This holiday giving season, we’re continuing our tradition of sharing a list of giving opportunities suggested by Coefficient Giving program staff.
Notes on these suggestions:
- They fall within the areas covered by Coefficient’s funds.
- They should be seen as reasonably strong options in the relevant area. The person who made a suggestion isn’t necessarily arguing that their suggestion is the best option available across all areas, or even within its own area.
- Many of them were chosen because they are particularly good fits for individual donors. This shouldn’t be read as a list of our strongest grantees overall (though of course there may be overlap).
- The explanations we share are very brief and informal; we don’t expect readers to be persuaded unless they put a lot of weight on the judgment of the person making the suggestion.
- Finally, these suggestions come from individual program staff or teams, and do not necessarily represent Coefficient’s institutional view.
Global health and wellbeing
GiveWell’s recommendations
Recommended by Alexander Berger
What is it? GiveWell recommends cost-effective, evidence-backed giving opportunities, primarily in global health.
Why I suggest it: GiveWell does unusually rigorous work to assess charitable opportunities and makes its recommendations and reasoning open and legible to the public (for instance, check out this writeup on a grant to CHAI). GiveWell and its recommendations have been the largest beneficiary of my personal giving over the years.
We currently expect GiveWell’s marginal opportunity to be roughly as cost-effective as Coefficient’s other marginal opportunities in global health. And in my view, GiveWell offers an especially good “product” for individual donors. Its exhaustive public writeups go a long way toward giving you confidence your funding will be well spent; it tracks and reports on your donations; it has a fundraising team to answer any additional questions should they arise, etc.
I still believe what Emily and I wrote in 2023: “When it comes to evidence-backed, scalable global health interventions, we don’t know of another resource for donors that is remotely comparable; GiveWell continues to set the gold standard in our eyes.”
Where to donate: You can donate here. I personally tend to give unrestricted or to the All Grants Fund.
Science and global health R&D
Cures Within Reach
Recommended by Ray Kennedy
What is it? Cures Within Reach (CWR) funds low-cost “proof-of-concept” clinical trials that test whether existing generic drugs can treat diseases they weren’t originally designed for. These trials often uncover new uses for these drugs, like using a generic cholesterol-lowering drug to improve outcomes in tuberculosis treatment.
Generic drugs offer key advantages: they tend to be inexpensive and widely available, and they come with extensive safety data. Because of this, successful trials can achieve impact far more quickly and cheaply than developing new medicines from scratch. Private pharmaceutical companies rarely pursue this work, since they can’t establish exclusivity (which limits their potential profit). This creates a major market failure that philanthropy can address.
Why I suggest it: CWR has been a Coefficient Giving grantee for several years, and I’ve consistently been impressed with its process. In the past, I helped CWR run calls for proposals focused on health challenges that are especially prevalent in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and aimed at funding researchers in those countries (who typically have fewer funding opportunities). As a grantmaker for Coefficient, I’ve twice funded the more costly follow-on trials myself (e.g. this trial for snakebite envenoming oral drugs).
How to donate: You can donate here.
I recommend restricting support to CWR’s LMIC-focused calls, which I believe offer the highest impact. That said, if you’re passionate about one of its other program areas (e.g. women’s health or validating AI-driven drug repurposing models), its overall approach is still very strong. And for donors able to give at least $75,000, CWR will collaborate with you to design a customized call aligned with your interests — for example, identifying ideas for a specific disease area you care about.
Farm animal welfare
The EA Animal Welfare Fund
Recommended by the Farm Animal Welfare team
What is it? The EA Animal Welfare Fund seeks to fund the most promising neglected opportunities to reduce animal suffering. This often includes supporting newer groups in lower-income countries or groups working on overlooked issues.
Why we suggest it: The Fund is a simple way to support a diverse portfolio of animal welfare organizations, with a focus on tangible impact. We consider the Fund’s managers to be some of the most experienced and thoughtful researchers and advocates in the movement. Further, the Fund offers an open application process, which ensures that funding opportunities are available to individuals and new groups regardless of their existing networks.
You can read about some of the Fund’s 2025 grants here.
How to donate: You can donate here.
Global aid policy
Center for Global Development
Recommended by Norma Altshuler
What is it? The Center for Global Development (CGD) is a Washington D.C.-based think tank that researches and promotes evidence-based policies to improve the lives of the global poor.
Why I suggest it: We’ve supported CGD for many years. CGD has an impressive track record, and it continues to do promising work on education and global health (such as lead exposure reduction). In the wake of the aid crisis, CGD’s teams are focused on making limited resources stretch, and on discovering opportunities where aid can be both politically salient and highly impactful.
How to donate: You can donate here.
Abundance and growth
Center for Building in North America
Recommended by Matt Clancy
What is it? The Center for Building in North America (CBNA) studies building codes and construction policy in the U.S. and proposes avenues for reform to reduce the cost of housing construction (thereby increasing the supply of housing, and reducing prices).
Why I suggest it: While most of our grantees focus on state-level legislative reform, CBNA takes a different approach: producing research that can influence policy at both the federal and state level.
Its elevator report, which was featured in the New York Times and many other outlets, showed that it costs far more to install elevators in the U.S. than in other countries and made recommendations to reduce that discrepancy. It’s also helped make substantial progress on single-stair reform, another cost-reducing measure where the U.S. is out of step with international peers. Recently, it published “Beyond Zoning“, a report exploring barriers that can hold back the development of middle-scale housing.
Where to donate: You can donate here.
Model Evaluation and Threat Research
Recommended by Peter Favaloro and the rest of our Technical AI Safety team
What is it? Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR) is a nonprofit research organization that evaluates the ability of AI systems to complete complex tasks without human input, the impact of AI on AI R&D, and the effectiveness of monitoring AI systems. Its mission is to develop methods to assess catastrophic risks that could arise from autonomous AI systems, and help people think clearly about the development of such systems.
Why we suggest it: METR produces some of the highest-quality research in the field of measuring and predicting AI capabilities. We have also been excited by its work on model developers’ commitments to catastrophic risk evaluations, mitigations and transparency. We believe that METR’s work on Frontier AI Safety Policies represents one of the biggest success stories of frontier AI governance to date; nine major AI companies have established such policies, and METR has been publicly credited with helping develop the policies of Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Magic, G42, and Amazon.
Keeping up with cutting-edge AI systems is expensive, and in order to avoid potential conflicts of interest, METR does not take funding from labs. (Nor is it a Coefficient grantee.) However, METR hires many people who might otherwise take jobs working on those systems, which requires enough funding to make reasonably competitive offers. According to Beth Barnes, METR’s founder and CEO, hiring is METR’s “central constraint to publishing more and better research.” More funding should help to relax that constraint.
How to donate: You can donate here.
Effective giving and careers
High Impact Professionals
Recommended by Melanie Basnak
What is it? High Impact Professionals (HIP) supports mid-career and senior professionals who want to maximize the positive impact of their careers. Its flagship Impact Accelerator Program (IAP) connects participants with like-minded peers and helps them explore promising paths to impact and the concrete steps needed to pursue them. This year, HIP started a self-guided version of the program, the Career Impact Track (CIT), to scale its reach.
In addition, HIP’s Talent Directory helps professionals signal their interest in high-impact roles, while giving organizations a way to find strong candidates. The directory currently serves more than 4,500 professionals.
Why I suggest it: This year alone, HIP supported hundreds of professionals; 210 participated in the IAP, and 519 more used the CIT. Through mid-December, they’ve helped facilitate 51 career transitions into roles with outsized social impact, as well as 11 transitions into high-impact fellowships. In addition, 67 HIP participants have taken a giving pledge committing to donate part of their income to effective charities, with 18 of those committing to donate at least 10% of their income. These are strong, concrete results, and I expect HIP to grow its impact as it scales.
How to donate: You can donate here.
Why does METR not receive cG money?