply. We are not looking for any specific type of work experience or formal education; we’re looking for potential. What our incubatees have in common is…

  • A deep dedication to doing good
  • Ambition to make rapid progress and achieve results
  • The drive to always keep learning
  • The grit and creativity to keep going even in the face of difficulties
  • Diverse and complementary skill sets

We recommend that you watch our video with the participants of our February-March 2023 Incubation Program if you want to learn more about why past incubatees joined the program and what their experience was like.

Announcing our top intervention ideas in mass media

For our upcoming February-March 2024 Incubation Program, we looked into mass media interventions in the area of global health and development. Our research focused on social and behaviour change communication campaigns delivered through radio advertising, TV shows, text messages and similar with the goal of improving human well-being. After going through our iterative research process, we have found two highly promising intervention ideas for new charities to start: 

1. Childhood vaccination reminders 

A simple SMS or call reminder can be all a caregiver needs to attend a child’s vaccination appointment. CE-incubated Suvita is delivering this impactful service at scale in India, and a new non-profit organization will launch it in the next top-priority country. This org will likely coordinate closely with Suvita to expand to numerous priority countries in the future or could even operate under the same umbrella. 
 

2. Entertainment-led mass media to prevent violence against women

Intimate partner violence affects millions of women, with wide-ranging health and financial consequences. A new non-profit organization can prevent this violence from ever happening by changing behaviors through edutainment mass media content. 

During the program, we will supply 80+ hour research and implementation reports on all top ideas to help participants find the their best fit and make it easy for our graduates to hit the ground running.

We will announce our top intervention ideas in the space of preventive animal welfare in our next post and provide you with longer write-ups of the mass media interventions. Keep an eye out on the forum, or subscribe to our newsletter.

Should you apply?

We hope that nonprofit entrepreneurship is already on your radar as a potential career. It’s an unconventional career step, but we genuinely believe that for those for whom it is a good fit, starting a charity could be one of the most impactful, fulfilling paths they might ever take.

1) Do it for impact

Our internal calculations of the counterfactual impact of our charities suggest that pursuing a career in nonprofit entrepreneurship could have an impact equivalent to counterfactually donating $338,000-$414,000 USD annually to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF). 

Some caveats: It's important to note that this calculation represents our current best estimate, and while we are reasonably confident that it is in the correct range, the exact number relies on several highly uncertain inputs. These inputs include assessing the impact of 23 charities that we have assisted in launching until early 2023, as well as our estimates of the counterfactuals of co-founder time, that is, of how much impact they would probably have achieved if they had pursued a more conventional, impactful nonprofit job instead of starting a charity through our program. This estimate is based on our last assessment of charity progress from early 2023. Furthermore, the impact that our co-founders have had is heavy-tailed, meaning that some co-founders are having an impact in the range of equivalent to $1,000,000 USD in counterfactual donations to AMF while a bigger number of others have less than the $338,000-$414,000 average in counterfactual impact.


2) Do it for the skills

Pursuing this career path can have an immense counterfactual impact while also providing opportunities to learn and develop a diverse set of transferable skills. Here are some things that you will learn from our program alone: 

  • Evaluation Skills
    • Building a Theory of Change
    • Basics of Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E)
    • Cost-effectiveness analysis
    • Scientific evidence reviews
  • Leadership Skills
    • Strategic planning and prioritization
    • Task management and productivity
    • Pitching
    • Fundraising
  • Operations Skills
    • Basic operations management
    • Human Resources (HR)
    • Financial planning
    • Legal setup

And these are just a few examples. After the program, you will gain hands-on experience in running a nonprofit, collaborating with stakeholders, designing and implementing pilot programs, and learning from our network of 27 charities and other CE-adjacent projects. All this with ongoing support from the CE team and our community of over 100+ previous incubatees, researchers, and funders.

Plus, how cool does the title “Co-founder of a GiveWell-incubated charity” or “Co-founder of the world's first organization solely dedicated to shrimp welfare, potentially improving the lives of 2.5 billion individuals annually” sound? ;) 

Our application process as a career fit assessment

We value potential over experience. We encourage everyone to use our application process as an assessment of your fit for high-impact nonprofit entrepreneurship as a career step. Over the past five years, our application process has been improved and validated to be highly predictive of an individual's potential to successfully launch a high-impact charity. Completing the initial application form will only require approximately 30 minutes of your time.

Timeline:

  • Applications are open: July 10 - September 30, 2023
  • The application process will run: October 1 - November 30
  • Offer letters: by December 1st

Some more points

  • We will contact you about the outcome of your application regardless of whether you progressed to the second stage by October 31st.
  • To protect your valuable time, we will only invite you to the next stage if we think you have a good chance of success.
  • The entire application process will take no more than 10 hours of your time from start to finish.
  • We have designed the process to help you learn more about what is important for founding a high-impact charity and how to weigh it against other career options and pathways to impact.

Learn more: 

To learn more about the application process and access resources that will help you prepare, go to our new APPLY PAGE.

To learn more about what we provide in the two-month, cost-covered program, check our new HOW IT WORKS PAGE.

96

0
0

Reactions

0
0
Mentioned in

More posts like this

Comments1


Sorted by
New & upvoted
Click to highlight new comments since:
More from CE
30
How to Signal Competence in Your Early-Stage Career (CCW 2023)
CE
· · 4m read
2
2
70
Lead batteries, differential learning, and livelihoods - AIM's new recommended charity ideas
2 authors
· · 16m read
8
8
47
Announcing Applications for the AIM Research Program April 2025
4 authors
· · 2m read
6
6
View more
Curated and popular this week
Paul Present
 ·  · 28m read
 · 
Note: I am not a malaria expert. This is my best-faith attempt at answering a question that was bothering me, but this field is a large and complex field, and I’ve almost certainly misunderstood something somewhere along the way. Summary While the world made incredible progress in reducing malaria cases from 2000 to 2015, the past 10 years have seen malaria cases stop declining and start rising. I investigated potential reasons behind this increase through reading the existing literature and looking at publicly available data, and I identified three key factors explaining the rise: 1. Population Growth: Africa's population has increased by approximately 75% since 2000. This alone explains most of the increase in absolute case numbers, while cases per capita have remained relatively flat since 2015. 2. Stagnant Funding: After rapid growth starting in 2000, funding for malaria prevention plateaued around 2010. 3. Insecticide Resistance: Mosquitoes have become increasingly resistant to the insecticides used in bednets over the past 20 years. This has made older models of bednets less effective, although they still have some effect. Newer models of bednets developed in response to insecticide resistance are more effective but still not widely deployed.  I very crudely estimate that without any of these factors, there would be 55% fewer malaria cases in the world than what we see today. I think all three of these factors are roughly equally important in explaining the difference.  Alternative explanations like removal of PFAS, climate change, or invasive mosquito species don't appear to be major contributors.  Overall this investigation made me more convinced that bednets are an effective global health intervention.  Introduction In 2015, malaria rates were down, and EAs were celebrating. Giving What We Can posted this incredible gif showing the decrease in malaria cases across Africa since 2000: Giving What We Can said that > The reduction in malaria has be
LewisBollard
 ·  · 8m read
 · 
> How the dismal science can help us end the dismal treatment of farm animals By Martin Gould ---------------------------------------- Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. ---------------------------------------- This year we’ll be sharing a few notes from my colleagues on their areas of expertise. The first is from Martin. I’ll be back next month. - Lewis In 2024, Denmark announced plans to introduce the world’s first carbon tax on cow, sheep, and pig farming. Climate advocates celebrated, but animal advocates should be much more cautious. When Denmark’s Aarhus municipality tested a similar tax in 2022, beef purchases dropped by 40% while demand for chicken and pork increased. Beef is the most emissions-intensive meat, so carbon taxes hit it hardest — and Denmark’s policies don’t even cover chicken or fish. When the price of beef rises, consumers mostly shift to other meats like chicken. And replacing beef with chicken means more animals suffer in worse conditions — about 190 chickens are needed to match the meat from one cow, and chickens are raised in much worse conditions. It may be possible to design carbon taxes which avoid this outcome; a recent paper argues that a broad carbon tax would reduce all meat production (although it omits impacts on egg or dairy production). But with cows ten times more emissions-intensive than chicken per kilogram of meat, other governments may follow Denmark’s lead — focusing taxes on the highest emitters while ignoring the welfare implications. Beef is easily the most emissions-intensive meat, but also requires the fewest animals for a given amount. The graph shows climate emissions per tonne of meat on the right-hand side, and the number of animals needed to produce a kilogram of meat on the left. The fish “lives lost” number varies significantly by
Neel Nanda
 ·  · 1m read
 · 
TL;DR Having a good research track record is some evidence of good big-picture takes, but it's weak evidence. Strategic thinking is hard, and requires different skills. But people often conflate these skills, leading to excessive deference to researchers in the field, without evidence that that person is good at strategic thinking specifically. I certainly try to have good strategic takes, but it's hard, and you shouldn't assume I succeed! Introduction I often find myself giving talks or Q&As about mechanistic interpretability research. But inevitably, I'll get questions about the big picture: "What's the theory of change for interpretability?", "Is this really going to help with alignment?", "Does any of this matter if we can’t ensure all labs take alignment seriously?". And I think people take my answers to these way too seriously. These are great questions, and I'm happy to try answering them. But I've noticed a bit of a pathology: people seem to assume that because I'm (hopefully!) good at the research, I'm automatically well-qualified to answer these broader strategic questions. I think this is a mistake, a form of undue deference that is both incorrect and unhelpful. I certainly try to have good strategic takes, and I think this makes me better at my job, but this is far from sufficient. Being good at research and being good at high level strategic thinking are just fairly different skillsets! But isn’t someone being good at research strong evidence they’re also good at strategic thinking? I personally think it’s moderate evidence, but far from sufficient. One key factor is that a very hard part of strategic thinking is the lack of feedback. Your reasoning about confusing long-term factors need to extrapolate from past trends and make analogies from things you do understand better, and it can be quite hard to tell if what you're saying is complete bullshit or not. In an empirical science like mechanistic interpretability, however, you can get a lot more fe
Recent opportunities in Global health & development
145
Projects I'd like to see in the GHW meta space
Melanie Basnak🔸
· · 8m read
3
3
58
Exploring Far-UVC: Blueprint Biosecurity’s 266-Page Report, a Call for Feedback, and Exciting Career Opportunities
Juan Benzo🔸
· · 3m read
3
3
19
GiveWell is hiring a Talent Acquisition Specialist
GiveWell
· · 1m read
0
0
View more