Hi, we’re the management team for the Animal Welfare Fund. We’re here to answer any questions about our grant making.
We recently made this set of grants, and are planning another set in February 2019. We are keen to hear from donors and potential donors about what kind of grant making you are excited about us doing, what concerns you may have, and anything in between.
Please feel free to start posting your questions from now and we will be available here and actively answering questions between 7am and 1pm PT (with some breaks) on 20th December.
Please ask different questions in separate comments, for discussion threading.
Added 1:52pm PT time: This concludes the "official" portion of the AMA, but feel free to post more questions; we may be able to respond to them over the coming week or two!
Great Question! Similarly to Open Phil, ACE will also be putting out a set of research questions in January, we have solicited views from several groups in the movement to help inform our own research direction over the next year.
One particular question I'm interested in, is the trade-off that seems to exist between promising interventions and more neglected regions. i.e. countries where animal advocacy is less developed typically have organizations that are working on less effective interventions, but a grant there to build the movement may be substantially more impactful in the longer term than funding to more established regions. The combination of uncertainty of impact in different regions and across different interventions can be hard to separate out, which is why I think we're taking the right approach currently by funding a spread of smaller opportunities.
So I would say profiles of promising countries (e.g. at ACE we're currently looking into the BRIC countries) to better understand the opportunities and limitations of advocacy in different regions would be really useful, as well as further intervention-specific research.
Another issue is identifying good funding opportunities. In my own experience, I've found utilizing existing networks to be more fruitful than searching from scratch when identifying promising new funding opportunities, however I'm aware that this can lead to a bias particularly towards opportunities in N America/Europe.