From the EA Funds website, here is the amount of money unallocated in each fund:
- Long-Term Future: $348,167
- Global Development: $497,957
- Animal Welfare: $75,109
- EA Community: $206,271
Some of them haven't disbursed any funds in quite a while. I asked the CEA team about this and got the following reply:
The answer to this is that currently the fund manager have a great deal of discretion about when they give out grants, and they tend to do so in large chunks with somewhat low frequency. This is a situation we may be giving more consideration in the future, because indeed there are reasons to question whether the granting frequency as it currently is an optimal situation.
It seems problematic to have ~$1.1million dollars in the bank and no commitment as to when this will be handed out.
For the Animal Welfare fund, I mind less – the fund manager makes many small donations to a bunch of charities, and it seems unlikely I'd ever be able to match his skill in doing this. But in the case of the Global Development fund (which so far has mostly just handed money to AMF and has half a million dollars in the pot), I could just pay my monthly donation into a low-risk ETF, make a small yield on it, and then donate the total myself at the end of the year.
Interested to hear people's thoughts on this!
I also find it more instructive to think of it in terms of percentages -- the Global Development fund still holds 49% of all money it has received all time, the far future fund holds 95%, and the community fund holds 71%.
There can definitely be good reasons for this (such as more merits for giving later vs. giving now, or saving up to give a larger grant in one big batch). I don't know whether it's an intentional application of one of those two things or just that Nick and Ellie are exceptionally busy and have more important priorities than the EA Funds, but it would be nice for more transparency as to why funds are distributed the way they are. (Lewis does a good job at this.)
Minor typo: it's "Elie" not "Ellie"