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've received feedback from multiple points in the community the EA Funds haven't been as responsive in as timely or as professional a manner as some would prefer. It appears a factor for this is that the fund managers are all program officers at the Open Philanthropy Project, which is a job which from the fund managers' perspective is most of the time more crucial than anything that can be done with the EA Funds. Thus, doing a more than full-time work-equivalent(?... I don't know how much Open Phil staff work each week) may mean management of the EA Funds gets overlooked. Ben West also made a recent post in the 'Effective Altruism' Facebook group asking about the EA Funds, and the response from the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) was they hadn't had a chance to update the EA Funds webpage with data on what grants had been made in recent months.
Given that at the current level of funding, the EA Funds aren't being mismanaged, but rather are being more neglected than donors and effective altruists would like, I'd say it might already be time to assign more managers to the fund. Picking Open Phil program officers to run the funds was the best bet for the community to begin with, as they had the best reputation for acumen going in, but if in practice in turns out Nick, Elie and Lewis only have enough time to manage grants at Open Phil (most of the time), it's only fair to donors CEA assign more fund managers to the fund. What's more, I wouldn't want the attention of Open Phil program officers to be any more divided than it need be, as I consider their work more important than the management of the EA Funds as is.
If the apparent lack of community engagement regarding the EA Funds is on the part of the CEA team responsible to keep the webpage updated, as their time may also be divided and dedicated to more important CEA projects than the EA Funds at any given point in time, that needs to be addressed. I understand the pressures of affording enough money to project management it gets done very effectively, while as an effective non-profit not wanting to let overhead expand too much and result in inefficient uses of donor money. I think if that's the case for CEA staff dividing their time between EA Funds and more active projects, it'd be appropriate for the CEA to hire a dedicated communications manager for the the EA Funds overall, and/or someone who will update the webpage with greater frequency. This could probably be done at 1 full-time equivalent additional staff hire or less. If it's not a single new position at the CEA, a part-time equivalent CEA staffer could have their responsibilities extended to ensuring there's a direct channel between the EA Funds and the EA community.
In the scope of things, such as the money moved through EA overall, EA Funds management may seem a minor issue. Given it's impact on values integral to EA, like transparency and accountability, as well as ensuring high-trust engagement between EA donors and EA organizations, options like I've listed out above seem important to implement. If not, overall, I'd think there's greater need for adding external oversight to ensure anything is being done with the EA Funds.