Executive Summary

The four largest funds in the effective animal advocacy movement can absorb ~$120 million in new funding in the coming year, with potential for greater growth in future years. Setting aside the historic scarcity mindset, I share this money’s significant opportunity to reduce animal suffering and encourage emerging major donors from Anthropic to fund this impact.

We can deploy this money effectively across three intervention categories:

1. Scaling what works (~50-60%)
2. Testing new interventions (~30-40%)
3. Growing movement infrastructure & people power (~10-20%)

Major donors should contact the major funds’ managers directly to decide where to give: Karolina Sarek (EA Animal Welfare Fund), Lewis Bollard (Coefficient Giving’s Farm Animal Welfare Fund), Jesse Marks (The Navigation Fund’s Animal Welfare Fund), and Stien van der Ploeg (Animal Charity Evaluators). Extremely time-poor major ($250k+) donors can email me for a quick (~15-minute) call to match them to the most aligned fund.

Disclosures: I wrote this post in my Senterra Funders (formerly known as Farmed Animal Funders) capacity.^[1] The interventions discussed are broader than the strategy of the EA Animal Welfare Fund, where I am a Fund Manager.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to Elliot Teperman and Shannon Campion for reviewing drafts of this post. All substance is my own; I used Gemini only for stylistic improvements on a near-final draft.

The effective animal movement can absorb an additional $120 million in 2026

The farmed animal advocacy movement has achieved extraordinary progress for billions of animals, despite a global budget of <$300M global budget, less than the New York City Opera. A potential funding influx from emerging major donors at Anthropic challenges the movement’s scarcity mindset.

As we consider moving past the scarcity mindset, I assessed the effective animal advocacy movement’s room for more funding with a focus on three criteria:

• Ambitious creativity
• Strategies expected to roughly compete on cost-effectiveness (at least within roughly an order of magnitude, or better) with cage-free campaigns
• Responsible scaling

Cumulatively, the four funds within scope for this analysis—EA Animal Welfare Fund, Coefficient Giving’s Farm Animal Welfare Fund, The Navigation Fund’s Animal Welfare Fund, and Animal Charity Evaluator’s Greatest Needs Fund—proposed $185.4M as room for more funding.

After analyzing these funds’ room for more funding (see Appendix A for analysis details), I estimate that the four largest funds in the effective animal advocacy space can effectively absorb $120 million in the coming year.

What can we do with an additional $120 million?

Major funds’ strategies for the $120 million fall into three categories:

• Scaling what already works (~50-60%)
• Testing new interventions (~30-40%)
• Growing movement infrastructure & people power (~10-20%)

In this section, I provide examples of interventions in each of these categories.^[2] Due to the public nature of this forum, several sensitive or confidential strategies are omitted to preserve impact. I denote [Short-Term] on interventions I expect to see actual animal impact on in the next 1-3 years (assuming an additional $120M funding in the coming year and further growth in future years).

Scaling What Already Works

The movement has already secured extraordinary wins that should be scaled, given the immense suffering: our food system slaughters over 90 billion land animals, over 100 billion fish, and even more invertebrates annually.

Additional funding can support these scalable interventions^[3]:

• Reform supply chains to improve animal welfare:
  • Free hundreds of millions more laying hens from cages, via cage-free campaigns and technical implementation support. [Short-Term]
  • Secure more space, enrichments, potential breed improvements, and CAS slaughter (instead of live-shackle slaughter) for billions of broiler chickens, via Better/European Chicken Commitment campaigns and technical implementation support. [Short-Term]
  • Improve living and slaughter standards for billions of fish, via certifier benchmarks, welfare campaigns, and technical implementation support. [Short-Term]
  • Prevent millions of shrimps from having their eyes cut off and tens of billions from fully-conscious slaughter, via shrimp welfare campaigns and technical implementation support. [Short-Term]
• Pass laws to improve the lives of animals:
  • Free hundreds of millions more laying hens from cages by enforcing state and national laws banning cages and eventually passing an EU-level ban.
  • Spare hundreds of millions of male chicks from maceration or suffocation by passing national laws banning male chick culling. [Short-Term]
  • Spare tens of millions of piglets from castration without pain relief by passing state and national laws requiring anesthesia, analgesia, or otherwise banning physical castration.
• Secure public funding to develop alternative proteins (generally, long-term impact):
  • Help close the estimated $9.5 billion gap in public funding needed to scale alternative proteins (currently $500M annually).

Testing New Interventions

Increased funding allows the movement to take larger risks for larger rewards and build on pilots in ways historically limited. New interventions can position the movement ahead of the industry, thwarting growth and preventing suffering. Other interventions align welfare improvements with business priorities, potentially impacting nearly all commercially farmed animals.

Examples of new interventions (many others are in development) include:

• Research, development, and deployment of animal welfare technologies:
  • Sparing billions of chickens from disabling pain caused by leg fractures using electron beam vaccines. [Short-Term]
• Market shaping:
  • Implement welfare standards faster for millions (or more) animals via advance market commitments (guaranteeing purchase of welfare-compliant products to de-risk producer investment). [Short-term]
  • Incentivize welfare technology advancements through prizes. [Short-term]
  • Accelerate suffering reduction for millions of hens and billions of shrimps through credits for cage-free eggs and electrically-stunned shrimps (resolving logistical bottlenecks while achieving regional impact). [Short-term]
• Ensuring AI helps animals:
  • Advance AI monitoring in precision livestock farming for improved welfare outcomes.
  • Other emerging intersections between AI and animals that require more evaluation.
• Thwarting the growth of certain industries or practices (most of these strategies are confidential)
  • Spare billions of chickens from cages by preventing the expansion of broiler chicken cages in East and Southeast Asia. [Short-term]

Growing Movement Infrastructure & People Power

A larger, more influential movement benefits animals. While these interventions may not directly impact animals in the short-term, they build toward long-term cultural change necessary for even greater impact, irrespective of transformative AGI in the near-term.

Examples include:

• Building movement capacity, especially in the Global South, to allocate resources in tractable ways where most farmed animals are raised and slaughtered.
• Develop and place talent within the movement and at elite institutions.
• Build political power in the US and Europe to protect existing laws and develop long-term political leverage for major policy wins.
• Research novel interventions and incubate charities to implement the highest-impact strategies.
• Launch strategic media campaigns to support institutional campaigns, popularize pro-animal identities and voting behaviors, and grow awareness of animal issues, particularly amongst elite audiences with major financial, political, or cultural influence.

What next?

For emerging major donors: Recommendations to fund the $120 million growth

Anthropic employees are uniquely positioned to fund these interventions to reduce suffering for billions of animals.

For Anthropic employees and other emerging major donors, I recommend four major funds: the EA Animal Welfare Fund, Coefficient Giving’s Farm Animal Welfare Fund, The Navigation Fund’s Animal Welfare Fund, and Animal Charity Evaluators’ Greatest Need Fund. Each fund has nuances in its track record, focus, and acceptable donor level.

Many Anthropic employees are significantly time-constrained. Based on their time constraints, I recommend:

Funds offer the most straightforward, impact-centered donations for most time-constrained Anthropic employees. For less time-constrained philanthropists seeking a bespoke portfolio of charities, Senterra Funders offers separate philanthropic advising.

Appendix A

This appendix details the method and overall results of the room for more funding analysis. The full analysis, containing confidential details, cannot be published.

Method

The analysis focused on major funds with strong track records capable of absorbing and regranting at least $10M+ annually, including the EA Animal Welfare Fund, Coefficient Giving’s Farm Animal Welfare Fund, The Navigation Fund’s Animal Welfare Fund, and Animal Charity Evaluator’s Greatest Need Fund.^[4] Funds were prioritized over organizations because they are major funders of effective animal advocacy organizations and, as such, have already conducted due diligence on grants.

This approach, using funds as a proxy, replaced the time-intensive exercise of surveying the entire effective animal advocacy ecosystem at this speculative stage, when funding is not guaranteed. Additionally, as the direct grantors, these funds have conducted due diligence on grantees, have relationships with grantees to be generally aware of future plans, and have expertise in their focus areas.

Fund evaluation involved reviewing track records, assessing 2026 deployment strategies, removing duplication, discounting less cost-effective interventions and those outside emerging donor (specifically, Anthropic employees) interests, and considering grantmaking capacity.^[5] 

Results

The four funds initially proposed a cumulative $185.4M room for more funding justified by absorption pathways, grantmaker capacity, and organization-level analysis. This total was discounted:

• $38.2M due to strategy duplication^[6] 

• $21M for other reasons (e.g., strategies irrelevant to the Anthropic employee donor cohort, unlikely scaling rates for specific strategies).
• $0–$30M due to grantmaking capacity bottlenecks.

This set the high-end absorption capacity at $126.2M if grantmaking capacity is resolved, and the low-end estimate at $96.2M if grantmaking capacity is not resolved.

However, given the various funds’ current work, plans, and prioritization to fill the grantmaking capacity bottleneck, I expect this bottleneck is 80% likely to be resolved, reducing the discount to $6M, rather than $30M.

Conclusion: The effective animal movement can absorb an estimated $120M in additional funding over the next year. This is beyond the approximately $300M currently donated annually (not all spent effectively). This $120M is expected to roughly compete on cost-effectiveness (within roughly an order of magnitude, or better) with cage-free campaigns.

Room for growth in 2027 and beyond could be at least double that of 2026, depending on the movement’s 2026 growth and the scalability of new interventions tested this year.

1. ^{^}

    Senterra Funders is a major donor network representing 75% of global philanthropy in the movement to reform and replace factory farming. Senterra Funders’ strategy includes metafundraising, or leveraging our positioning and network to increase overall movement funding from major donors. As part of our metafundraising strategy, we (and several coordinated grantmakers and Bay Area allies) are engaging with emerging major donors from Anthropic. To meet these emerging donors’ needs as they decide on cause areas and donation opportunities that can absorb their levels of philanthropy, we’re coordinating with funders, funds, advisors, special topic experts, and other allies to prepare for the potential next chapter of our movement (and impact!) with potential significant funding increases.

2. ^{^}

    Contextual notes: (1) Not all the funds evaluated focus on all the interventions listed, but at least one includes the work described. (2) The impact described won’t be based on $120 million alone, but rather in addition to both existing and sustained funding to see theories of change to fruition. (3) I only detail strategies benefiting farmed animals, but the EA Animal Welfare Fund and Animal Charity Evaluators’ Greatest Need Fund also fund interventions for other neglected animals, like wild animals.

3. ^{^}

    Not all of these interventions work all the time (they all have challenges), but all of these work enough to be scaled in certain geographies.

^{^}

 This is not a ranking of major funders, but rather an assessment of regrantors specific to the needs of emerging major donors from Anthropic. Two Senterra members listed here—Coeffecient Giving and The Navigation Fund—accept major gifts for regranting in addition to distributing grants for their principal donors. Because they also meet the other criteria for these recommendations, they were included in this analysis. Most Senterra members do not have regranting arms, and rather grant only their own funding.

^{^}

 I focused mostly, but not exclusively, on interventions with shorter-term theories of change and significant scaling capacity for this analysis due to the interests of many of the donors we expect to potentially fill the $120M funding gap. Certain theories of change—like institutional meat reduction—were excluded from this analysis because they do not perform as well as other interventions on suffering reduction per dollar, although they may perform exceptionally well on other metrics once scaled to reach impact, like carbon emissions reductions per dollar or animals spared entirely per dollar. I speak more to institutional meat reduction as a viable theory of change here (from April 2025), and I encourage any major donors seeking support on an institutional meat reduction portfolio to email me.

^{^}

 Note that while this duplication was present in the room-for-more-funding strategy drafts, I expect the actual funding duplication to be minimal or non-existent when it comes time for funding decisions, due to the degree that the funds coordinate.

Show all footnotes